The Impact of Coastal Regulation Zone Legislation on City Development: A Study with Reference to Mumbai

The Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) legislation was brought in India in order to curb environmentally detrimental activities along the coastline. It is one of the controversial legislations in the country, which affected the development of cities and their infrastructure. For topographically constrained land-scarce cities like Mumbai, which also faces the challenge of a growing population and economic activities, the CRZ legislation turns out to be a bane for development. The city already has a large amount of population living in informal housing (slum and squatted settlements) due to the limited availability of land. The CRZ legislation would further limit the land available for development in Mumbai and, thereby, affect infrastructure, development, and property prices. This article examines whether the CRZ legislation would have impacted the coastal city of Mumbai in the form of informal development, lower infrastructure availability, and dampened property prices by making use of ward-level data. The study examines multiple, sequential, and interlinked hypotheses to assess how the CRZ legislation would have affected the development outcomes in the city. The results are assertive of the broader impact of CRZ legislation on the rise of informality, lower infrastructure availability, and poorer property prices. The study results are suggestive of the need to avoid a blanket approach towards coastal regulation; rather, it requires careful consideration of the local context of cities along the coastline and consultation with local government. However, the results have to be viewed from the perspective of Mumbai city and also in the light of limited data of a few wards along the Mumbai coast, which we use to arrive at the conclusions.