Mumbai's Coastal Road Made 111 Hectares of New Land. Bengaluru Shrunk Its Lake Buffers to Three Meters.

Mumbai's 10.6-kilometer Coastal Road has produced approximately 111 hectares of reclaimed land, according to the municipal corporation (BMC) — roads, bridges, interchanges and lots reserved for public amenities standing where the sea once was. The figure anchors a wider shift across India: water remains a shared ecological resource, yet the land around it is increasingly financed and defended as an economic asset.

The BMC's case rests on mobility and public benefit. The road was expected to cut travel time, and the reclaimed open space sought to deliver roughly 1.24 square meters per person in one of the densest megacities on earth. In 2019 the Bombay High Court cancelled the coastal clearances, citing a lack of proper scientific study — but it upheld the rule change permitting reclamation for roads, and the Supreme Court stayed the order. Work continued.

What does reclamation change for practitioners?

Local architect Alan Abraham, who later petitioned the court for design changes to the reclaimed section, frames the problem as one of priorities. "Roads are needed for the city, not the coast," he argued, proposing the road be pulled inland so that open space meets the water. The BMC responded that the design rested on expert studies and that, with almost all work complete, changes were not feasible.

Whether the reclamation damages coastal ecosystems, and how the sea wall will perform, remain debated rather than settled. For architects, the lesson is procedural: the alignment was fixed long before design began.

How did Bengaluru's lake buffers shrink?

Bengaluru's lakes were originally conceived as a connected system of man-made stormwater drains known as rajakaluves. City authorities set a uniform 30-meter buffer around lakes in which construction is restricted. In 2025, the state advanced an amendment replacing that figure with size-based buffers — no buffer for the smallest water bodies and three meters for those up to an acre.

Legal commentary notes the earlier norms were treated as unscientific, and that the bill would permit certain public-utility structures, such as roads and pump houses, within buffers. The bill returned in late 2025, noting that neither the state's expert committee nor the public had been consulted.

The hydrological consequences are measurable. An analysis of flood-hit neighborhoods confirms significant encroachment on or misuse of the drains linking the lake network. One locality saw the water table fall from roughly 100 feet to 600 feet within six years of a lake being removed. A buffer is no longer a natural feature but a legal figure; changing it redraws what classifies as buildable land.

Where do data centers fit in?

Data centers present a different problem: their water demand is largely invisible in a building's form and site. WRI India reported that more than half of India's data centers sit in water-stressed regions, concentrated in five states — Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Telangana and Uttar Pradesh. Uttar Pradesh's draft 2026 policy promises uninterrupted water supply to data centers, while India currently has no established disclosure requirement.

The trade-offs compound. Cutting on-site water use can raise electricity demand, and because power plants also draw on water, the shortage may be relocated to the grid rather than removed. A highly efficient facility in an over-allocated basin still draws on a shared supply, which makes site selection a decision about who gets water — households, agriculture or the server hall.

Can architects act earlier?

The three cases share one structure: the decision precedes the design. "Architects always inherit conditions rather than shape them," the analysis concludes. Individual practitioners can still push earlier — questioning briefs that assume a site, requesting water balances and hydrological assessments before accepting a location, and suggesting alternatives to a fixed alignment, as Abraham's collective did.

There is precedent at scale. The Mumbai Architects Collective, a group of about 120 firms, proposed reimaginations of the Coastal Road. In Chennai, design teams in the 2019 Water as Leverage program drew up closed-loop neighborhood water systems.

Sustainability, the argument runs, cannot be assessed solely through individual building performance, because that performance depends on the territory the building occupies and the shared resources it draws on. If the claim on water were declared at the outset as a condition of the site, some of the buildings now defended as inevitable might never have been proposed where they stand. Whether the profession — and the institutions that commission it — will begin from that point remains open.

This article is part of the ArchDaily Topic: The Architecture of Water: Territories, Tensions & Transformations.