The boss wears dark glasses and won't give his name, as his bodyguards throw themselves in front of any camera pointed his way. As he sits in the shade, with his dress shirt unbuttoned to reveal his gold chains and oiled skin, his work crews destroy a patch of wilderness at the edge of India's biggest city.
Dump trucks rumble into the mangroves and bury the leafy thickets under loads of dirt, slowly transforming the green belt along Mumbai's coast into real estate.
India's laws are supposed to protect these forests, restricting development to maintain a buffer against the sea. But just as coastal cities around the world are bracing against rising water levels, Mumbai is losing its natural defences. Environmentalists file legal challenges, but they're losing: In recent years, construction projects have devoured an estimated two-thirds of the city's mangroves.
The failure to save the mangroves serves as a stark example of what happens when the needs of a growing population - that of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region is currently estimated to be about 20 million - overwhelm plans for sustainability. The case also may prove to be a harbinger of future struggles over land use, as India's crowded cities grow by half a billion people in the coming generation.
POLLUTION SPONGE
Developers have a proud history of dumping fill into the Arabian Sea to expand the city. In the 18th and 19th centuries, British engineers transformed an archipelago of seven islands into a peninsula to create the thriving port of Bombay. Speculators bought real estate before it existed, staking claims to patches of water where Mumbai's skyscrapers now stand.
But the modern controversy over coastal development has little in common with that feat of engineering, Mr. Goenka says, because Mumbai now depends on the dense vegetation that grows in the salty mud flats along the coast.
Mangroves absorb the city's pollution, offsetting carbon emissions and improving air quality. They are spawning grounds for fish, and the interlocking root systems serve as a barrier against erosion.
That green belt has suffered as Mumbai swells into a megacity and developers seek alternatives to building in the distant suburbs.
Hemmed in on the north by the huge Sanjay Gandhi National Park, the city has few options for expansion.
Developers could mitigate the environmental concerns by replanting mangroves and shoring up the coastline against the rising ocean. But urban-planning experts complain that such precautions are usually overlooked - despite disasters such as the Asian tsunami of 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which illustrated the need for natural barriers along the coast. Just last month, 70,000 people were moved as a major cyclone reached India's southern shores.
A major reason for the haphazard pattern of development in Mumbai is corruption, says Shirish Patel, a consultant and urban-planning specialist.
"The Bombay mafia was heavily into smuggling, but they moved into filmmaking and real estate," he alleges.
In a recent research paper, Liza Weinstein, a sociologist now at Northeastern University in Boston, concluded that, although Mumbai's crime syndicates have moved into slum and squatter settlements, most major developers do not have criminal connections.
She suggests that the "rather flippant use of the term 'land mafia' by media and housing-rights advocates" has created a false impression.
It may seem strange, but slums can offer staggering rewards no matter who builds them. Rent here is steep, even for a tin-roofed shack. In the Dahisar neighbourhood on the western edge of the city, a residents association lobbying to protect 175 hectares of mangroves estimates the swampy tract could be worth hundreds of millions if turned into a shantytown.
The property owner has permission to repair a facility for extracting salt from sea water that was abandoned in the early 1990s, along with a court order to "take necessary care not to disturb mangroves and vegetation."
But environmentalists claim the real goal is to clear land for residential development, and lawyers acting for the owner of the land, as well as a developer allegedly linked to the project, refused repeated requests for comment.
'NO MANGROVES ARE CUT'
Even at the job site, answers are hard to come by.
Well-muscled young men who guard the property and supervise the work crews were labelled "goons" last month after they threatened and allegedly assaulted government officials, forestry specialists and environmentalists trying to inspect the property.
Greeting a team from The Globe and Mail, the guards introduce themselves and politely block entrance to the area. As their boss and several other supervisors hide their faces, they offer up a spokesman who identifies himself as John Rodrigues of the Kanderpada Salt Producers and Fishermen Union.
Local residents say they have never heard of the union, but Mr. Rodrigues insists that his group has been hired to provide security - although he claims not to know who owns the land, or even the full name of the man who pays him, in cash.
Still, he seems familiar with the environmentalists' concerns. Trucks rolling onto the property are simply part of the effort to repair roads and the existing salt facilities, he says.
"No mangroves are cut. Not a single one is cut inside. Not a single one. We have got a road here, but the road was broken by the high tides. So we have to construct the road only."
Again he insists: "Hundred per cent, none of the mangroves were cut."
When informed that his visitors have, in fact, already examined the site, arriving before the guards and photographing swaths of mangroves that appeared to have been cut recently, Mr. Rodrigues suddenly changes his story, suggesting that trespassers from slums have harvested the brush for firewood.
Environmentalists dismiss this explanation.
The nearest slum is on the far side of the mangroves and, "as you can see from these chopped branches here," says doctor and activist Mathew Peedikayil, standing in a vast clearing littered with dead vegetation, "they have all been cut with machines."
Slum dwellers, he points out, are highly unlikely to possess chainsaws.
Dr. Peedikayil, who works at a clinic nearby, is a volunteer with the New Link Road Residents Forum, a community group trying to save the mangroves. Even if the construction crews do no more than finish the road, he says, the fragile ecosystem will have its water supply choked off, killing the vegetation.
The two sides are locked in a legal battle, and last month, the Supreme Court of India referred the case back to a lower court.
There are an estimated 70 such disputes in and around Mumbai - and the legal wrangling can go on for years.
Sometimes the environmentalists' concerns result in action, as when plans for an airport near the city were modified this year to include replanting 350 hectares of mangrove.
But the gesture seemed to miss the point of coastal protection, because the plantation will be 200 kilometres north of the new airport.
In their arguments, activists often rely on the Coastal Regulation Zone rules of 1991, part of India's Environment Protection Act, which limits development along the shoreline.
The government released a draft of new CRZ rules in April after a five-year review process, but environmentalists say they are skeptical about whether the updated regulations represent a step forward.
"It's a mixed bag," says Ashish Fernandes, an oceans campaigner for Greenpeace India. "The laws already exist, in many cases, but the big problem is enforcement."
PRESSURE TO GET WORSE
Upholding the rules that limit development will only get harder in India's cities, urban planners say, because of the overwhelming demands created by millions of new arrivals.
India now has 300 million people living in cities, a number projected to almost triple to 800 million by 2051. That growth, says Edgar Ribeiro, the country's former chief planner, will be concentrated in the biggest centres, such as Mumbai.
"It's a rush from rural India and small-town India to the megacities," says Mr. Ribeiro, who now freelances as a consultant.
"I can understand the environmentalists saying the mangroves have to be protected, but I can at the same time understand that the very poor, through a slum landlord, searching" for a place to live.
"The haves and the have-nots," he concludes, "are fighting for space."