Green Belt Development for Industries in Wagle Estate MIDC, Thane.

Few Wagle Estate plots still have the open land a green belt was meant to occupy, so the work begins by finding it: a front setback paved for parking, the strip along a compound wall, the gap between two sheds. Species follow what the unit releases: dense, broad-leaved evergreens where dust settles, taller screening rows where the neighbour is a residential building. Each tree is tagged and mapped, so the number in the consent file is the number standing on the ground.

Wagle Estate is a grid of numbered roads in Thane West, lined with sheds, galas and multi-storey industrial buildings, with the Yeoor hills rising behind. Its units are mostly small and medium (engineering shops, packaging converters, pharmaceutical and chemical formulators) and many share one building, one yard and one drain. Over the years some plots have been rebuilt as IT parks and office blocks, so a machine shop may now stand beside a floor of desks. Dense housing and settlements have grown up along its edges and up the lower slopes, and people now live within a wall's width of working units. The estate is changing tenant by tenant rather than all at once.