 Yeah, so thank you very much. Very good afternoon to all of you. This is Nenu Somraj. I am an Indian Forest Service Officer. I'm a bureaucrat working in one of the state of India, Maharashtra. And I present, I'm looking after the mangroves and marine biodiversity in the Mumbai city and Maharashtra state. So here, I would like to bring the topic on, it's a case study. In fact, it's a case study on mangrove conservation happening around Mumbai Metropolis. And before going into detail, so for, you know, activities, I would like to introduce you Mumbai city to all of you. So some of you might have heard about it. So this is the capital city of Indian state of Maharashtra. And it's a global financial and a commercial hub. So the city is very, very crowded and it's very, very popular. So you can see that it's most, sixth the most populous metropolitan region in the world, having a population of more than 23 million. They are living on over an area of 6,500 kilometers. So we understand that it's very, very crowded. Yeah, sometimes I can see that over crowded city. So, so I'd like to give you an introduction about, I mean, the specialty, geographic specialty of this city. So previously, Mumbai was known as Bombay. And when previously it was a group of seven islands. So when the British came in our country, and in the 18th century, they understood the commercial potential of the sport city. And they reclaimed all this land in between the seven islands and reshaped and don't have the present form. And so here on the right side, you can see by diversity map of Mumbai city, Mumbai metropolitan region. So which was prepared by Mumbai metropolitan region development authority in the year 2011. So, so here, I'm concerned about the mangroves here on the map, you can see our red color areas. So this is the mangroves is very, very close to the western cost of India towards the cost aside, we can see so many big creeks and small creeklets. So because it's a reclaimed city, the city is in the sparse with bias many creeks and creeks and home to rich mangroves and associated by the city. So, as I mentioned, how do you do is they were growing population this, you know, city face the huge migration from the nearby villages and, you know, the mangroves, the mangroves in the city really faced so many things. So lots of mangrove forest have been diverted for development projects and for industries and for even agricultural projects and even even migrant population cut down a part of mangrove forest in the developed day slums and, you know, human settlement. So so unfortunately because of all this surrounding illegal activities the city witnessed more than 60% of loss of mangrove cover in the past. And here, we will know that why mangroves is important and why it's very, very, very essential to be conserved for the sustainability of a city like Mumbai, because, you know, being a coastal city, this Mumbai is located on the west coast of India subcontinent. And this is very much, and the city is facing all the threat of climate change, like sea level rise and, you know, erratic weather events like the tropical cyclones etc. And mangroves act as a bioshield in providing this kind of thing and helping the city, hence it's very, very imperative to conserve these mangroves in the city. And similarly, this mangroves act as a hub of biodiversity as a home to many migratory water birds and other marine organisms in water birds and economically important fishes and shrimps. And incidentally, I can tell you very much that this mangrove forest really supporting very much in the sustainable fishery industries and helping the local income generation for the local people's communities. And also, considering all this fact, and since the Mumbai witnessed the disproportionate reduction in the mangrove cover, all the government agencies, judiciary and the community organizations, civil society organizations joined together. In the year 2005, judiciary, the High Court of Mumbai came up with the progumentary order, which sees that, you know, all development activities, all conversions of mangrove forests and buffers on 50 meter buffers, they completely banned. So I consider this as a watershed here in the conservation or in the history of conservation of mangroves in Maharashtra state and particularly in Mumbai. So, in order to protect these mangrove forests in the city and the state, so the state government created a special dedicated unit. So this is known as mangrove cell, and personally I'm working in the mangrove cell, I'm working as a deputy conservator of forest and the joint director of mangrove foundation. So, our first task was to identify these mangroves in the government land and the public land. So, we identified such mangrove forest in the government ownership and brought those land in a legal protection framework in India, it is known as reserve forest. So it is the highest order of protection as per Indian Forest Act 1927. This was our first step. So, but then after the identification and the mapping of these land, we understood that lots of encroachment happened even within the boundary of the reserve forest and our next task was to remove all the illegal encroachment on the mangrove forest and that's a continual process but thankfully we could remove, you know, almost 95% of encroachment in Mumbai city and it's a more than 8000 illegal settlement. So, considering the industrial importance and the commercial importance and the population, it's really difficult task in, you know, demolishing all this structures and protecting this land. So, we have to do some policing also in this place. So, we adopted concept of green policing in Mumbai and so deployed security forces, the enormous Maharashtra security force, they have been deployed in sensitive locations which are very much prone to all diversions and destruction and these police are doing all these tasks in 24 by 7 bases and protecting these lands from further encroachment. And another topic was to restore the, you know, degraded mangrove forest and for that purpose we initiated huge massive mangrove plantation programs and more than 735 hectares of area in this metropolitan region has been restored back and we have separated mangrove nurseries in different places and even so far more than 30 lakhs of seedlings have been utilized in our plantation program. So, you can see the photographs of mangrove nurseries and the mangrove plantation here we adopt a special technique known as fish bone channeling for the restoration of the mangroves in the blank and degraded forest area. These fish bone channels really help in allowing the salt water into the land, into the interior part and helping the mangrove seedlings to try. And the main issue is making this mangrove forest more cleaner and more healthier to support more biodiversity. For that purpose a clean mangrove campaign was initiated in a different part of Mumbai Metropolitan Police to remove all the solid waste and plastic waste from the mangroves and make it more hygienic and to support all this, you know, water boards and other organisms and also for more than 8000 tons of solid waste and the plastic waste have been removed from this forest. This is a continuous process and for that purpose we are in partnership with the various organizations like non-governmental organizations and civil societies to conduct this kind of programs and it's a part of our outreach programs also since as college students and school students are also joining in the clean mangrove campaigns and it really helps in creating awareness about keeping this mangrove area more clean. Can I just interrupt briefly? This is an extremely interesting and very important case but we are out of time. Could you slowly or I mean rather quickly wrap up. Perfect and I'll invite any questions to the chat but yeah we're over time now. I am so sorry to do that because I was really enjoying your presentation. Yes, thank you very much. So this is my last slide only. I can just tell about the biodiversity of Mumbai so we have a creek in the city of Mumbai which is a part of the Central Asian Highway for migratory birds and to protect these lands so we brought this land under a marine protected area so it's known as Tannic Big Flamingo Sanctuary which is home to many birds like the Flamingos, Greater Flamingos, and the lesser Flamingos more than one lakh birds do migrate to this place. So this was another work on conserving the biodiversity and the result was really awesome that now we have more than one 10 square kilometre of mangroves in Mumbai city and this all happens due to the stringent protection and the conservation and the restorations. Thank you.