Thane hasn't had a quiet Sunday in two weeks. On September 6, residents turned out again, forming a human chain along Pokhran Road No. 2, stretching from Swami Junction to Prashant Corner, to protest the proposed Thane Integral Ring Metro project.

The protest, organised by the citizens' forum Thane Against Integral Ring Metro, followed a signature campaign that ran the previous week. This time businesspeople, environmental activists and what the Free Press Journal described as prominent citizens from across the city showed up in numbers, standing shoulder to shoulder to make the point that the project, as planned, doesn't have local buy-in.

The metro line is being pushed by the Thane Municipal Corporation along with Maha Metro, meant to ease internal traffic congestion inside the city. Good intentions, maybe. But residents say the execution threatens to gut the very neighbourhoods it's supposed to serve, with heavy tree felling, displacement of citizens, and traffic chaos through the construction years.

The sharpest charge came from environment activist Rohit Joshi, who called the general body's approval to cut down 3,900 trees flatly illegal. His argument: no Tree Authority Committee with citizen representation has existed for six months since the municipal elections, so there's no lawful body to sign off on felling in the first place. Joshi said if the trees are touched without proper public hearings, he'll take every tree-cutting permission to court. That's a legal threat, not a settled fact, and it'll only be tested if and when the administration moves to actually fell trees.

Advocate Radhika Rane brought numbers into it. She said nearly 80% of transplanted trees don't survive, which makes the administration's usual fallback of relocating trees rather than felling them look more like a talking point than a solution. Rane also asked the more basic question: shouldn't the government wait to see how many people actually use Metro Lines 4 and 5 once they're running before building an entire internal ring route on top of it?

Protester Meghna Jadhav kept it simpler still, arguing Thane's civic priority should be staying clean and green, not layering on infrastructure nobody asked for.

None of this has stopped the project on paper. But civic groups say legal action is coming if the administration pushes ahead without the hearings they say the law requires. Two Sundays of street protest is one thing. A courtroom fight over 3,900 trees is another, and that's the direction this is headed if the Tree Authority question doesn't get resolved soon.