MUMBAI: A new underground metro is expected to ease the burden on Mumbai’s notoriously congested roads and railways, but not everybody in India’s sprawling financial capital is happy about the multi-billion-dollar project.
Announced in 2014 with much fanfare, the Metro 3 line has been hailed by backers as essential to help solve the city’s traffic woes and finally provide a link to its airports.
But campaigners are angry at the felling of thousands of trees, and say it could desecrate temples and lead to the destruction of an urban forest tribal groups call home.
The scheme has faced considerable opposition in court, delaying completion and highlighting the complexities of undertaking major infrastructure work in the world’s largest democracy where people have the right of redress.
“This is one of India’s biggest projects. It has faced immense difficulties and challenges of different types,” says Ashwini Bhide, managing director of the Mumbai Metro Rail Corporation.
The 231-billion-rupee ($3.6 billion) line will link Mumbai’s popular tourist destination of Colaba in the historic south to SEEPZ, a special economic zone situated 33.5 kilometers (21 miles) north.
It will boast 27 stops servicing the coastal city’s busiest business districts, including Bandra Kurla Complex and Lower Parel, where 23 people died during a stampede at a railway station last year.
The line is scheduled to be finished by December 2021.
“Congestion on the road will be substantially reduced because of this corridor,” Bhide told AFP, estimating that 650,000 vehicle trips could disappear from the roads daily.
Metro 3 also aims to ease the load on Mumbai’s creaking railway lines where an average of more than nine people lose their lives every day, often falling off overcrowded carriages.
Seven million people use Mumbai’s railway daily. Bhide says the new metro will carry 1.7 million passengers per day, freeing up space on overground trains.
“The quality of commute, ease of traveling and speed of traveling will increase,” she says.
Mumbai effectively shuts down when trains cannot run, as is often the case when tracks flood during the four-month summer monsoon. The underground will ensure the city keeps running, advocates say.
Work began in October 2016 and large areas of the city have been dug up to bore tunnels, which will be up to 22 meters (72 feet) deep.
Barriers shielding construction work boast the tagline “Mumbai is upgrading” but while most people support the project, several groups are angry.
Thousands of Parsis signed a petition calling for the route to be changed so trains do not pass under fire temples where Zoroastrians worship, claiming it would pollute the “holy fire” and force nature to exact its revenge.
Environmentalists unsuccessfully went to court to stop the destruction of thousands of trees, and also object to plans for a depot and station on a 33-hectare (82-acre) site in Aarey Colony, a biodiversity hotspot.
The area borders Sanjay Gandhi National Park, home to leopards, birds and other animals.
“It’s a beautiful forest in the heart of Mumbai, an oxygen cylinder for the city that needs to be protected,” Stalin Dayanand, director of the environmental non-profit organization Vanashakti, told AFP.
“Once the shed and station come up, it opens the door for real estate developers to construct properties there,” he added.
Some 7,000 indigenous Indians — the Warlis — also live across Aarey, which at more than 1,200 hectares is a green oasis in the teeming city.
The animizts worship wildlife and are famous for their simple paintings depicting nature.
Prakash Bhoir, a tribal leader, says the area, where Warlis have lived for centuries, has witnessed severe encroachment in recent years.
“The destruction of the forest is happening at an alarming rate. We don’t want change or development here. Let it stay the way it is,” he told AFP.
The Bombay High Court is hearing a petition against the depot but Bhide claims Aarey is the only suitable place for it in space-starved Mumbai.
She says legal challenges have put the underground line’s completion date back by around ten months.
“Probably these kinds of problems may not be faced in a country like China. Although there are a lot of challenges, we have to complete the metro project as early as possible.”
New Mumbai metro will beat traffic, but at what cost?
New Mumbai metro will beat traffic, but at what cost?
Saudi youth turn to AI for art and culture
- Creativity, heritage and technology converge in a new generation of artists
RIYADH: As Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 places creativity, culture and technological innovation at the core of national development, the impact of these priorities is becoming increasingly visible across a wide range of disciplines and practices.
Through the use of artificial intelligence, young Saudis are integrating technology into their creative work both as a practical tool and as a medium in its own right. In doing so, they are expanding their capabilities, exploring personal and collective identity, and finding new ways to preserve and reinterpret cultural heritage.
“AI gives young Saudis a new way to interact with their own cultural inheritance,” said Dmitry Zaytsev, founder of Dandelion Civilization, a platform designed to help individuals shape unique professional paths.
“Traditional design elements such as calligraphy or geometric motifs were once difficult to modify. Experimentation required resources and formal approval. AI removes that barrier and makes exploration immediate. A creator can test many versions of a pattern and see which ones still feel authentic to them,” he told Arab News.
According to Zaytsev, this emerging form of expression does not signal a rejection of tradition, but rather a deeper engagement with it. “The young creator discovers what can change and what must remain constant. AI becomes a sketchbook that allows culture to evolve through curiosity rather than fear. When creators correct a model or push it toward local rhythm, they strengthen rather than dilute cultural identity,” he explained.
Sarah AlBaiz, an art adviser, researcher and artist, uses code to blend visual art with concepts drawn from culture and philosophy. While her early practice focused primarily on painting, her trajectory shifted during the 2020 AI Artathon, a pioneering international event highlighting collaboration between humans and machines in artmaking, where she discovered how to merge her engineering background with her creative work.
DID YOU KNOW?
• Saudi youth are using AI as a creative tool to reinterpret heritage, from calligraphy to folklore.
• AI is helping artists experiment faster without the traditional barriers of resources or formal approval.
• The Kingdom is backing creative AI nationally, with programs like SAMAI aiming to empower 1 million Saudis for an AI-driven future.
Operating within the field of computational creativity, where technology actively participates in the artistic process, AlBaiz explores themes of finance and faith. “Because they’re two sides of who I am,” she said. “When you talk about values, for example, that is both a term used in finance and trade from an objective perspective, but also moral and spiritual value.”
“When you understand prompting in AI, you can get it to produce almost anything. But it’s also informed by the training data it has,” she said.
Rather than relying on a single platform, AlBaiz experiments with multiple AI models to test their limitations and audience reception. “I work a lot with language as well, so large language models are right up my street when it comes to computational creativity.”ee
Her work has gained international recognition. At the 2022 Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah, she co-created an artwork under the banner of Super Artistic AI that generated Al-Qatt Al-Asiri motifs from southern Saudi Arabia. The piece received an Audience Award.
Beyond her artistic practice, AlBaiz is developing an intelligent art advisory system aimed at helping users navigate the Saudi art landscape. Designed as an initial point of contact, the system would guide users through potential pathways before they engage with a human adviser.
“It’s about understanding what role AI plays in the pursuit of what you want,” she said. “When I decided to focus on Qantara and building the advisory, I recognized that many of the systems required would need to be intelligent systems that offload a lot of work from me and the team.”
“When AI is an enabler rather than the end result, it becomes less intimidating because it feels risk-free for the end user,” she added.
Zaytsev echoed this idea, describing AI as a kind of rehearsal space. “Young people practice conversations, explore sensitive topics and organize their thoughts without social risk. This builds emotional clarity and confidence,” he said.
While generative tools such as large language models attract much of the attention, AI’s creative applications extend far beyond text and image generation.
Fairooz Alawami, trained as both an architect and engineer, uses AI to create self-expressive visual works inspired by dance.
“My practice is focused on contextualizing movement,” she said. “Because of my architectural training, I work with 3D modeling software called Rhino, which includes a visual coding language. Within that environment, you can also write code in Python, JavaScript or C#.”
Alawami employs OpenPose to analyze videos of her dancing by mapping points across her body. She then applies another computer vision model, MIDAS, which converts images or videos into depth frames. “If OpenPose gives me a skeleton, MIDAS gives me depth,” she explained. The resulting data is fed into 3D modeling software, where it is refined and manipulated into finished artworks.
She began dancing at a young age. “I didn’t find it, it found me,” she said. Movement later became the foundation of her artistic practice, leading to her first major project around three years ago while completing her master’s degree using the Grasshopper plugin. At the time, the workflow was slow and fragmented, but the arrival of ChatGPT helped streamline the process by making it easier to write and learn code.
“I think my love for dance and my love for art and design came together in a way that felt uniquely me,” she said. “Once I found that space, I just ran with it. It is my singular voice.”
Her work also draws heavily on cultural and musical heritage. One recent project was inspired by folklore referenced in the iconic song “Al Leila wa Leila” by Umm Kulthum. Alawami extracted musical stems from the track and mapped them to characters within the narrative. “The vocals were Shahrazad, the storyteller, and each stem represented a different narrative element,” she said. Earlier works were influenced by Islamic architecture and the geometric patterns found throughout Saudi Arabia and the wider Arab world.
“There are some incredible artists using generative AI to do very impressive things, and I don’t think I fall into that camp,” she said. “For me, AI is more like a skills-gap tool that helps me reach where I want to go.
“As humans, whether we realize it or not, the act of creating feeds us in some way. Lowering the barrier to entry makes creativity less intimidating.”
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Today, Saudi Arabia’s creative sector is supported by expanding national infrastructure. Initiatives such as the Cultural Scholarship Program place Saudi students in more than 60 universities worldwide, spanning disciplines from archaeology and literature to design, filmmaking and culinary arts. In parallel, the Kingdom launched the SAMAI initiative last year, aiming to equip 1 million Saudis with the skills needed to engage confidently in an AI-driven world.
Within Vision 2030, culture, tourism, digitalization and AI are treated as strategic sectors rather than peripheral concerns. As Saudi Arabia develops its creative economy as a form of soft power, its youth are becoming increasingly digitally fluent. AI tools are now embedded within creative workflows, enabling a new generation to explore heritage, remix traditional aesthetics and develop narratives that resonate on a global stage.
