If your household Ganpati stands under six feet, it goes into an artificial pond this year, not the sea and not a lake. The BMC set that rule after a Bombay High Court direction of August 20, and it applies from the first immersion day, September 15, through Anant Chaturdashi on September 25. Ganesh Chaturthi itself falls on Monday, September 14.
For most Mumbai families this is the operative change, because most household idols are well under the six-foot mark. Tall mandal idols continue to go to the beaches and jetties under the existing arrangement, which is why the visarjan images from Girgaon Chowpatty will look much as they always have while the household routine changes.
How the courts got here
The rule is the residue of a long-running public interest litigation over plaster of Paris. In June 2025 a division bench of Justices Ajey Gadkari and Kamal Khata restricted immersion of PoP idols in natural water bodies while the petition ran, leaving manufacture and sale untouched but requiring the court’s permission for immersion. The state’s own policy, which allowed idols up to six feet in artificial ponds and larger ones in natural water, lapsed in March 2026.
Maharashtra went back to the bench in July asking to revive that policy for another season. Advocate General Milind Sathe pitched a pilot to melt and recycle idols above six feet. The judges declined interim relief, observing that similar applications arrived every year, and folded the pending petitions together for a single final ruling. In August the bench heard all parties and reserved judgment, keeping the restriction in force. The Central Pollution Control Board complicated matters by telling the court that its 2020 guidelines against PoP idols were advisory rather than binding, a reversal of the position it had held for five years. Environmental petitioner Rohit Joshi’s counsel argued the state policy had failed in practice, producing photographs of idols taller than six feet going into natural water in defiance of both the policy and the court.
None of that is settled. What the BMC is enforcing this month is an interim position, and the final verdict is still pending.
What the civic body has put on the ground
Mumbai has 348 immersion sites this year: 281 artificial ponds, 44 beaches and jetties, and 23 natural lakes, according to the BMC. Each is mapped, and residents can reach the nearest one through QR codes and Google Maps rather than guessing. Staffing across the sites includes 1,132 lifeguards, 85 ambulances, 34 cranes, 10 motor boats and 498 nirmalya collection bins, with 6,052 floodlights and searchlights for the night processions.
On the supply side, the corporation handed idol makers 858 tonnes of shadu clay and 25,400 litres of eco-friendly paint at no cost, and cleared 1,136 of them through its online permission system. Sarvajanik mandals had filed 1,885 applications by September 1. The BMC has also been pushing housing societies to set up their own immersion tanks, which is the quiet part of the plan that decides whether the rest of it works.
Where the strain will show
The bottleneck has moved. For years the constraint on household immersion was crowd control at four or five beaches. Now it is pond capacity spread across 281 points, and demand is not spread evenly across the ten days. It piles up on the one-and-a-half-day immersion of September 15, the fifth day on September 18 and the seventh on September 20. A pond that serves a dense ward comfortably on a Tuesday can back up on those evenings.
The second question is what happens to the water afterwards. The environmental case for artificial ponds rests on the BMC collecting and treating the immersion water rather than letting dissolved plaster and paint drain into a creek. That step is invisible to the public and rarely audited, and it is the one worth asking your ward office about after the festival ends.
What to watch
Two things. Whether enforcement holds at the beaches for idols under six feet, given that last year’s photographs of oversized idols entering natural water are now court exhibits. And the final judgment in the PoP petition, which will decide whether Mumbai runs the same rules in 2027 or something looser.
Sources: India TV News, The Free Press Journal, FPJ on the Bombay High Court hearing
This report was compiled and written with AI assistance from publicly reported sources, and reviewed for accuracy.