Maximum city, minimum care

Mumbai’s past is somewhat troubled but has its fair share of glory. Its future is less certain and probably slipping away.

Mumbai’s skyline as seen from Bandra. | Photo Credit: Getty Images

Rain anxiety is real in Mumbai these days. Every year for the past 20 years, when rainfall in July-August turns heavy-to-very heavy, people and the authorities are on tenterhooks wondering if there will be a repeat, in some degree, of the massive flood of July 26, 2005. Before that day, the city would come to a standstill for a few days every monsoon but it was not a life- or economy-threatening crisis. Two decades later, Mumbai’s rivers have retaining walls to hold rainwater, stormwater drains are annually desilted, spending hundreds of crores, and water pumps have been installed at many locations to literally throw the rainwater into the Arabian Sea.

What Mumbai’s authorities have not done is pay attention to its ecology either in response to climate change-induced extreme weather or as a necessary parallel to its economy. Instead, the city lost a staggering 2,028 hectares of green cover in just five years from 2016 to 2021 for a slew of infrastructure projects. Its complex system of watercourses lies fractured. Two years ago, the Maharashtra government made it legally possible for Mumbai’s real estate developers to construct on every inch of their plots without leaving any open space. Where will the rainwater go?

Of course, as the country’s premier city of commerce, finance, and entertainment, Mumbai has an eye-popping list of high-investment infrastructure projects. The two newest and biggest projects, Atal Setu and Coastal Road, together cost a whopping Rs.30,900 crore. The authorities say that investments in such high-cost projects are meant to boost the city’s economy. In July, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched a Rs.29,000 crore investment drive in Mumbai, focussing on more infrastructure projects to elevate Mumbai’s status as a global powerhouse in fintech. Every election brings a bounty of sorts.

Economic inequality, ecological slide

Yet, is Mumbai a liveable city, a city of sustainable growth? Or is its pre-eminent position, built through the colonial and postcolonial decades, being gradually eroded? The short answer: the economy of Mumbai is growing, but the city is neither sustainable nor entirely liveable except for those at the top of the economic pyramid. Detaching the economy from the quality of life for the working millions in a city of nearly 21 million and delinking it from its natural ecological template—an estuary, an archipelago—only sets it up for worse times ahead. Mumbai’s past is somewhat troubled but has its fair share of glory; its future is less certain, probably slipping away.

The uncertainty comes despite the flurry of announcements, inaugurations, and showcasing of select urban geography like the Bandra Kurla Complex (BKC) that commands eye-popping property prices. Nowhere in these is the recognition that Mumbai sits uneasy, threatened by extreme heat, air pollution, floods, and rise in sea levels—a climate-sensitive city with one of the world’s highest population densities, at about 14 times the national average, and with one of the worst instances of urban inequality in India.

The Mumbai Climate Action Plan, released two years ago, suggested ways forward for the city’s ecology. However, it is not a statutory plan, which means the State government and Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) are not bound to follow it. Mumbai’s Development Plan 2014-34, finalised in 2017-18, focussed on the use and zoning of land as if the city was in an ecological vacuum. The two critical plans are neither cohesive nor rational when read together.

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, formerly Victoria Terminus, a UNESCO World Heritage site and one of the oldest railway stations in India. | Photo Credit: Getty Images

Then, there is the ambitious target set by the NITI Aayog and repeated by the State government: Mumbai’s GDP was pegged at $140 billion in 2023 and, as the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR), was projected to touch $300 billion by 2030. How the city’s economy can flourish when it does not even pretend to factor in ecological challenges is anyone’s guess. How such a city can offer improved quality of life to millions is not even debated.

The political economy of Mumbai—the corporates, the real estate czars, the fintech outfits, the unicorn startups, the education cartels, the infrastructure builders—prefers it this way: allow the blitzkrieg of glamour to build the perception of the city and cover up its gritty underbelly with grandiose announcements. To this deadly mix another layer has been added in recent years: the quiet spiriting away of some of its defining industries by the BJP-led government at the Centre and in the State.

Fintech is being lured to GIFT City near Ahmedabad with concessions that Mumbai cannot legally offer, such as allowing Indians to open US dollar accounts. Several diamond trading businesses, housed in Pancharatna in south Mumbai and later in the Bharat Diamond Bourse in the BKC, opened or shifted offices to the massive Surat Diamond Bourse last year. Although the diamantaires are yet to give up on Mumbai, it is a significant shift. Concerted efforts have been made to get the Hindi film industry to the National Capital Region, especially Noida, with the government of Uttar Pradesh proffering incentives. Four major projects worth nearly Rs.1.8 lakh crore were moved out of Maharashtra as soon as the Eknath Shinde-Devendra Fadnavis government assumed charge in 2022. If the services sector (which grew from 59 per cent of the city’s economy in 1993-94 to 74 per cent in 2010) shrinks, Mumbai will stumble.

Highlights

• Mumbai is a climate-sensitive city with one of the world’s highest population densities and the worst instances of urban inequality in India.
• Yet the city authorities have not paid attention to Mumbai’s ecology either in response to climate change-induced extreme weather or as a necessary parallel to its economy.
• Detaching the economy from the quality of life for the working millions in a city of nearly 21 million and delinking Mumbai from its natural ecological template only sets it up for worse times ahead.

The political slugfest over Mumbai is not new. At the time of Independence, there was a strong demand that Bombay be made a Union Territory or the capital of Gujarat. It was literally wrested from the powers-that-were to become the capital of Maharashtra and invested in thereafter to become the commercial powerhouse it became. Mumbai’s growth can be seen in two phases. One, in the post-Independence decades during which its booming economy was driven by the manufacturing sector, when the city grew geographically into suburbs such as Malad, Borivali, and Mulund.

The other was the post-liberalisation phase during which the manufacturing sector gave way to the services sector, to the informalisation of work and post-industrial urbanisation that the well-known urbanist Saskia Sassen talked about, and densification in most parts except in its old south. In 1981, 60 per cent of Mumbai’s population lived in the suburbs; by 2011, it was nearly 75 per cent. This was not planned growth; the plans only determined land use, appropriating more and more land in the name of development—landfilling from the sea, hacking down forests, building on the floodplains of its four rivers, and so on. Despite this, Mumbai continues to house more than 54 per cent of its population—an astonishing 11 million people—in slums. Affordable housing within city limits is only a political slogan.

In the past decade, the construction boom was mostly redevelopment, razing old buildings or slums to construct high-rises. Mumbai’s skyline changed in upscale and middle-class areas. Those living on its margins—in slums and almost-forgotten suburbs like Govandi and Mankhurd where community toilet floors have given way and killed people, and good schools are a distant dream—live in a different Mumbai; nothing has changed for them.

As the Dharavi slum goes under the bulldozer, to be redeveloped into a swanky township by Adani Realty, turning nearly 600 acres of public land over for private profit, it typifies much of what is wrong about Mumbai. Project-led development has done the city in: large infrastructure projects, small beautification projects, metro projects that do not connect to other transit lines, the Dharavi project, the BKC project constructed on land stolen from the Mithi river (a Supreme Court-appointed committee stated this). Project planning has replaced comprehensive urban planning, leading to silos on the city’s landscape and selective development.

Atal Setu, the 21.8-km-long expressway bridge that connects Mumbai with Navi Mumbai, was inaugurated on January 12 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. | Photo Credit: EMMANUAL YOGINI

Then, there is the isolationist approach of detaching Mumbai from the MMR, when Mumbai’s economy and life are closely tied to the larger metropolitan region. The MMR has a total of nine municipal corporations, several municipal councils, and village panchayats, for which a regional plan was drawn up by the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority, but it is grandly independent of Mumbai’s plans. If there is rampant construction on the wetlands in Navi Mumbai or its rivers are bent for the new international airport, it cannot but hurt Mumbai. This interdependence is not reflected in plans or programmes.

Within Mumbai too, there has been a steady and marked shift from the old downtown to the suburbs, which have seen a proliferation of business districts and the entrenchment of the creative-entertainment industry. A corresponding shift in governance attention and resource allocation by the BMC is missing. For example, at the height of air pollution in 2023, the civic body deployed six mist vans to keep the dust down; three moved along the sea-abutting areas that had the least polluted air even as the worst polluted were left to their fate.

The governance of Mumbai has to take the blame for the city’s condition. Key civic services are with the BMC, but some areas and projects are exclusively governed by autonomous bodies that have no accountability to the city’s elected body or by special purpose vehicles such as the Dharavi Redevelopment Project Private Limited where people’s voices are not represented. Mumbai’s suburban railway system, servicing 7.5 million commuters every day over nearly 100 km, is yet to see a massive investment that would improve the one- or two-hour commutes. The double- and triple-engine sarkar model has not worked for Mumbai in the past decade.

The distressing economic inequality and ecological slide cannot but touch the iconic Mumbai quality of embracing strangers, making space despite the crunch, and folding in different strains of music, life, and food unto itself. That it still holds magic for so many must have something to do with its enigmatic sea breeze. 

Smruti Koppikar, journalist and urban chronicler in Mumbai for over three decades, writes extensively on cities, development, gender, and the media. She is the Founder Editor of the award-winning online journal Question of Cities.