What Mumbai needs as a starting point is a city administration that is accountable to the city's residents, and a directly elected mayor, as in all great cities of the world
T N Ninan / New Delhi Feb 18, 2012, 00:32 IST
Mumbai has had its civic elections, but 46 per cent voting suggests that the city’s residents don’t believe the elections will solve their problems. They may be right. The city has stopped growing (its population in 2011, at 12.4 million, was fractionally smaller than in 2001), it has water rationing, and little space for more public or private transport. Half its population lives in slums (the national urban average is less than 20 per cent), so daily life is an aggravation — and expensive. Office rents are 50 per cent higher than in Delhi, and four times Bangalore’s, while apartment prices are even more out of line; commuting times in trains that pack passengers like sardines are twice as long as anywhere else. Delhi has two-and-a-half times the land for a population of similar size, which explains its broad roads and green areas. There is only one way for Mumbai to escape long-term decline: either free up the stretches of land occupied by the port and the navy and give the city a fresh lease of life, or escape to the mainland and create new growth centres, set up a new airport, and a different logic from that of an overcrowded island. If not, India’s Maximum City will continue to lose out.
Among the country’s five biggest cities (excluding Kolkata, which is a story by itself), Mumbai now has by far the smallest annual addition to office space. Delhi is already the premier city in many ways: its population, if you include satellite towns like Gurgaon, is now larger than Greater Mumbai’s, and its Indira Gandhi Airport has slightly more traffic than the one named after Chhatrapati Shivaji. Delhi used to have an inferior electricity supply system; no longer. And it has more water per head. Property tax revenue in Mumbai might be twice what it is in Delhi, but the combined budget of the Delhi government and municipal corporation (about Rs 28,500 crore) is bigger than Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s (BMC’s) Rs 22,000 crore plus that part of the budget of the Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority that is spent on the city. Also, a good chunk of BMC’s money comes from an octroi that Delhi does not impose. So Delhi has lower taxes and therefore cheaper goods, while its income per head inched ahead of Mumbai’s for the first time last year.
Living in other cities is easier. The Delhi metro’s daily ridership total of two million allows people to get to work and back home in civilised fashion, unlike Mumbai’s suburban train service with its seven million daily trips, while millions more in Delhi are able to use personal transport — its population of seven million cars and two-wheelers dwarfs all other Indian cities. More important than anything else, Delhi is able to implement civic improvement projects, unlike Mumbai with its solitary achievement of a Bandra-Worli sea link that took close to a decade to commission.
Maharashtra’s well-meaning chief minister recognises that the city needs saving, and he is right to complain that Delhi is pampered with funds in a way that Mumbai is not. But he will be hamstrung by hopelessly corrupt civic authorities and the fact that Maharashtra’s politicians have long used Mumbai as a milch cow. Did you know, for instance, that someone has a monopoly on supplying sand to the city? And that there are similar monopolies for other products (for one of which there are multiple suppliers but they all come from the same village in Rajasthan)? What Mumbai needs as a starting point is a city administration that is accountable to the city’s residents, and a directly elected mayor, as in all great cities — London, Paris, Berlin, New York… A newly elected BMC is no substitute.
I see this as a plaintive cry of someone who is impatient to turn Mumbai into a mirror image of Shanghai, Singapore, New York... you name it. I find the mine is better (bigger?) than your's syndrome amusing actually. My real worry has noting to do with the transparent desire for flash, but it has everything to do with the apparent lack of desire to keep 20+ million people of Mumbai (and Delhi) safe from the galloping impacts of climate change, an expression that found no mention at all in the entire piece.
Elections just completed in Mumbai and some other cities in Maharashtra have once again underscored the fact that resident- citizens of these cities are simply unconcerned about the way the cities are managed. They have to participate in the election process on a much larger scale and demand implementation of reforms that would considerably improve the administration of these cities. Directly elected Mayor with administrative powers may be one solution but success of that that type of reform is not guaranteed due to poor people participation.
Incidentally slums in Mumbai or for that matter in Delhi are mostly inhabited by poor people from our undeveloped states, mainly from BIMARU states. If Delhi has made some progress to reduce the number of those who live in slums, it is good. But let us not forget that tax payers of the entire country are paying for relatively better show of Delhi in this regard.
The problem with Mumbai is that it wants to be everything. Its time the High court and/or some other big govt moves out of Mumbai to vidarbha.
E.g. It was announced that Nagpur will become the air transport hub, but it was not made.
Smiliarly, many banks need not have a huge HO in Mumbai, least of all NABARD, its a bank for rural development, what is it doing in Mumbai?
Unless you shift govt or some industries out of Mumbai, smart people will make that choice for themselves. I have moved my company to central India and live a better life.
The rest of the country needs the govt offices for development. The development of Delhi and Mumbai is mainly on account of huge govt (and armed forces) presence. Move some of them to Naxal affected areas and you can hit two birds with one stone.
So Mr Nainan you want Mumbai to GROW even more and become bigger, use more personal transport, get more water for the city as well as more power. All this coming from a senior executive and Director of an established Business Paper with influence. No wonder our country is going to dogs.
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