Mumbai's reckoning: Can crumbling city reclaim place among great metros?

Mumbai administrators have launched futuristic projects while its existing infrastructure imperils lives every day

Not buying bananas might have saved Pinkle Naik’s life one recent Thursday in Mumbai. The copy editor at a newspaper often picked up the healthy snack on the footbridge between the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (CSMT) railway station and her office because her team tended to get hungry on the evening shift. But that day there had been a small crowd of buyers around the hawker and Naik was already running late. As she walked into the newsroom at half past seven, colleagues said there had just been a crash. Naik returned to the scene to find bloodied people being pulled out from under shattered concrete. Only the metal frame of the bridge stood naked in the air, as if exposing the fractured bones of the city. 

Six people died in that collapse on March 14. Naik, who used the Himalaya Bridge, as the footbridge was named, for nine years, had in fact considered it a less hazardous way for pedestrians to cross the road. The alternative was a stuffy subway, where twisted electric wires power a cacophony of shops. She says in retrospect, “Although reports claim maintenance work had been done, I never saw repairs happening there.” Until help arrived several minutes later, locals including journalists at the nearby newspaper office had rushed the injured to hospitals. Mahesh Narvekar, disaster management chief of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), says response teams had been mobilised within a minute of receiving word. However, despite attempting a “green corridor” (a route cleared for emergency services to pass through), it took nearly a quarter of an hour to reach the site owing to high traffic — another symptom of infrastructural failings. The corporation, which launched an investigation and whose external auditor has been arrested, says it has received 24 further complaints of precarious bridges from citizens.

The affordable Mumbai suburban rail network remains the preferred mode of transport for some eight million people daily, carrying, on average, two to three times its capacity. More than 30 people have died in bridge-related mishaps alone in the past 18 months: 23 were killed in a stampede at the Elphinstone Road station in 2017 and two died in a collapse in Andheri last year. Overall, even as the number of train deaths fell 10 per cent to 2,981 in 2018 versus 2017, each day on average seven lives are lost — mainly while crossing the tracks or from falling out of crammed compartments. 

Other forms of travel are high-risk too. Mumbai’s private vehicle count has risen dramatically: there are now 510 cars for every kilometre of road, compared with Delhi’s 108 per kilometre. According to a report by Bloomberg Philanthropies, 2017 saw 490 fatalities in road accidents, the equivalent of one death every 18 hours. Pedestrians make up more than half that figure. Add incidents of flooding and cave-ins of buildings to it, and the picture is grimmer still. 

Shouldn’t citizens be taking to the streets? “With so many hours spent getting to and from work, what would be left of you to protest?” contends architect and activist Chandrashekhar Prabhu. At times, frustrated commuters have beaten up innocent motormen. Bad roads have inspired a few instances of satire too. A citizens group, “Fill in the potholes”, placed toys comically in water-logged craters and clicked photos that went viral. Radio jockey Malishka Mendonsa upset the BMC by parodying its inaction in a song, while comedian José Covaco made a sketch about how potholes were where authorities left water for birds and small animals. Other Mumbaikars saw little humour. “If Mumbai, the ‘crown jewel’, continues to groan under its weight, it will drive away investors,” industrialist Anand Mahindra warned at a gathering last year, where another prominent Mumbai citizen, Ratan Tata, expressed similar concerns. 

 

Inconvenience today. For a better tomorrow” read the blue shutters that have been snaking through much of the city, and behind which lines of the ambitious Mumbai Metro are being installed despite several objections from citizens on property-related, environmental and religious grounds. “The nature of questions has changed from anguish and concern to questions on how we are doing this, if they can see it or visit,” says a senior bureaucrat working on the mega project. The Metro is expected to ease the pressure on suburban trains. With some corridors underground and others elevated, achieving seamless connectivity in the network will be a challenge. However, the bureaucrat points out: “Once we create the new capacity, one can look to put conscious restriction on private use of vehicles.” It is an expensive bet — Line 3 alone is expected to cost Rs 30,000 crore — and experts say fares, thus far capped at Rs 40, may rise, limiting it to the middle class. As of 2017, hurt by heavy finance and operating spends, the only operational line (between Ghatkopar and Andheri) was losing Rs 79 lakh a day.

In the eastern expanse of the city, a second line of the Mumbai monorail was inaugurated by Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis in March; the first had been launched by the previous Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan in February 2014. In both cases the opening was just months before the general election, notes Guru Kamble, an urban policy researcher who focuses on the narrow transport system. It cost Rs 3,000 crore to lay the 19.5 km corridor connecting Chembur, Wadala and Jacob Circle —deemed a failure because: “It neither served the purpose of taking the load off the suburban train network nor acted as an efficient feeder system.” A fire led to the first line being closed for a few months and, when it reopened, Kamble found that ridership had dropped from 15,000 per day to around 10,000 — only 10 per cent of the estimated daily usage of at least 150,000 passengers. Indeed, some stops are a full five-minute walk away from the nearest suburban railway station, and are not close to connecting bus services either. Rather than serving crowded neighbourhoods, the lines rose along relatively vacant lands which have since become urbanised. With little evidence of success, further lines are unlikely to get funding.

The statistics don’t speak well of earlier infrastructure projects such as the Western Express Highway (WEH) either: traffic data says the average speed of vehicles on the “fast” WEH is a ludicrous 10-12 km per hour. On the Rs 1,600-crore Bandra-Worli Sea Link, average daily traffic is around 37,000 — a third of the original estimate. While the swanky road has made a small profit, revenues and revenue growth have trailed expectations. A Rs 12,000-crore coastal road is being built to connect South Mumbai with the northern neighbourhood of Kandivali, and another link between the Eastern Express Highway (EEH) and the Bandra-Kurla Complex is underway too. In the absence of a congestion tax, however, more roads in Mumbai have meant more cars rather than less traffic. And most of them plying on older, narrower, more congested — but not expensive — roads. Ridership of BEST buses, which once ferried 4.5 million passengers, has dropped to 2.5 million as the institution hurts financially and struggles to maintain speeds.

The challenge in Mumbai, a linear city surrounded by water, is unique in some ways. Some 180 million people live here, and its storied economic promise naturally attracts more people. Getting public consensus for projects often takes years during which costs mount. As the city expanded, so did the agencies: there is the BMC, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA), the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC) and others. It is not always easy to tell where one agency ends and the other begins. The Shiv Sena, which heads the BMC, blames migration rather than crumbling services for accidents. Janaagraha’s Annual Survey of India’s City-Systems, cited by the IDFC Institute, says city bodies have about 1,300 staff for every 100,000 citizens — New York has about 5,000 staff for the same number of citizens. Sulakshana Mahajan, urban planner and member of the Mumbai Transformation Support Unit, recalls a time when public services were strong. “Transport is what made ‘Mumbai’, and it is now killing ‘Mumbai’.”

The going is lonely and often frustrating for urban architects and planners in Mumbai. Despite holding multiple conferences, they say their suggestions are rarely taken on board. Just this past week there were three such events, featuring participation from architects, bureaucrats, builders and representatives of the European Union (EU), who offered advice on how to make Mumbai the “Capital of the Indian Ocean”, ranging from Cape Town to Ho Chi Minh City. Two years ago, Mahajan compressed 50 years’ worth of wisdom from studies on Mumbai transport and presented it to a roomful of decision-makers. “There is no reform and no reform-thinking.” All research arrives at the same conclusions: put public transport first, develop non-motorised and pedestrian systems, have dedicated lanes for buses and improve the road network while also curbing use of private cars.

Ideas to achieve these have been in the public domain for years. Structural engineer Sudhir Badami has been on advisory committees to the Maharashtra government and the MMRDA but his attempts to bring in a version of the bus rapid transit system have not succeeded. It would be less expensive to make and operate than the Metro, he explains, and would use mini buses for space and frequency management, while 24-hour passes would encourage people to stick to public transport. Madhav Pai, India director of the World Resources Institute, a sustainable transportation specialist, says perhaps the most urgent need is upgrading pedestrian safety. The existing, space-taking skywalks have been underused, he critiques. “They were built for the benefit of private car owners, to get pedestrians out of their way.” Experts such as Pai say that footpaths have to be widened or reinforced where needed, crossings made shorter and elevated walkways raised at busy intersections.

The affluent BMC, with Rs 61,510 crore of cash as of 2017, took on urgent repair work only after the jolt of fatal accidents. On court orders, it now also has to remove abandoned cars parked on roads. While the chief minister appointed a panel in 2017 to make a plan to bring transparency in municipal corporations, its suggestions have been neglected, notes D M Sukthankar, former BMC commissioner. “All attention gets paid to launching new projects while existing infrastructure gets neglected. During their tenure, everyone wants to do something they can blow their own trumpet about.” In Sukthankar’s view, young blood must be introduced by hiring engineers at mid and higher levels. All city agencies need to employ data science seriously, suggests conservation architect Vikas Dilawari, and hold competitions to award projects. 

Dilawari believes that if the rent control Act, which has hurt maintenance of old buildings, is amended it could open up existing structures to accommodate more people. Prabhu, former president of the Maharashtra Housing and Development Authority in the 1990s, hopes that unlike the mill lands, which were used for commercial purposes rather than public housing, land available on the eastern waterfront will not be sacrificed for reasons of political “greed”. He is still optimistic. “The priorities must change. We can have a clean break from the past.” 

As always, citizens have adapted. Some offices offer flexible hours or take up co-working spaces in multiple locations to soften the burden of the commute. Those employees who can afford it pay premiums to move closer to work, while transport and housing conditions have led some to turn down jobs in Mumbai. Others like communications executive Shuporna Ghosh, who reckons Mumbai is still the safest city for single women, has given up weeknight outings after construction work slowed down her trips from Goregaon to Bandra from 40 minutes to two hours. For her part, Naik who escaped the Himalaya Bridge collapse, wonders when it will be ready for use again. “That is the sort of thing Mumbaikars worry about.”