Almost exactly a year after the last one, a deluge has brought Mumbai to a standstill again, raising the question whether an entire year has been wasted. The truth is that the interregnum has not been totally wasted, for incremental improvements have been brought about, but no effort has been made to seek long-term solutions to what are after all long-term problems. In that sense, the underlying crisis has become more endemic. The main drainage system through the Mithi river has functioned better, considerable work having been done to clean it up. The condition of highways leading out of the city and its main arterial roads has also improved. Hence Mumbai is currently not witness to the same kind of traffic jams on the highways that it did last year. An airport runway was closed for only under an hour. So the city has not been cut off from the rest of the country the way it was last year. | |
| On the other hand, the issue of local flooding and clogging of important roads in many areas remains. This is because the drainage system is inadequate and that cannot be set right in a year. When it rains over 250 mm in three hours and the drains can carry only 25 mm of rain water per hour, the system will not be able to cope. The water-logging is particularly severe in low-lying areas which have been allowed to develop without attention to their particular topography, and consequently the drainage issues. |
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| If Mumbai has to hold its own and seek to be counted among the leading cities of the world in something other than the sheer number of its inhabitants, it has to reinvent itself. It can do so only if it changes its governance structure. This it has failed to do in the last one year. For the city to grow and restore some of its past glory, it has to have a vision that is translated into action by a properly empowered tier of local government. Plus, it has to have a regional planning apparatus which takes in the entire urban agglomeration, including the emerging suburbs at the periphery, while planning common transport and drainage systems. Maharashtra's political leaders have condemned their capital city to be run by a municipal commission without an effective mandate. Ultimate power but no direct responsibility rests at the Mantralaya, and the people's local representatives constitute a bunch or inconsequential corporators and rotating mayors with little political standing. |
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| What Mumbai should have is a system like Chennai's, where the mayor gets directly elected for five years and heads a mayor-in-council elected for the same period. In such a system, real power is wielded and responsibility shouldered by politicians with far greater capability and ambition than is the case today in India's financial capital. The model to keep in mind is that of Michael Bloomberg, who left his business empire to run New York city and now aspires to become governor of the state by the same name. Unless large Indian cities adopt a properly empowered system of governance, their future will be bleak. And for the country as a whole, there can be no successful development without successful urbanisation. |
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