Mumbai's makeover

Mega transport projects must be fast-tracked

This has been a jackpot year for Mumbai. The launch of Mumbai's first Metro service last week was the latest in a series of at least five showcase projects that have come up in quick succession. The others include the country's first monorail project on the 8.9-kilometre-long Wadala-Chembur section in the central-eastern suburbs; the 16.8-km-long Eastern Freeway, which connects south Mumbai and the eastern suburbs; India's first double-decker flyover (part of the 6.5-km-long Santacruz-Chembur Link Road, which provides quick east-west connectivity); and the Mumbai airport's new terminal, T2. Add the Bandra-Worli Sea Link (it opened in 2009), which has changed the skyline of the country's commercial capital, and Mumbai's infrastructure script doesn't look all that sad any more.

Yet the celebrations remained muted, despite the stage-managed chants of "Ganpati Bappa Morya" when the first Metro coach pulled into stations on its inaugural run. The reason is obvious: all the projects that have formed the crux of the makeover for the city made a mockery of their original deadlines. Take, for example, the Metro project, which runs east-west connecting Versova, Andheri and Ghatkopar. It will ultimately carry 1.1 million passengers every day and reduce travel time to 21 minutes as against one hour that it takes to cover the stretch by road. This is good news, but the discordant note was that the 11.4-km-long project took nearly 76 months, even as the cost increased to Rs 4,321 crore from the originally envisaged Rs 2,356 crore. Worse, the contentious issue of fare fixation has snowballed into an avoidable legal controversy; the state government has already moved court, arguing that the operator must adhere to the tariff commitment it made while bidding for the project.

That's not all. The original plan of a metro network criss-crossing the city by 2021 is still warming government files. While the second and the third routes of Phase I are in various stages of planning, Phases II and III are not even on the drawing board, which gives rise to concerns that by the time they are completed, it may be a case of too little, too late for the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, which has over 25 million people and is the second largest urban conglomeration in the world after Tokyo. Or consider the fact that the Santacruz-Chembur Link Road project has earned the embarrassing tag of being the world's most delayed road project - it was completed 10 years behind schedule.

The time has come to hasten a raft of projects, such as the remaining phases of Mumbai Metro, the Mumbai Harbour Link, more freeways, and the extension of the Bandra-Worli Sea Link to Nariman Point, among other things. Showpieces such as the monorail project are hardly the answer; the seven-stop, 19-minute journey is already losing money heavily. In any case, such "light railway" projects are not the right recipe for a populous city like Mumbai. One of the pet peeves of Mumbaikars has been that the revenues of Mumbai are controlled by politicians whose constituencies lie deep in the Maharashtra hinterland. It is believed that these politicians feel using that money to improve living conditions in the state capital would do nothing to help them win re-election. Money can be found to set up bankable large transport projects in Mumbai only if that mindset changes - fast. Clearly, Mumbai has suffered far too long for keeping artificial deadlines for such projects without doing the proper groundwork required to identify the critical issues that would affect them.