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.
