Why Mumbai's recent infrastructure projects may not be enough to unclog the city

C Khatua works at Botawala Building opposite the 140-year-old Horniman Circle Garden in south Mumbai. To meet him, you’ll have to dodge sweaty workmen perched precariously on ladders and make your way to the dimly lit lobby of the ancient building. A dust covered British-era elevator creaks its way up to the third floor, where Khatua works in a room whose only decoration are maps of Mumbai.

Khatua heads MTSU, or Mumbai Transformation Support Unit, a body mandated to advise, coordinate and monitor projects undertaken by the city’s multiple governing bodies. MTSU’s one-point agenda: to facilitate the transformation of Mumbai into a worldclass city. It is ironical that the man keeping an eye on the city’s transformation sits in a building that could do with a lick of metamorphosis itself.

“Just step outside this building and look at Horniman Circle,” says Khatua, director, MTSU. “It was designed such a long time ago and it’s so beautiful after all these years.” In the same breath, Khatua says, the beauty of the city of the ’60s and ’70s is gone and has been replaced by a concrete jungle.

Too Little, Too Late

But then again, over the past year, Mumbai has had a few reasons to smile. If you have been away from Mumbai, you are likely to be surprised by the change in the city. It now has a Metro line, a monorail, a freeway that connects the eastern suburbs to ‘town’, and the Santa Cruz Chembur Link Road (SCLR) and a double-decker flyover which connects the eastern and western suburbs over a swathe of slums.


That’s just one way of looking at it. Most of the projects were delayed. One of them, the SCLR, earned the epithet “world’s most delayed road project” from the World Bank. The monorail was greeted with derision as the project in its current state hardly connects populated areas. As for the Metro, it’s too little, too late. To put Mumbai’s Metro push in perspective, the 11.4-km line was built over six years. Delhi adds more Metro track than that in just a year. The scariest part? Mumbai has no visibility about when the next Metro lines will be operational. 2019 is the most optimistic view.

So, what’s going wrong with Mumbai? Like Adi Godrej, chairman of Godrej group, puts it, “Mumbai is not in a decline… things are changing, but not at the pace they should be. The city has to keep up with the times.”

The dhobi list of Mumbai’s problems is familiar and frustrating. One, it is an extraordinarily congested city. “The Mumbai Metropolitan Region [MMR, which includes Mumbai and its satellite towns like Navi Mumbai and Thane] is about 4,350 sq km. Of this, Mumbai and its suburbs account for 482 sq km, just 11%” explains Khatua. “However, the population is largely focused around Mumbai and its suburbs. So, we have a situation where nearly 12.5 million people out of the 22 million [in MMR] living in just 11% of the city’s land mass,” adds Khatua. This has started to change as people are moving beyond Mumbai city limits and its suburbs to its satellite towns in search of more affordable dwelling. Like the 2011 census showed, the population of the island city of Mumbai came down from 33.26 lakh in 2001 to 31.45 lakh in 2011 (down 5.4%).

During this period, Navi Mumbai grew by 59%. The dense population of Mumbai makes any major infrastructure work in the city and its suburbs a nightmare.

Unique Problems, Zero Planning

Even as the city has struggled to add infrastructure, its challenges have multiplied. Mumbai’s vehicle population has shot up from just under 7 lakh in 1991 to 21 lakh in 2013 — that in a city surrounded by sea from three sides. BMC reportedly has just 12,000 official parking lots for this ocean of vehicles. Moreover, over 450 vehicles get registered in the MMR region every day. And that’s just one part of the challenge.

“Seventeen agencies are involved in the city’s governance,” says Narinder Nayar, chairman of Bombay First, a body that is working with the Maharashtra government and local bodies to better the city’s cause. “I compare it with an orchestra. You have 17 players — each one of them good at what they do — but without a conductor…it simply can’t work,” says Nayar.