How to turn Mumbai into another Shanghai ?

There is nothing wrong if you want to dream. Dream you must to attain even the seemingly impossible. And if you want your dreams to come true, you must persevere and create the right congenial conditions. You have to take a total picture without giving any room for lapses in one way or the other.

In recent times the powers-that-be dreamt that Mumbai should become another Shanghai and one of the first steps that they took was the slow elimination of slums that disfigured the beautiful face of the financial capital that also, incidentally, turned out to be the slum capital of India.

On April 16, 2005, the Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra, Mr. R.R. Patil announced that the Maharashtra Government would not rehabilitate the post-1995 slum dwellers within Mumbai.

Those who came to Mumbai after January 1, 1996, will be rehabilitated outside the metropolis as the city is unable to take any more. Painting a grim scenario, Mr. Patil said: “The time has come to think of those who live in Mumbai legitimately. We must not allow the degeneration of the metropolis by allowing any more people. If we do not stop the influx, not only Mumbai will collapse but India, too, would suffer as Mumbai is the nation’s economic capital.”

Mumbai’s population has already crossed 1.20 crore. The 400% increase had taken place within just 50 years. At least 35,000 hutments have come up on the water pipelines while 65,000 hutments were on the pavements. Over 13 lakh hutments exist in Mumbai now.

The Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister conceded that though constitutionally none can stop the migration to the city, his government would try its best to prevent the growth of any more slums in the city as Mumbai had reached its saturation limit in providing even the basic amenities to the already congested metropolis.

How fragile could be the dreams of those who trek to the city and those who are already better off in the big city has been borne out by the deluge that engulfed Mumbai in July last when Mumbai the dream city- degenerated into a nightmare, overnight.

It could create the same distressing scene in almost every city in India-New Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Kanpur, Ahmadabad, Kochi, Patna or Lucknow if a similar disaster overtakes them. The problems that dog our cities could be legion-poor housing, lack of mass transport, pollution, water scarcity, and lack of sanitation, lack of community concern, traffic snarls, road accidents and many more.

The Union Government has been working on a proposal to formulate a National Urban Renewal Mission for 60 selected cities to address issues of infrastructure development and management of assets. The need for such a Mission is long overdue. Right now over one third of the country’s population lives in towns and cities-the real engines of growth that sustain our economy.

One fundamental question confronting the policy-makers and city planners is how to deal with the growing slums. One basic premise that one must admit is that people anywhere in the world, not excluding India, migrate from one place to another, from one State to another or from a village to the city or from one developing country to a developed country for better prospects.

This is a global phenomenon. And this has been true of all mega cities in India. And such mega cities serve as magnets for not only skilled professionals from the other States but the poor from the countryside. Thus cities have become the beacon of hope for the rich and the poor. Slums in any city are a reflection of our chronic neglect of the countryside and our failure to provide housing for the urban poor.

No urban planner can wish away the urban poor. Can a city grow without the services of masons, plumbers, taxi drivers, carpenters, construction labour and scores of other workers who live in the slums? Can we deny the right of the poor to live in a city?

Mumbaikars may take a long time to dump into oblivion the nightmare they lived through when the city buckled into chaos in the wake of the downpour in July 2005. Infectious diseases that came after the deluge killed nearly a hundred people while those affected by malaria, dengue, cholera, gastroenteritis and leptospirosis exceeded ten times more.

Accumulation of garbage and plastic stopped the flow of water making them excellent breeding grounds for disease-spawning larvae and germs. The poor, already down and out, with the misery spawned by flood waters swamping the slums could hardly find the money to buy medicines. In a march by citizens that included stars from TV and film world, they asked the Government as to what they did in bettering the conditions of the roads, drainage and removal of garbage.

The floods also resulted in a loss of around Rs. 25 crore to the fledgling Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company (carved out of the MSEB) with over 5,667 transmitters having been affected. The city that wanted to be a Shanghai collapsed like a house of cards in the wake of a natural disaster that exposed the weak underbelly of a city that grew haphazard with high rise structures providing no proper drainage, destroying the mangroves and wet lands that could have absorbed at least part of the storm water.

The deluge in Mumbai has administered a serious warning to other cities too: can they cope up with such a disaster if it overtakes them too?

To solve the mass transit problems in the mega city, Mumbai is already working on a Metro, egged on by the resounding success of the Delhi Metro, Reliance Energy and L&T consortium are among the five prominent bidders for the construction of Mumbai’s first Metro project, the 15 km Versova-Andheri-Ghatkopar stretch that is estimated to cost Rs. 1,500 crore. Once the construction comes under way, it will take at least five years to complete the project.

The capital city of New Delhi may be ahead of India’s financial capital in terms of its world-class metro and the steps taken to provide pollution free mass transit-something most other big and small cities have yet to do. But here too one chronic problem is the frequent power cuts and the high tariff the service providers have slapped on the consumers. In terms of pollution, Yamuna continues to remain contaminated.