Decaying Mumbai

India's financial capital fails its citizens

The tragic stampede at the Elphinstone Road station on the Mumbai commuter rail network is another reminder, although none was needed, that India’s financial capital is failing its citizens. Cities such as Mumbai should be engines of growth, but they will not live up to their potential if people who live there are subject to conditions that gave rise to the stampede in which 23 people died on a crowded footbridge. What is worse is that the responsibility for this disaster is easy to evade, given the confused chains of authority that govern India’s cities and their infrastructure. There has been a serious debate as to whose jurisdiction within Indian Railways this particular incident falls. Governance failures are an inevitable consequence of the lack of a clear structure of responsibility and accountability. 

Mumbai’s infrastructure was once the envy of India, but it has now fallen behind on several counts. Its suburban rail, in particular, has not kept up with the times, and cannot be compared to the modern metros in cities such as Delhi. Poor connectivity means that the financial and business districts of Mumbai are far more isolated from residential areas than in other global cities. Compared to the almost two dozen bridges, tunnels and railway lines that link Manhattan to the surrounding boroughs, South Mumbai can be accessed by only two highways and two railway lines. Five of the six bridges to the island city are in its far north; in Manhattan, many of the tunnels and bridges access the business district in the centre and middle of the island directly. 

Nor has the crumbling infrastructure been updated, which is not surprising given the paltry amounts spent on capital investment. The budget of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority, or MMRDA, is barely 15 per cent of the total budget of the greater Mumbai corporation, the richest civic body in the country. Meanwhile, the MMRDA has spent a great deal of its time feuding with its counterpart in the Maharashtra state government set-up. Unsurprisingly, a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey of emerging-market cities placed Mumbai at near the bottom in terms of liveability — where such cities as Shanghai and Johannesburg scored around 80 on the PwC index, Mumbai scored 25. The corporation is primarily responsible for the failure to update infrastructure; it has managed to implement only about 20 per cent of its own development plans in the past. 

Innovation and investment are drawn to cities that are liveable, in which citizens have the basic expectation that they will have access to decent public transport that connects them to their workplaces and where simply going to work is not a risky endeavour. In this respect, Mumbai fails every global standard by a mile. Nor can tricky politics be held responsible — after all, the central government, state government, and local government are all held by the same political alliance now. What is necessary is an institutional reform that increases accountability to residents. Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis had promised that Mumbai would get a “CEO”. He should follow through on this assurance. At the least, a directly elected and accountable mayor should be granted the power to raise revenue that can be spent on infrastructure that ensures tragedies like Elphinstone Road are not repeated.