That sinking feeling

It's that sinking feeling yet again in Mumbai, just a week after the first monsoon showers. The financial capital looked battered last Saturday (it was the wettest day since the deluge in July two years back) and the sight was all too familiar. Railway stations overflowed with stranded commuters, crumbling potholed roads were like running sewers, there was chaos at the airports, pavement squatters hoisted themselves on top of their roadside hovels to escape the watery mess below, power supply was disrupted in many suburbs, and several buildings collapsed. The situation would have been worse had the rain gods not decided to take a break. It also helped that the downpour happened on a weekend, when most offices and schools were closed. What is different from the past is that the city's celebrated never-say-die spirit seems to have taken a hard knock; there is a new lack of self-belief about the city that is dangerous. What the inept city administration has ensured is that every Mumbaikar's thoughts about the city's future are as dark as the clouds rolling overhead.

It was an irony that when the city was sinking on Saturday, Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, along with Johny Joseph, the head of the state's disaster management machinery, was busy in Seattle on a road show to attract more foreign direct investment to the country's commercial capital. According to media reports, Mr Deshmukh made an eloquent Power-point presentation on the city's attractiveness as an investment destination. But his words may have rung hollow in the aftermath of Saturday's deluge. For, it was Mr Deshmukh who has set up a plethora of power centres, creating confusion among the various civic implementing authorities. The Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority, for instance, has been blamed for usurping critical functions of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, such as the care of crucial roads and storm water drains. It also hasn't helped Mr Deshmukh's cause that the various development projects that he had promised are in varying stages of implementation and overshot completion deadlines by a long margin.

It is, however, unfair to blame the city administration alone for the mess. Mumbai has around 19,000 tall buildings that are old and dilapidated. But demolishing these structures is almost impossible. The city's housing authorities had issued a demolition notice to one of the buildings but could not carry it out as one of the tenants got a stay order from the court. This was one of the buildings that collapsed after Saturday's rains. Also, it is clear that the city is unable to take the strain of further population growth. The city has seen grown from about 4 million in 1947 to more than 16 million now, a number that is expected to exceed 20 million by 2015. Neighbourhoods have expanded, fallow factory land has been opened up for real estate development, old low-rise buildings have been torn down to make way for skyscrapers and slums have proliferated to make space for new migrants.

This growth has not been accompanied by an expansion of amenities, for which a state government task force had estimated an investment of Rs 200,000 crore in infrastructure over the next 10 years, mostly from private businesses, and Rs 1,500 crore additional investments every year from the state government. Nothing much has happened on the task force report so far.