I am beginning to dread Mumbai

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Shantanu Bhagwat in The Times of India

My favourite city when I was growing up has today become a place that I try hard to avoid. The reasons are not hard to find. Lack of an efficient system of public transport tops the list. Add to this, the traffic snarls. To this, add a humid climate and uncontrolled, chaotic crowds that jostle for space with shops, scooters, buses & cars.

Don’t get me wrong. There are still many things that keep me hooked on Mumbai. The spirit of enterprise, the numerous eating joints, the real feel of a cosmopolis and the walk along Marine Drive – to name just a few. But all these are increasingly overshadowed by my dread of being stuck in an endless traffic snarl or missing my meeting (worse, a flight) or having nowhere to go for a walk if I feel like unwinding after a long day.

Mumbai’s problems are not unique. At their core is the utter failure of government and administration to deal with rapid urbanisation that is happening across the length and breadth of India.  This urbanisation is the reason for Guwahati losing its charm. This urbanisation is the reason Delhi is fast becoming a cold, ruthless city seething with rage. It is what long-term residents of Pune dread. And it is the reason Bengaluru’s distances are now calculated in “hours” rather than kilometres.

To get a sense of the magnitude of the challenge we face, sample this:

• Over 32% of Indians living in major cities still live in single room homes. In most Tier-I cities, “Affordable Housing” remains a pipe dream.
• Almost no Indian city has water coming through the pipes that is safe to drink. Waste disposal remains a common problem across towns and cities in India
• Sometime between now and the next 10 years, 3 Indian cities will be among the fastest growing cities world-wide. These are Ghaziabad, Surat and Fardiabad. “Twenty-two other Indian cities (will) also find a place in the top 100”. 
• In Delhi, over 350 kms of nullahs (storm water drains) built hundreds of years ago now carry untreated sewage posing a grave risk to public health & environment 
• On an average, 10-12 people die every day on the tracks of Mumbai’s suburban rail system. That is almost 4000 people each year. This has been going on for several years 

And finally this statistic which I doubt would surprise any of you: almost 50% of the population in most cities live in slum-like conditions.

About 3 years ago, I visited one such area in Mumbai. Situated within minutes from the famous RK Studios in Chembur, this area is called Cheetah Camp. Cheeta Camp is unusual because it is a “planned slum”. But the planning does not extend to sewers or basic provisions.

A recent study discovered that the 117,000 residents of Cheeta Camp have just 38 usable toilets among themselves. That means roughly one toilet per 170 people. To understand what this means, take about 30-40 families in your neighbourhood. Now imagine all of them coming to your home to use our one toilet.   I think you get the picture.

Believe it or not, we actually have a “Ministry of Urban Development” with a cabinet rank minister in charge. The minister in charge is the redoubtable Kamal Nath – a man tagged with the “15% label” by Tarun Das, former Chief Mentor, CII and alleged to  have offered “jet airplanes as enticements” to  get support from MPs for the India-US civilian nuclear deal in 2008. 

Sadly the Ministry appears to have achieved little.  The Minister himself has publicly said, “We are not building for the future, unlike Hong Kong and Singapore. We are still catching up with the past” 

And his own Ministry’s survey on the state of affairs in our cities has highlighted glaring failures, including the fact that, “more than half of India's cities have no piped water or sewerage systems, four in five had water for less than five hours per day and seventy per cent households across the states had no lavatory.”  Not only has the Ministry failed to achieve much, it has been dragged into the murky CommonWealth Games Scandal too.

Unfortunately urbanisation is a dull topic for prime time TV. It does not arouse the kind of passion that can get people out on the streets. For most well-read, educated Indians whose stomachs are full, urbanisation is an inevitable “evil” that is ruining their towns and cities. It is the “evil” that is making water scarce; making groceries expensive, commuting a nightmare and jeopardising the safety of their children.

There is little realisation of the long-term implications of this “problem”. It seems most of us assume the challenges of “urbanisation” will be resolved on their own.

But we ignore urbanisation at our own peril. I believe, more than anything, dealing with the effects & impact of rapid urbanisation will be India's biggest challenge in coming decades.