The future of Mumbai

Mumbai is home to 13 million people and rising - but chronic congestion and a fragile infrastructure are barriers to progress. Time Out Mumbai editor Naresh Fernandes asks what the future holds for his city, and what it could learn from London

Mumbai commuters struggle through the 'super-dense-crush-load' at rush hour

When Mumbaikars visit London for the first time, they’re swaddled by a comforting sensation of familiarity. After all, London just seems like a scaled-up version of elements that are familiar from India’s commercial capital. Imposing churches? Our Scot’s Kirk is a replica of St Martin’s in the Fields. Red buses? Our double-deckers were designed to look like London’s. Gothic buildings? We’ve got a whole row of brooding grey structures along the Oval, in downtown Mumbai.

But it’s only a matter of hours before reality strikes. Riding London’s tube is a breeze compared with the battle to enter Mumbai’s local trains. Six million people take the Mumbai commuter line each day and though each train is built to carry 1,800 people, in peak hours they carry about 5,000 commuters (the railway authorities call this ‘super-dense-crush-load’). Things aren’t much better on the roads. In the so-called rush hour, traffic crawls at less than 7.5mph. Most noticeable to the casual visitor from Mumbai is the orderly housing in London. More than 55 per cent of Mumbai’s 13 million people live in slums.

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Mumbai’s crushing problems will come up for discussion at ‘Age of Metropolis’, a debate on the future of cities at this week’s Battle of Ideas event at the Royal College of Art. Already, more than half the world’s population lives in cities and, by 2030, the United Nations predicts that urban centres around the world will be home to more than five billion people. And Mumbai, with its tremendous possibilities and potentially horrifying living conditions, is a grim symbol of where the world could be headed. It is, as Charles Correa, India’s best-known urban planner has often observed, ‘a great city and a terrible place’.

Just as New York is the crucible for the great American experiment, Mumbai has always been the cradle of India’s modernist dreams. It was the city in which the first industrial plant with Indian funding was started (in 1854) and the place where India’s first trade union was born (1884). Mumbai lit the spark of Indian nationalism when it played host to the first session of the Indian National Congress (1885) and was the port from which the last British troops departed the subcontinent (1948).

But for many Indians, perhaps the most significant event to have occurred in Mumbai was the screening at Watson’s Hotel in 1896 of the first films that India had witnessed (by the Lumière brothers). Over the next few decades, millions of people came to know of a life in an unusual place that was free of the caste prejudices that afflicted the rest of the subcontinent; of a place where men and women could hold hands on the street and even choose their own spouses instead of having their families arrange their marriages; of a place where anyone who was willing to work hard could get ahead in the world. From the images on-screen, Indians also came to recognise the beauty of the stunning sweep of the Marine Drive seaside promenade, of the verdant hillslopes of Aarey Milk Colony in Goregaon and the breathtaking views from the crest of Malabar Hill.

Bollywood still makes hundreds of movies each year, but the camera rarely ventures into the streets anymore. Mumbai’s crumbling infrastructure has lent the city an air of ugliness, so Hindi films are more likely to be shot in the plazas of Poland or along the Sydney waterfront. One indication that the City of Gold has lost its sheen is the fact that the flow of migrants from the hinterland, which accounted for almost 80 per cent of Mumbai’s growth in the 1940s, has fallen dramatically. Now, natural increase accounts for more than 60 per cent of the city’s population expansion.

In recent years, Mumbai’s administrators have said that they hope to turn the city into a global financial centre, but its inadequacies are too pronounced for anyone to take that ambition seriously. It’s clear that Mumbai could take some contemporary lessons from London. A congestion charge like the one implemented in the UK capital could help ease things on the street, as would a greater emphasis on improving public transport services. Replicating London’s public culture of performances in the parks could help break the class barriers that are still all too rigid in Mumbai. And the Indian commercial capital could also learn some lessons about how to recycle industrial land in a way that benefits all residents. That way, each time we visit London, we could feel a sense of déjà vu that’s much more genuine.

Naresh Fernandes will be speaking at ‘Age of Metropolis’ at the Royal Academy of Art on October 27. For more information on the Battle of Ideas visit www.battleofideas.org.uk

Time Out Mumbai is published fortnightly.

Naresh Fernandes. Image © Chirodeep Chaudhuri

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