The fight for a dream of Mumbai that never quite was
Devendra Fadnavis is selling an age-old dream of transformation, as the chief minister locks horns with Uddhav Thackeray in Mumbai
Mumbai is the city of dreams. It’s a cliché perhaps, but like most, there’s a kernel of truth to it.
Historian Gyan Prakash dates the city’s dreamy aspirations back to an age when Mumbai was Bombay, the last tram had run less than a year earlier, the Shiv Sena had not yet been born and Sunil Gavaskar was six years away from making his Test cricket debut.
In Mumbai Fables, his biography of the city published in 2010, Prakash writes about a 1965 issue of MARG, a Bombay journal of art and architecture, which carried plans prepared by three “young professionals"—Charles Correa, Pravina Mehta and Shirish Patel—and proposed the development of a twin city for Bombay.
Navi Mumbai, the planned city to Mumbai’s east, is the product of this idea, executed by a team of eight members selected from different disciplines, including Patel.
The editorial by Mulk Raj Anand, an acclaimed writer and the editor of MARG, “implored the city to pick up the courage to dream up a worthy metropolis", recalls Prakash.
But rare is the Mumbai dream that comes to fruition. Most others just fizzle out, while a few doggedly hang on, never really completed, but repackaged time and again.
Indeed, the vision of a revitalized Mumbai has been around for over five decades now, ever since that proposal in 1965. In the intervening period, the city has witnessed visceral son-of-the-soil politics, the rise of the land mafia, the migration of the middle class to the suburbs in search of affordable homes, communal riots, a deluge that nearly submerged the city and a series of terror attacks.
Vasantrao Naik, then chief minister of Maharashtra, only managed to half-accomplish the lofty goal that was Navi Mumbai. Today, current chief minister Devendra Fadnavis is hard-selling the dream of a “seamless and smart Mumbai" in 2017.
The latter is fighting one of his greatest political battles—he is contesting the Shiv Sena’s claim over Mumbai in the elections to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, or BMC, the sprawling civic administration that runs the city and is the richest in India.
Mumbai votes on 21 February, with Fadnavis of the BJP and Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray as the protagonists of this electoral duel that has crowded out everyone else.
It may only be a civic election, but the results of the BMC polls on 23 February could be seminal for India’s financial capital, its most international of metros and the foremost crucible of urban planning or lack thereof.
The chief minister’s vision for the capital is at the core of his campaign, but what does history have to say about such efforts?
The tale of a second city
When Navi Mumbai was being planned, Jawaharlal Nehru had died just the year before and India was very much in the Nehru-Mahalanobis era of centralized planning. Bombay, which had become the capital of Maharashtra in 1960 after the fierce Samyukta Maharashtra Movement and the division of Bombay state, offered a clean slate to urban planners and government.
Veteran urban planner and civic activist Sulakshana Mahajan recalls those early years, when the possibilities seemed endless. “Correa, Mehta and Patel proposed building a new city and it was a good plan which the government should have accepted exactly the way they had proposed it. But they first created Navi Mumbai and provided connectivity much later. That was a mistake," she says.
Patel, now 85, worked with the Maharashtra government on the plan and does not think it was a total failure. “It certainly did not go the way we wanted it to but the government accepted the Navi Mumbai plan in 1970 and built the city. I would not call it as great a success as we wished it to be," Patel says 52 years later.
One of the major shortcomings was the lack of provision for dedicated corridors for high-speed buses in any of the Navi Mumbai "nodes", as they are called, Patel says. The other was that “the planners did not adopt the policy of housing across the spectrum and cross-subsidization that would have prevented slums in Navi Mumbai".
Mumbai 2017, a contested constituency
Coming back to the present day, the battle between the BJP and the Shiv Sena has reached levels never before seen in the civic polls. (Interestingly, this is the first time there has been direct contest between a chief minister and the Sena.)
Thackeray is a voter in Mumbai, Fadnavis is not. That he is not on the electoral rolls of the city he aspires to wrestle from the grip of the Shiv Sena is something Fadnavis is deeply conscious of.
“I know I am from Nagpur and will go back to Nagpur when I retire from politics. But I would like to be remembered as the chief minister who was from Nagpur but who changed Mumbai for the better," Fadnavis said in the legislative assembly’s budget session in 2016.
Uddhav, perhaps the most mild-mannered of the Thackerays, is campaigning with unusual ferocity. Addressing a rally earlier this month, he dared Prime Minister Narendra Modi to campaign in Mumbai so that “Shiv Sena could show that it won despite the prime minister campaigning against it". Fadnavis retorted that the Sena had to beat him first before it can get to Modi.
The fact that both Thackeray and Fadnavis are Marathi speakers denies the Sena an opportunity to drive this election on its usual Marathi versus non-Marathi narrative. The BJP—led by Modi and Amit Shah, both Gujaratis—is usually projected by the Sena as the party of outsiders, hinting at the Marathi-Gujarati divide in Mumbai.
The BJP, emboldened by back-to-back victories in the Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha elections in 2014, has set its sight on the city where the party was founded in 1980.
The main prongs of Fadnavis’s Mumbai makeover machine are transport projects. These include metro lines (worth Rs70,000 crore), the Nariman Point-Kandivli coastal road (Rs12,000 crore), the Mumbai Trans-Harbour Link (Rs17,500 crore), the Navi Mumbai International Airport (Rs16,500 crore) and the Dharavi Redevelopment Project (worth Rs30,000 crore).
It is not only infrastructural changes that Fadnavis is pushing, though.
There are projects that look like relics from the age of identity politics. One such is Shivsmarak, a Rs3,600 crore memorial to the Maratha king Chhatrapati Shivaji, in the Arabian Sea. In this, Fadnavis and the BJP are in a way playing catch-up in Maharashtra—the Shiv Sena, the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), have for many years exploited the Maratha king to their political advantage.
Fadnavis says the mass transport projects, all announced in the past 48 months, will ultimately add commuter-carrying capacity of 9 million per day to the suburban train network’s existing capacity of 7.5 million. The effect on Mumbai, a city plagued by transport bottlenecks, could be transformative.
But progress has been uneven. The trans-harbour link and Dharavi projects have both been non-starters while the coastal road awaits clearances.
Political consensus and the drowning of dissent
There were no real differences of opinion on the way ahead for Mumbai before the BJP and the Shiv Sena made this civic battle an all-or-nothing face-off. Their fight, therefore, is not so much over issues of infrastructure or development but rather over who gets to run the show in the city. There is, so to speak, only one dream.
The Mumbai makeover plan, ever since it was mooted in the early 2000s, enjoys near unanimous support among all political stakeholders; much of the fight is over semantics.
In fact, so complete is the capture of this civic exercise by the chief political actors that some minor instances of opposition to projects have actually stemmed from mere political expediency.
For example, the Shiv Sena has opposed the Metro III line because it “displaces" some people living in Girgaon. Fadnavis has promised new homes to those affected in the south Mumbai locality. But this being an old Marathi neighbourhood, the Shiv Sena’s opposition is directly related to the election.
Similarly, the party has opposed locating a proposed car shed for metro trains in Aarey Colony since it reduces Mumbai’s green cover, but at the same time, they are pushing through the coastal road project even though environmentalists have opposed it. The coastal road is a BMC project and the Sena does not want to let go of this rare chance to earn itself some brownie points for development.
This politics of convenient opposition has created a queer situation in Ward Number 219, Malabar Hills, where Shiv Sena contestant Durga Shinde has launched a signature campaign and online petition to “Save Priyadarshini Park". Shinde accuses the BMC, a body run by her party, of making plans to build a 60-storey hotel inside the park “under pressure from builders".
Shinde said awarding such contracts was not decided by the BMC or Shiv Sena. “But I am the only candidate opposing this and people are with me," she says.
Civic and social activists, environmentalists and representatives of local communities like the Koli fishermen have, however, applied relentless pressure against many of these makeover plans using democratic and legal means.
Vanashakti, an environmental non-profit organization, has filed a case at the National Green Tribunal against the Mumbai Metro’s plan to locate the car shed in Aarey Colony. “It is going to take up 35 hectares of green land, of which the carbon footprint would be nearly 60 hectares. Aarey is one of the last remaining green zones of Mumbai and we can’t let it go like this when there are alternative sites to build the car shed," says Stalin D., director of Vanashakti.
The organization has also opposed the coastal road and the reclamation of land from the sea necessary for that project. As for the trans-harbour link, Vanashakti has complained of its alignment along the Sewri creek, which is a habitat for migratory flamingos and other birds.
Suniti S.R. of Ghar Bachao, Ghar Banao Andolan, which is part of the National Alliance of People’s Movements, raises questions about the entire Mumbai makeover project.
“There are limits to how much a city can expand and take in pressures. Mumbai has long violated those limits. In this situation, no infrastructure project can fundamentally alter the situation. Projects like the coastal road or (the trans-harbour link) would only drive out the original people of Mumbai like the Kolis," she says.
The plans did not take into account the fact that any interference with the island city’s climate and habitat could cause long-term ecological damage, she adds.
In December, when the prime minister laid the foundation stone for the memorial to Shivaji, Damodar Tandel of the Mumbai Fishermen’s Association was among the few voices openly opposing the location of the statue.
The substance of Tandel’s argument was straightforward: the statue and the memorial would need to be based on 42-acres of reclaimed sea that would severely disrupt the habitats of several species of fish.
“There are around 15 pockets of 90,000 fishermen around this Marine Drive location and fishing is their only means of livelihood. We have pointed out that all those clearances that the government claims it has are conditional and not permanent," Tandel says. “Shivaji Maharaj was a great naval commander who built his force with help from fishermen only. Does the Maharashtra government want to take away the livelihood of the same community that Maharaj once protected?"
The dream reloaded
In 2004, then prime minister Manmohan Singh gave a new reference for the Mumbai dream: Shanghai. “I share this aspiration to transform Mumbai in the next five years in such a manner that people would forget about Shanghai," said Singh, addressing Congress party workers in the city ahead of the state assembly elections.
“I liked it especially because it sought to create a big vision, an image that Mumbai could look up to. It is good to dream big because that sets you on the path to achieve something beyond your realms of thinking," says Sanjay Ubale, an IAS official who was secretary, special projects, in the government of Maharashtra at the time, and now managing director and CEO of Tata Realty and Infrastructure Ltd.
The Congress-NCP alliance came back to power in 2004, and in 2005, chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh accepted the Mumbai Vision plan prepared by Mckinsey and Co. The consulting firm had been retained to draw up this plan during Deshmukh’s previous term in office.
The plan, which came to be known unofficially as the Mumbai Makeover, looked at an investment of around Rs2 trillion in the Mumbai metropolitan region. The idea was to elevate it to a “world-class" city within a decade. Ubale was a member of the task force created by the state government to execute the McKinsey plan.
“The best thing about the Shanghai dream is that nothing of it has been diluted. Almost all the projects that the task force worked on are still on and I am glad the current government’s commitment is still high," Ubale says.
The report recommended investment in mass transport systems, urban infrastructure, reforms in laws, government land use and housing and modern governance.
Not everyone agrees with Ubale’s sentiments though.
Shirish Patel, for one, feels the Mckinsey report was “quite superficial and did not have any substance. It made no in-depth study of Mumbai’s problems and just proposed to follow the Shanghai model. Now, Shanghai is a great example of the poor being lifted, moved away from the city and a new city made in the place where they once lived. Is this the model Mumbai wants to follow?" Patel asks.
Missteps and delays
Mahajan, the civic activist, points to two “epic blunders", both committed in the 1965-2000 phase, that she claims makes the Mumbai makeover a “nearly impossible task".
She goes back to the 1965 Navi Mumbai plan and recalls how even the private sector was ready to back it at a time when there was widespread scepticism over the term “private sector".
“For instance, the chemical industry was developing along Thane-Belapur belt and if Navi Mumbai was created, the planners and the government saw many economic opportunities for people who would live close to their workplaces," Mahajan recalls.
Unfortunately, the then chief minister Naik wholeheartedly accepted the Navi Mumbai plan but rejected the metro project proposed around the same time, Mahajan says.
“So the government started building Navi Mumbai without providing rail and road connectivity to the new city. The Vashi bridge connecting Mumbai to Navi Mumbai was built in 1973 and the suburban rail only came in 1995," she says. But by then it was too late for the new city’s economy.
The second blunder, which has set Mumbai back by years if not decades, according to Mahajan, was the government’s failure to provide East-West connectivity across the city itself.
In 1995, when the Shiv Sena-BJP alliance came to power, public works minister Nitin Gadkari (now transport minister in the central government) built 55 flyovers in just four years in Mumbai. But this was a relatively easy task—the Eastern and Western Express Highways were in place and most of the flyovers were oriented north-south over busy junctions leaping in and out of these highways.
The administration, however, did not show the same enterprise in improving east-west connectivity, something that continues to cripple a city that is longer than it is wide.
Other than that, three major projects—the metro, the trans-harbour link and the Navi Mumbai airport—stand out for the scale of their delays and the rapid escalations in costs over the years.
Manmohan Singh had laid the foundation stone in 2006 for the Versova-Andheri-Ghatkopar stretch of the Mumbai Metro (from west to east) that was originally estimated to cost Rs2,356 crore and was to be completed by 2011. It was eventually operational in 2014, at an actual investment of Rs4,321 crore.
The plan was to build a network of 146.5km in three phases estimated to cost Rs19,500 crore and it was to be completed by 2019. But the costs have only mounted.
“The three metro lines which are now at an advanced stage of implementation currently are estimated to cost Rs70,000 crore," says Kaustubh Dhavse, a management and public policy consultant and officer on special duty to the chief minister.
Dhavse also heads the chief minister’s war room on 30 “deep-impact, long-term and high-sustainability projects", of which nearly 40% are in Mumbai.
The second project, the trans-harbour link, was proposed in the early 1970s by then Mumbai mayor J.G. Bodhe, an engineer himself, at an estimated cost of Rs400 crore.
Mahajan says the government had given the same excuse to not implement this project as it had when the metro was first proposed in 1973—lack of finance. The cost of the project has now gone up to Rs17,500 crore. The Maharashtra government says the Japanese International Co-operation Agency is ready to lend, but has not yet been able to interest any private sector firms to take up the job in the past 10 years.
Ubale is not worried so much about the monetary cost as he is about the impact the delay has on the overall economy of the city. “For instance, since Navi Mumbai airport has been delayed, Mumbai lost so many service sector jobs that would have been created. An infrastructure project like airport has multiplier benefits which Mumbai seems to have lost out on. In the meantime, Delhi has benefited at the cost of Mumbai," Ubale says.
The airport, when first proposed in the early 2000s, was estimated to cost Rs4,500 crore. Last week, the GVK group won the bid to build it for Rs16,000 crore.
Fadnavis has promised completion by 2019 but officials at Cidco, the implementing authority for the project, are sceptical. “I do not see the airport completing before 2020," says a senior Cidco official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Dhavse, however, says the project would stick to the deadline of being “functional by 2019". “The chief minister has said that the first flight will take off by 2019 and it will take off by 2019. However, the other apparatus of the airport will take more time to complete," Dhavse says.
Shishir Joshi, CEO of the think tank Mumbai First—which was the first industry-friendly voice that encouraged the government to hire private consultants to find out what ails Mumbai—pins it down to governance problems, the multiplicity of agencies and political challenges.
Many of the recommendations that Mumbai First made in its concept plan in the early 2000s are still gathering dust, he says. “For instance, we suggested a separate chief commissioner’s office be created under a senior IAS officer to deal exclusively with Mumbai. There are about 18 government agencies that govern Mumbai in some way or the other. We did not want to create another one but suggested it as a sort of exclusive agency that would cut through red tape… and conflicts.
“But successive chief ministers ignored this because they feared it would lead to political problems. The war room that Fadnavis has created was Mumbai First’s suggestion only but it was ignored by three chief ministers before him and only Prithviraj Chavan (2010-14) accepted it towards the end of his tenure."
Mahajan, generally critical about the trajectory of Mumbai’s progress since the 1960s, concedes that some good things did happen towards the end of that first phase from 1965 to 1995, when Navi Mumbai was finally connected by suburban rail.
The year 1995 was also significant for Maharashtra and Mumbai as it saw the Shiv Sena-BJP alliance coming to power for the first time and initiating some big infrastructure projects. And of course, in 1991, then finance minister Manmohan Singh presented India’s most famous budget, which had quite the impact on Mumbai.
Liberalization opened up possibilities of private investment and funding for the city’s infrastructure projects. Mahajan singles out the Mumbai-Pune Expressway—built at nearly Rs1,600 crore in just four years during 1996-2000—as a case in point.
“It was probably the first instance of privatization of public infrastructure in India, and was built at great pace," Mahajan recalls.
The dream lives on
The images and metaphors have changed over the years but the dream remains. At the war room inside Mantralaya, the state’s seat of government, Fadnavis takes stock of Mumbai projects once every two months.
The chief minister has opened the doors of government to students as well, by starting a fellowship, which selects, through an entrance test, 12 who sit in on the war room meetings and provide their academic perspectives.
There are management students, lawyers, chartered accountants and architects in the current war room, and there is a greater convergence between academia, the bureaucracy and the private sector.
“There is a special war room application loaded on the CM’s phone where he can see the progress on each project 24x7. If there is any update on a project, he gets an alert on his phone. A typical war room meeting is at the most a two-hour affair," Dhavse says.
Unlike most of his predecessors, Fadnavis is an urban politician—and was one of the youngest mayors in India in the 1990s when he was Nagpur’s first citizen. Ubale and Joshi both agree that it helps to have a chief minister with urban sensibilities and experience.
“There is a greater degree of engagement, openness to working with non-government actors, and better understanding of urban issues," Joshi says.
According to Ubale, Fadnavis has brought about many positive changes—reducing the number of permissions required, decentralization, delegation of powers to officials lower down the administrative hierarchy. He also recommends greater engagement with people, especially those who are opposing projects for a variety of reasons.
“It is fine if people oppose the projects. That means there is some engagement. I would rather have people opposing projects but engaged than have them not engaged," Ubale says.
He also points out a critical weakness in the Fadnavis administration. “Apart from the chief minister, who is of course a great spokesperson for the infrastructure projects, I do not see a senior official in the administration who is kind of championing Mumbai makeover. The chief minister represents the entire state and has other responsibilities also," Ubale says.
Since Ubale left the government, no bureaucrat has held the position of secretary, special projects. Joshi too sees this as a handicap.
“You need an IAS officer at the helm of affairs to run this orchestra," he says adding that it has been one of Mumbai First’s recommendations to the government.
Shirish Patel finds this government and its approach to Mumbai’s problems a “retreat of democracy". “There is no engagement with the civil society whatsoever. Because democracy is not limited to voting only and it involves building of independent institutions and voices that could offer critical insights," Patel says.
He recalls when he was working on the Navi Mumbai plan, the politicians and bureaucrats of the time regularly engaged with the civil society. “The eight-member team had people from multiple disciplines, including playwright and writer Vijay Tendulkar. I do not see that kind and level of engagement today," Patel says.
Fadnavis is the face of the BJP’s 2017 civic election campaign across Maharashtra, which also includes nine cities apart from Mumbai. Yet, it is Mumbai which matters most to the chief minister and his arch-rival, Thackeray.
For the outcome of the Mumbai polls on 23 February would determine the stability of Fadnavis’ state government—the Shiv Sena has said it may pull out of the BJP-led alliance—and the leeway the chief minister has to introduce more substantial infrastructural measures in the city.
Whatever the outcome, the people of Mumbai will continue to dream of fast cars, big flats and cushy jobs, of consistent water and electricity supply. Others will hope for traffic-less and smooth roads, connectivity and trans-harbour links. Politicians come and go, and sometimes these dreams grow old and tired. But Mumbai has no option but to persist.
“You must have a dream and a big one at that," says Ubale. Good advice, for both cities and the people who live in them.
Comments are welcome at feedback@livemint.com
Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed – it's all here, just a click away! Login Now!