Now Playing: Shanghai dream turning sour
Topic: Incorrigible India
Last month Forbes magazine came out with a survey which listed Mumbai as the 7th dirtiest city in the world, while Delhi appeared not any better at 24th position in the filth list. Two years ago, the Readers’ Digest placed Mumbai at the top of the most rude cities in the world. There are even more statistics to compare Indian cities with global standards, which we will tell you in course of this series of articles on urbanisation in India, but the moot point is that infrastructure provided to citizens has a bearing on their life in a mega-city like Mumbai.
Recently, a website had collated the opinion of the Indian software community the world over, which gave an insight into the mind of the Indian youth. The large number of middle-class Indians who travel abroad for work, and even more these days on vacation, list out infrastructure as the root cause of all ills that plague our cities. The new cities that are coming up in tier II and tier III category because of the rapid growth in industry and subsequent urbanisation are no better than older cities in terms of utility services and planning.
A European CEO of a mall in suburban Mumbai was recently quoted in the press as saying that, in India the economic growth has skewed the development process. “We see all around us beautiful, swanky malls, multiplexes, restaurants and private residential complexes. They are better than the ones found in Europe or South East Asia. But once you step out of their precincts you witness the kind of infrastructure not seen even in the bottom pit of third world countries”.
The Forbes article on dirtiest cities in the world also allude to this fact. In the pre-1980s, there was abysmal economic growth in India. “During those decades the developed world was ignorant and indifferent to conditions prevailing in India. But today with record-high foreign direct and capital market investments the world has started to notice the prevailing irony of India’s growth story”, enunciated Manish Parekh, a real estate developer based in Mumbai.
After the private airline fares slumped to compare with train fares, passengers travelling by air and by air-conditioned trains have become common. The comparison today is between the well-oiled and near-perfect domestic airways system in comparison to the moribund railways.
The private airlines are employing the latest aircraft and technology but the railways are still riding on 19th century engines and coaches. The airports, despite the occasional jackal on the runway, are comparable to the best in the world. Most of the 3,000-odd railway stations in India look and work on a hundred-year-old technology which has been decommissioned all over the world. If you ask a train engine driver of the Indian raIlways, he would tell you that most railway engines do not have a functional speedo-metre, and the speed limits are followed more as a matter of guess.
The latest local train coaches introduced in Mumbai also have the same pathetic design which it had since Independence. Westerners, like the Mayor of London, find it astounding that local trains in Mumbai run at 120-kmph with doors open and hundreds of passengers clinging on to their dear life. In Mumbai, crowding in trains has reached epic proportions that many get killed during peak hours while holding on to the door panel when the train can reach up to 100-kmph speed. They are either ejected out of the coach by the surging crowd or hit by a passing electric pole. There are many who are run over while crossing tracks. The ways to reduce crowding in local trains are simple. There is solution to all these problems, but no one seems to be in a tearing hurry to solve them.
The new local train coaches in Mumbai designed in collaboration with an Australian firm and IIT have the same outrageous feature.
On the other hand, the newly-designed railway stations on the harbour-line corridor in Mumbai which connects to the satellite town of Navi Mumbai do not have any provision for escalators to help passengers cross over from one platform to the other. It is common sight in Mumbai to see old and physically challenged people struggling to climb steep flights of stairs.
“Infrastructure is creaky, but there seems to be a dearth of innovative thinking and compliance with international standards”, points out Sushant Pai of Suburban Railway Users’ Club in Mumbai.
According to him, even today there is no measure taken to prevent the average daily death toll of 147 people in city suburban railway accidents. Railway accidents are the biggest cause of death in Mumbai, more than disease and road and industrial accidents, especially in the young, most productive age group. The high death toll on the Mumbai railway tracks has been historically recorded since 1970s. What is alarming is the indifference of subsequent governments, both at the Center as well as the state, to the need for quick and life-saving emergency para-medical teams to reduce the death toll. Anywhere in the developed world these statistics would have brought the government down, but not in Mumbai.
Balasaheb Thackeray, since he started his Shiv Sena movement in the 60s, has been talking about an average 300 migrant families settling down in Mumbai everyday. But what has the state done to improve the infrastructure in the last 50 years to accommodate this growing population? According to Mr Pai, the demand for transport in the city has surpassed all the estimates of the railways. “The two rail corridors, viz: central and western railways, should have doubled capacity by having a two-tier railway system. This would have meant additional four railway lines to the existing four lanes. Every suburban railway station should have been redesigned on lines of Vashi railway station wherein there could parking lots and office space which could earn revenue for railways for expansion plans”, elaborates Mr Pai.
Migration of Biharis or south Indians into Mumbai would never have been a problem if subsequent governments had planned to improve infrastructure post-1960s. The railways do not even have enough rakes or coaches to meet the demand in city suburban railway, though the system is far from reaching its full capacity. If there had been one local train leaving CST and Churchgate every minute round-the-clock the living standard of the city would have improved remarkably. “Every minute a flight takes off from Heathrow Airport, which is the busiest airport in the world. So why can’t CST and Churchgate stations be able to expand and handle that kind of traffic?” asks Mr Pai.
Instead of taking to violence to drive out outsiders from Mumbai there should have been a concerted effort to improve living standards by investing hugely in infrastructure. Not surpringly, the most pertinent question posed at railway users’ meet is: what stopped governments from building infrastructure all these years. The drainage system in Mumbai is over hundred years old, and the municipality is still worked up over building a new storm drain system. Former Mumbai Municipal Commissioner Johnny Joseph has questioned the need for a new storm drain system. According to him, a July 26 kind of torrential rains occur only for a day in the year and the municipality need not spend a ‘bomb on such a project’!
Recently, an intrepid photographer of a city newspaper took pictures of over 370 BEST buses idling in depots. These buses have not been put into service for months now. BEST buses are idling in depots ostensibly because the cost of operations has shot up though the number of passengers using BEST buses have actually gone down in the last few years. People prefer to avoid using buses even on feeder routes because of the slow speed (average 15-kmph) of the buses, just as facilities, comforts and convenience of travelling by buses have come drastically down. Mumbai has lesser and lesser air-conditioned buses and there is no incentive or even an alternative for car owners to give up their personal mode of transport in Mumbai. The car pooling system has proved to be inadequate to ease the traffic congestion at many places in Mumbai.
Over-crowding in buses during peak hours often lead to verbal exchanges and fisticuffs among passengers which at times even involve bus service staff. There is no reason why the municipality or the government can’t intervene and put idling buses back to service. BEST has gone in for intensive anti-stress programmes for its staff with bus drivers and conductors joining the laughter club. But the solution to relieve stress lies somewhere else, which the BEST management and the municipality choose to ignore.
A few months ago there were riots in Kalva, near Thane, on the Central Railway line and a boycott of suburban train services for a day at Vasai on the Western Railway corridor because passengers find lack of rakes and coaches leading to infrequent services. Even during rush hours frequency often drops to less than one train leaving CST in ten minutes.
In the midst of all this last month Paris tourism department made a presentation to the media on how they are seeking more and more tourist population in Paris. When asked about how their city takes in huge migrant population without all the attendant infrastructural issues, the French representatives told the Mumbai media that Paris city managers constantly improve infrastructural facilities and keep increasing the target number of tourists which are expected to flow in. Paris today has only 34 per cent local citizens, the rest are floating tourist population. London is no different. Any Indian tourist will be shocked to find that there are more number of browns and blacks than whites on the streets of London.
Another instance of how world-class cities manage to increase efficiency and bring down wasteful expenditure is New York city. New York produces seven times more garbage than Mumbai does everyday though Mumbai municipality employs three times more personnel than New York state government does to clear garbage and keep New York squeaky clean. One wonders, why world-class cities are desperately trying to attract more and more people to their cities to improve their economy and tourism, while in India we are trying to single out ‘outsiders’, even as services and facilities are failing all around us. The fact is that no political party wants to do the hard work of improving infrastructure in Mumbai (or in any other city, for that matter) when they come to power, but would take the easy way shown by the Thackerays: intimidate people from other states and force them to leave.
Last time when Raj Thackeray and his goons beat up young boys from Bihar who had come to take railway exams at Kalyan station then Congress chief minister Sushil Kumar Shinde, who is a dalit, had unequivocally said that he was not against Raj Thackeray’s philosophy of son of the soil; he was only against the violence used!
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