CM’s right on 50-year vision

CM’s right on 50-year vision

Siva Sankar

It’s time we start working on long-term projects. Instead of thinking only five years ahead, we have to think 50 years ahead.” That’s CM Prithviraj Chauhan holding forth on the need for Mumbai-Nagpur bullet trains. You may think the CM is forward-looking, a visionary. Well, he may have been merely realistic. Elsewhere, two generations would come of age in 50 years. In Mumbai, however, 50 years is just the local rate of progress. Proof? In 1970, the MMRDA decided to widen the Lal Bahadur Shastri (LBS) Marg but even after 42 years, its successor BMC is yet to get started on this project! This is just one glaring instance. Projects plagued by time (and cost) overruns are everywhere. But it would be erroneous to blame them alone for the metro’s rot though. Two key aspects help explain the tragedy: absence of a vision among administrators to develop the metro in an integrated way; and total indifference to ‘inclusive growth’ that UPA-II keeps talking about. An example will help. The DNA now operates from the world-class India Bulls Financial Centre (IBFC) beside the Elphinstone Road station in central Mumbai. The 32-storey, multiple-tower wonder is complete with lobbies full of polished marble, gleaming metal, sparkling glass and painted concrete; hi-tech turnstiles and X-ray scanners that guard access to hi-speed elevators; and air-conditioned offices with stunning views of Mumbai’s skyline. The IBFC is so awe-inspiring it could make you believe Mumbai has truly arrived. Quite a few MNCs operate from the IBFC; so the sight of suited-booted foreigners is not uncommon here. This could be Singapore’s Raffles Place or London’s Canary Wharf. But step out of the fantasy, and a blast of reality hits you: dusty air, noisy vehicles, dangerously chaotic traffic, the homeless living under a flyover in squalid conditions, poor women with plastic pots bending over pits to collect drinking water from leaking and exposed underground municipal pipes. And you begin to wonder how long – 50 years? – before inclusive growth becomes a reality. But there is hope. The rise of ultra-modern facilities like the IBFC suggests that the underprivileged and the unskilled who would otherwise suffer, benefit too by way of employment for numerous maintenance and upkeep-related works. Just a beginning.... At full capacity, multiple towers of the IBFC may house upwards of 15,000 employees (most of whom are also suburban railway commuters). There are many such towers coming up in and around central Mumbai, extending all the way to BKC. Each such facility will bring in its wake new urban needs specific to its locality. For instance, the IBFC was in the making long enough for planners and administrators to foresee that the facility needs new links – say, a sky walk or a subway – to the nearest railway station (Elphinstone/Parel). But all you have today is a dusty kachcha lane that snakes through shanties. It is as though the stakeholders of Mumbai – the railways, the state government, the BMC, research houses and the private sector – have never heard of private-public partnerships for integrated development. Unless they acknowledge the transition that Mumbai is going through and develop 50-year visions, the metro will continue to straddle two disparate worlds at the same time.