Anil Singh
Mumbai grew from seven islands to a megalopolis, but even today, its heart lies within the seven isles; everything that makes it India’s financial capital is located in the Island City. The rest of the urban sprawl, north of Mahim and east of Sion, is essentially a dormitory. Hence, nothing defines life in Mumbai as much as commuting time.
On average, Mumbaikars take an hour and a half commuting to their offices. And that’s a feat of unacknowledged endurance. This will take some explaining for the uninitiated who haven’t seen a Mumbai railway platform during rush hour.
Commuters lunge at approaching local trains even before they have come to a halt, elbowing out others and timing their leap to perfection. This requires the guts of a gladiator and the nimbleness of a gymnast. Millions of office-goers compete in this extreme sport twice a day, merely for a window seat.
If the rest of India is unaware of this sport, that’s because commuting doesn’t make news in Mumbai, except at the end of the year when the Government Railway Police adds up the deaths on the tracks. Last year, the figure was 2,287; six per day.
The four metro lines that are operational and the first phase of the coastal road have made little difference for Mumbaikars whose lot will improve only if there are more trains or more jobs in the distant suburbs, including Navi Mumbai.
Mumbai’s roads are notoriously narrow, besides being cordoned off for years by the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) for metro lines or dug up most of the year for utilities by a municipal corporation so inept that it could not get the two ends of the Andheri bridge to meet. It takes three hours to cover 20km from Bandra to Borivali by the Western Express Highway in the morning and the evening. In that time, one can reach Pune from Navi Mumbai.
But if you survive all this, Mumbai reveals its treasure: a cosmopolitan city, one that recognises merit and rewards your talent, stimulates your mind and surprises you with its limitless possibilities. Rags-to-riches stories abound. Mumbai is still the City of Gold for those who can spot an opportunity, be it selling bhel puri on the beach or collecting scrap.
Politicians and planners of the 1960s realised that in time, overcrowding would drag Mumbai down. That’s how Navi Mumbai, a planned city across the Thane creek, was conceived. The aim was to create a counter-magnet to Mumbai. In this brave new city, residents would walk or cycle to work or shop in seven spacious self-contained nodes separated from each other by forested patches.
In 1970, the City and Industrial Development Corporation (CIDCO) was set up and tasked with creating Navi Mumbai. Half a century later, the largest planned city in the world has a mixed report card. The quality of life here is appreciably better than that in Mumbai, but half the working population of the city still commutes 30km to Mumbai. The late J.B. D’Souza, a prime mover of the idea of Navi Mumbai as the state’s chief secretary, was to later famously dismiss it as the “bedroom suburb” of Mumbai.
Navi Mumbai, though, is a pensioner’s paradise with senior citizens’ recreation centres in most of its 175 civic gardens, notably Kharghar’s 290-acre Central Park, Nerul’s Wonders Park and Vashi’s Mini Seashore. The Parsik Hills and the Kharghar Plateau are reminiscent of Mumbai’s Sanjay Gandhi National Park. Bird-watchers have renamed Navi Mumbai as “Flamingo City” because of the several roosting sites of this migratory bird in the city’s unbroken belt of mangroves.
Things could have been even better if Kharghar’s Pandavkada waterfall had been developed as a tourist spot. But, Maharashtra’s second-highest free-falling cataract at 107m is out of bounds for the public.
Commuting in and out of Navi Mumbai is easy as it is connected by rail to Thane on one end and to Uran on the other, and soon will be to Karjat. The one thing that rankles is the lack of a metro link to Mumbai, which the other distant suburbs have. Unlike in other townships, water is plentiful here, thanks to the Morbe dam owned by the Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation.
Other factors that make it a liveable city are uninterrupted power, piped gas, footpaths and covered drains, reasonably good schools and colleges, neighbourhood shopping centres, malls and multiplexes. The garbage heaps that mar other cities of Maharashtra are absent in Navi Mumbai, consistently ranked as India’s third-cleanest city in the Swachh Survekshan.
However, Navi Mumbai needs to improve its affordable housing stock, bus transport, public hospitals and sports facilities; it has just one public swimming pool. Despite the greenery, the AQI is as bad as that in Mumbai owing to unchecked pollution from the huge MIDC industrial belt, dust from illegal quarries and construction sites.
Of late, Navi Mumbai is stealing some of the spotlight from its glamorous twin with the Navi Mumbai International Airport (NMIA) finally taking off and the 22km Atal Setu bringing it within an hour’s drive from South Mumbai.
Navi Mumbai is half the size of Mumbai, with just 7 per cent of Mumbai’s population. It occupies 344sqkm and has an estimated 1.64 million residents to Mumbai’s 603sqkm and an estimated 22 million. The figures speak of its untapped potential.
It is perplexing, then, as to why the government is talking of a Third Mumbai. It will be thrice the size of Mumbai, some 20km southeast of Navi Mumbai, including Panvel, Ulwe, Taloja and Uran. As it is, CIDCO has been struggling for the last 12 years with the Navi Mumbai Airport Influence Notified Area (NAINA), the aerotropolis planned over 300sqkm. Despite the hype, townships in Panvel by Hiranandani, Godrej and Wadhwa on the old Mumbai-Pune highway remain sparsely occupied.
When the Island City still rules, and when Navi Mumbai remains a bedroom suburb, Third Mumbai is a faraway dream. At best, it will remain a destination for real estate speculators.
Anil Singh is a journalist who grew up in Mumbai and relocated to Navi Mumbai 20 years ago.