A brief four-day sojourn in Mumbai, the Maximum City, which was your correspondent’s first port of call when I migrated to India over half a century ago, revealed a shiny new metropolis of near-global standards. Especially for the well-heeled.
A new 10.5 km coastal road-cum-tunnel linking Worli to Nariman Point in South Bombay has transformed the superbly designed and furbished high-rises of Worli into the most expensive real estate in India with per square foot property prices rivaling Dubai and London. According to Urs Schoettli, a Swiss journalist who has experienced prolonged postings in London, Tokyo, Berlin and Beijing, SoBo (South Bombay) — not Mumbai — with its numerous clubs, excellent restaurants, theatre and parks and sophisticated bourgeoisie, is the most livable ‘city’ worldwide.
However beneath the glittering top-soil, all is not well. Mumbai’s poor majority and even the petit bourgeois have been shunted into barely affordable housing in distant suburbs, connected to business districts by a dangerously rickety and over-crowded suburban rail service with a death toll of eight-ten commuters per day. According to a recent study of the National Housing Board, barring the top 1 percent, the next 5 percent of Maximum City’s wealthiest households will need to save 30 percent of their annual household income for 105 years to purchase a two-bedroom flat in modestly tidy city wards. This is the outcome of over 60 years of socialist five-year plans of the Central and state governments. Yet lefties and woke liberals are up in arms over a joint venture between can-do business tycoon Gautam Adani and the Maharashtra government to clean-up and develop Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum sprawl in the heart of Mumbai. Any parallel with St. Petersburg in Tsarist pre-1917 Russia is purely coincidental.