Commentary/Dilip D'Souza

Unsung Death Of A Promise

Busybee is the whimsical author of that Bombay institution, the Round And About column that he has been writing almost daily for over thirty years. His breezy 500 words often pokes fun in different directions, but Busybee also often has some truly perceptive comments to make. So I was not surprised when I read what he had to say a few years ago, when the city's suburban train line was extended to serve Vashi, part of New Bombay.

While Central Railway and the state government patted themselves on the back, while residents of Vashi rejoiced at an end to long and arduous journeys into the old city, while everybody marvelled at New Bombay's gleaming suburban train stations -- "like Washington DC", somebody said proudly -- it was left to Busybee to point out the truth. The new train service was the blow that finally killed a promise, a vision, from 25 years ago. And Bombay is the poorer for that death.

Indeed, the new line was a great boon to people in the new city. Suburban trains could bring them right into the heart of Bombay in about an hour. Their commutes became far simpler. But it was those very commutes become easier that showed just how far from its original shape New Bombay had come.

In the early 1970s, New Bombay was planned as the entirely new city across the harbour, designed to relieve Bombay of the pressures of urban growth in a limited space. It was to have its own industry, government, shopping, schooling. In fact, its planners wanted no less for New Bombay than for it to be a model for a new kind of urban life in India.

Consider just some of the features of the 1973 "New Bombay Draft Development Plan." In the new city, there would be:

* exclusive bus lanes, meant to encourage high-speed bus services.

* exclusive cycle lanes.

* a schooling system available to all residents of the city, irrespective of income; twice as much would be spent on each pupil as in the old city.

* housing cross-subsidies, meaning that profits from the sale of land for higher-income housing would subsidise low-income housing.

* the idea of "sites-and-services": plots with municipal facilities but no construction, available to the poor at cross-subsidised rates, encouraging them to build and improve on their own houses.

That was the promise.

Today, not one of those features is a part of New Bombay. Sites-and-services never made it off the Plan. Reserved lanes for buses and cycles are so totally forgotten, they seem like improbable, even laughable, fantasies today. Housing for the poor is as low a priority as it is in Bombay itself.

New Bombay's planners also dearly wanted the state government to move across the harbour. That would put the city's largest employer in the new city. That alone would reduce, immediately and vastly, the numbers of people herding in and out of the southern tip of Bombay every day in brutal conditions. It would also represent a commitment by the government to the new city, a commitment that would draw other employers there too.

Instead, for whatever reason, the government stayed firmly in South Bombay. In these 25 years, it has got increasingly entrenched there. The heart of the administration, the huge new Mantralaya building, was built across the road from the old one. The stylish new Vidhan Sabha, the assembly building, was built only yards away, in the middle of Nariman Point. Ministers and MLAs and bureaucrats continue to live within shouting distance of these recent landmarks of South Bombay.

All this only encouraged other institutions to dig themselves even deeper into South Bombay's tiny confines over the same 25 years. India's biggest bank, the State Bank of India, is headquartered in an edifice just behind the new Mantralaya building. The Reserve Bank of India built itself a tall new office right behind its old one, in the heart of the Fort district, a few steps from where this column resides. Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited, by whose courtesy you are reading these words, lives just down the road. Just a hefty stone's throw away is another major commuter destination -- and, incidentally, one of the city's ugliest structures -- the building the Stock Exchange has been housed in.

Each of these, and lots of others, might have made life easier for its employees by moving to New Bombay. Since the government did not move, since much of their daily activity inevitably involves the government, they stayed put too.

That's why, a quarter century later, Bombay itself is no better -- in many ways far worse -- than it was in 1973; far worse, too, than it might have been had that promise been redeemed. Sadder still, New Bombay is not very different from Bombay. In fact, and perhaps saddest of all, it is no more than just one more suburb from where thousands of people herd into South Bombay every day in brutal conditions. The extension of the Central Railway's harbour line to Vashi in 1992, far from being cause for celebration, should have been a mournful event.

Because it stood starkly for governmental failure of the worst kind: the failure to better the lives of most of us.

Why did New Bombay, so promising in concept, turn in practice into this colossal failure? There are many reasons. None is particularly edifying; all have lessons for the rest of the country. Let me try to explain just a few of them.

First, the government did not move. One reason is that the decision-makers -- those ministers, MLAs and bureaucrats and their remote-controllers -- live, work and play right in South Bombay. Or close enough. They didn't see why they should move out to what they thought was the boondocks.

Second, related to the first, decision-makers don't travel to their jobs like most of the city does, crammed into trains and buses. They are driven in cars, their routes sometimes cleared by long convoys of police cars bristling with guns. They truly do not appreciate the conditions in which the rest of us commute. Reducing the number of people streaming in and out of South Bombay has never been a consideration. In fact, the government only wants to build expressways so more cars can travel faster into South Bombay. There's no talk of better buses, say; such things as bus and cycle lanes make no sense at all. Cities are for those cars, after all!

Third, New Bombay's planners were constantly running up against politicians whose attitude to citizens was condescending at best, blind or antagonistic at worst. They would not see citizens as having needs and aspirations which had to be considered, see their interests as paramount. As one of the original planners wrote in a recent article: "While [the] planners were drafting documents proposing reserved bicycle tracks, and exclusive lanes for buses, and cross-subsidies in housing, Dr Rafiq Zakaria, the then minister for urban development, was criticizing the location of sites-and-services development where it could be seen from the highway: he wanted them hidden, at the very least, behind a high wall. Or better still, located far away."

Fourth, and this really sums it all up, our decision-making bureaucrats and politicians are simply not interested in truly bettering the lives of the majority of the people. In Bombay, in New Bombay, across the country. Whether this is a middle-class affliction or a decision-makers' affliction, I'm not sure. I suspect both.

But certainly all that changed completely when Maharashtra got itself its current remote-controlled administration. Now it has taken two major steps to better lives in Bombay. You know what they are, of course.

Bombay is now Mumbai. New Bombay is now Navi Mumbai.

I'm sure they sing bhajans of gratitude for that on the harbour line to Vashi.

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