Big things are happening in India’s financial and entertainment capital.
Its contiguous urban population is nearing 25 million and its land is surrounded by water,
making it the world’s second-most densely populated major city. But there’s hope that
a set of five transportation megaprojects - that are under construction simultaneously
throughout the city - will ease the movement of people and goods,
and help position it to become a global power center by the middle of the century.
This is Mumbai, the transforming megacity.
Surrounded by the Arabian sea, Mumbai - which means “mother” in Marathi, the local language - is
the heart of the state of Maharashtra, the second-most populous country subdivision on Earth
and the single largest contributor to India’s Economy. What was a group of islands were - by
1845 - merged into one landmass through multiple land reclamation projects. But it was a turning
point in American history that did arguably the most to place Mumbai on its modern path.
Had it not been for the Civil War in the United States, Mumbai probably wouldn’t have been as important
a city as it is today. That source of raw cotton for the newly industrialized England
suddenly dried up due to the Civil War. Simultaneously they managed to open the Suez canal
which cut the journey to London into one-third. So what was a 90-day journey became a 30-day journey.
When you come out of the Suez and you come out of the Red Sea, the port dead ahead was Mumbai.
So Mumbai just happened to be at the right place at the right time with the whole of Maharashtra’s
rich cotton growing culture. One of the things the British brought to us were the railways,
mainly to move goods from the hinterland directly to the port. And the port really grew like mad.
Today, Mumbai’s seaport handles most of the container traffic entering and exiting India,
creating many jobs for its residents. Ramesh Shinde commutes by train to work at the port.
Ramesh Shinde: “I work at a shipbuilding company, Mazagon Dock, building submarines.
We have already built 5 submarines and we’re currently building the sixth.”
The prospect of good, stable employment has been attracting people from across India for decades.
In India we have a huge problem with people migrating to the metros.
You can’t prevent people from coming to the city of Mumbai,
they have as right to come here as any other Indian. You either figure out how
to make things better, or you vote in people who figure out how to make things better.
The challenge is that the city’s population has grown far faster
than their government's ability to build infrastructure and it’s been happening
for so long now that no matter who they elect, there is a lot of catching up to do.
Infrastructure was being built to try and keep up with the needs of the city. But from the 1970s onwards we
had a lot of setbacks in spending money. We had a complete lack of foresight. You know, when you
reach 10 million people and your infrastructure is good for two, and you bring up your infrastructure
to 10 million people, by the time you do that it's already surpassed 15 million and it’s inadequate.
To close the gap, five massive transportation builds are happening at the same time.
The first is the Mumbai metro, one of the most ambitious and
important transit initiatives in history.
“Right now our suburban railway is lifeline of Mumbai.
This suburban railway carries around nine million passengers. The new metro network which we are
creating will be carrying around 7 million or 8 million passengers. We are almost doubling it.”
Gigantic tunnel boring machines are being used to construct eight lines at the same
time through the living city. They can’t come soon enough. The existing suburban railway is
completely maxed out, carrying three times more passengers than originally intended.
Not only is this extremely stressful, it’s dangerous.
Around 2,000 people die every year on these tracks, conditions that cause constant delays.
“There is no fast train and it doesn't come on time. If the train on the central line doesn't
come on time, then we miss the connecting western line train.”
“It is difficult to get on the train for a non-Mumbaikar.
It can get very crowded. I’m a local and I can’t even get on the Virar train.”
The first two above-ground metro lines opened earlier this year to positive reviews.
“With the metro, we sit in Air Conditioning and travel for 30 rupees. So it is
very convenient. Otherwise, imagine how much money one would spend on a taxi or a rickshaw.”
The most important, arterial line will run 33 km under many of Mumbai’s most historic buildings.
“This is going to be the first underground metro that the city is going to witness.
I live right outside what is going to be an underground metro station soon. I think it’s
going to make travelling very convenient. And it’s underground so there is very little damage to the
built heritage or built parts of the city. The way the networks are being built right
now it’s made connectivity so much easier and convenient. You get out of your railway station,
you have a skywalk that’s connecting you to a metro line, and from there directly home.
I remember speaking to RA Rajeev. He said that while the first metro project took
about 10 years they were really hoping to make the rest of the lines quicker,
and we’re seeing that, we’re seeing that happen in the rest of the city, the suburbs.
The current plan is for 14 lines to make up a 360-kilometer network.
It will also help ease traffic congestion.
The road is very, very stressful. Clutch, brake, clutch, brake. There is a lot of traffic.
Driving a car is very difficult. And what’s more difficult than driving is parking.
That’s also a problem, no parking spaces.
Mumbai’s layout means its most popular areas are in its southern end, like Bollywood, India’s
booming film and media industry. Many of its stars live in Bandra, a lush, upscale neighborhood.
A little further south is the city’s historic heart, home to government agencies,
the main business district and university, luxury hotels, and famous landmarks–including
the Gateway of India, the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus railway station, and the ensemble
of Victorian and Art Deco buildings that face each other across Oval Maidan Park.
However, this area is so congested that it can
take well over an hour to get to the airport by car.
That’s where project number two comes in. The Coastal Road will be a 29.2-km
expressway that will cut this travel time to just 20-25 minutes when it opens next year.
As a civil engineer it is a dream project. It has everything a civil engineer can dream
of including reclamation, sea wall, bridges, tunnel. We’ve had some world records on this
also. We’ve had 456 meters of mining in a month, which has never happened.
The coastal road project was a dream in India
and now it is being built so there is a lot of progress in India.
The project also creates 10.5km of non-stop waterfront promenade
with various greenspaces and will improve the ease of travel to Sanjay Gandhi National Park,
the world’s largest tropical urban forest.
However, the highway will also be a massive concrete barrier that cuts
off much of the seafront, replacing that view with loud vehicle traffic.
Cautionary tales of such an approach can be found in the US cities of Seattle and Boston,
which recently spent billions to open up access to their precious waterfronts by
tearing down viaduct highways to reroute traffic through newly dug tunnels instead.
Other concerns include encouraging more car ownership which could make air pollution and
traffic worse; that it neglects the needs of carless residents who make up a majority
of the city’s population; and it seems to ignore perhaps the city’s biggest threat.
When you build roads that are 1 km into the sea, you need more roads
to connect that. You’re increasing your built infrastructure. That increases cost,
that increases the damage that you are doing to the environment. You’re reclaiming your seas for
this, at a time when there is a threat of the city submerging. We need to seriously think
about whether a coastal road is really going to benefit the city 50 years down the line. Are we
going to see more water logging incidents during the rain? None of that has really been thought of.
Mumbaikars call elevated highways, like the coastal road, flyovers.
Another is the Sewri-Worli Connector–the third major project. It will cut through
the island so vehicles can cross the city uninterrupted from coast to coast.
This taxi driver is constantly navigating its construction. Based on conversations with his
customers, he has a good idea of how this new piece of infrastructure will be used.
“When the bridge is built, the locals who have to go into the suburbs, will go from below.
The rest of the people will go up over the flyover.”
So we first had a whole series of flyovers in Mumbai,
but they were all North-South. So East-West connectivity was terrible.
Kurush lives in the satellite city of Navi Mumbai, which will benefit from the fourth
project. The Trans Harbour Link is a 21.8 km bridge for vehicles to quickly cross
the bay-like inlet of the Arabian Sea that separates the island city from the Indian
mainland. When it opens this year, it will be the longest sea bridge in the country.
It’s not just a transportation corridor,
it is - and will be - and engine of economic growth. So what this bridge does is, actually,
it brings the mainland within a distance of 12-15 minutes, adding a huge land parcel to Mumbai.
With the bridge in place, the fifth project makes a lot of sense.
The Navi Mumbai International Airport will provide what many other major global cities already have:
one airport dedicated to international flights and a second for domestic travelers.
With an urban area nearly twice as dense as the national capital, it is vital that Mumbai’s
transportation system works. So even though these five big projects have taken decades,
now that the steel has been laid and the concrete poured, an even more ambitious vision is emerging.
The city has transformed it’s been moving toward becoming megapolis.
We’re looking at something all the way to the Gujarat border in the north, to Mubar in the east,
and to Mangaon on the Bombay-Goa highway in the south. That is what we realized the
city of Mumbai is going to be, and that’s the Mumbai Metropolitan Region ultimately.
But an example of the constantly evolving tradeoffs to continual development is Gorai,
a part of the city that has remained fairly immune to its sprawl. Lying
just across Manori creek, it is only accessible from the south by ferry.
In the evening the place is totally deserted.
You don’t feel like you’re in Mumbai. This is a beautiful place.
Hillary has seen firsthand how fast things are changing.
People are crazy for money, everybody wants a fast life. Everybody sold their property. Before there
was not a single wall over here. Now since you buy the property you construct your own wall.
Hillary says he’s content making about $8 USD a day, even though he has to spend hours driving
15 km to the closest compressed natural gas pump and wait in line each time he needs to fill up.
Authorities want to build a bridge to connect Gorai - and its beaches - to the rest of the city.
They say this will give residents like him more services, like gas pumps.
They’ll give you options. If you need a gas pump over here,
we have to construct the bridge. To win something we are losing something.
But if they construct the bridge and all the beauty of this place is going to vanish. Oh
mangroves and everything–everything will be disappeared over here. No land will be saved.
So even though his income could improve, he doesn’t want the bridge. He thinks it
will ruin the relatively quiet life he and his wife enjoy among the water-absorbing
mangrove ecosystem that helps protect them from rising seas and storm flooding. Most
of the rest of Mumbai’s mangroves have been completely destroyed.
Nobody else is destroying the nature, we ourselves are destroying the nature. And we are blaming the
nature. What nature can do? Nature stands still.
Take care of the nature, everything will be fine. If you play with the nature you have
to pay the fine. If you cooperate with nature, nature will cooperate with you.