Welcome to one of the world’s most congested cities.
A simple commute here in Mumbai can mean spending hours stuck in traffic or overcrowded trains.
To tackle this, India is taking on one of its most ambitious infrastructure projects yet.
To build a new 8-lane highway along the coast, Mumbai is reclaiming land from the sea,
digging underwater tunnels and constructing a roadway on stilts.
These are intended to be spectacles, monumental achievements
that residents can take pride in and identify with.
But for all its ambition, the project has faced just as much criticism,
protest and legal challenges.
This is the USD $1.7BN highway that’s transforming Mumbai’s coastline.
From a population of just 3 million in 1950, Mumbai has exploded. It’s now home to more
than 20 million people and the city’s infrastructure is struggling to keep up.
Today, its suburban rail system is one of the busiest, yet deadliest in the world.
Roads can get so bogged down with cars, bikes and buses that it can take hours to commute
from South Mumbai to the Western suburbs.
In 2011, an Indian politician revived an idea that was originally explored by American consultants in the 1960s.
Build a road in the sea along the coast of Mumbai.
But plans for the cleverly named “Mumbai Coastal Road” have faced opposition from the start.
Environmental activists say the construction will cause ecological damage to marine life.
And local fisherfolk have raised concerns that the highway will impact fishing activity
and their livelihoods.
Still, the proposal was officially approved in 2015
and construction began three years later in 2018.
Despite legal battles and a temporary halting of work, construction has pushed on and
Phase One is now expected to complete in 2023.
In all, the road will stretch 29 kilometres from Marine Drive in the South
to Kandivali in the North.
The first phase of the project will span 10 kilometres beginning at the promenade of
Marine Drive to the Bandra-Worli Sea Link.
In this section, Mumbai is building 111 hectares of new land in the Arabian Sea,
a tactic that’s been used to build the city for centuries.
It first started with reclamation by the British when they were given Mumbai by the Portuguese
some many hundred years ago.
And so much of the city's central regions have been made dry through reclamation projects
conducted historically over time over the last two or three centuries.
In 1991, regulations were put in place that actually prohibited any new reclamation,
but the government amended the rules for this project.
Now, it’s Mumbai’s largest reclamation effort in the last 50 years.
Turning ocean into land is typically done by filling the water along the coastline with
heavy rocks or cement then filling the space between with clay and soil.
As of July 2021, about 90% of the land reclamation work for the coastal road was complete.
Now in any location, coastal construction is a risky business that disrupts natural habitats,
But in Mumbai, a city already plagued by heavy rainfall and floodwaters,
the risk may be even higher.
There is a concern that in the absence of studies to look at the interaction between
rain infrastructure and sea level rise that the city is setting up, setting up the conditions
for natural disaster in the present and in the near future.
As the project progressed, the municipality said it needed to reclaim more land than originally
proposed in order to build a 7.5 kilometre sea wall that will help protect
the new road from sea waves, floods and erosion.
The government says the sea wall is being built with eco-concrete technology from Israel,
which will preserve marine biodiversity and create protection from coastal erosion.
The city is also placing concrete tetrapods along the coastline to help protect it from waves.
Still, in 2019 a big portion of the newly reclaimed land was washed away during a cyclone
and on-site engineers are still working to rebuild it.
If the project weren’t complicated enough, a set of twin tunnels is also being dug
beneath some of Mumbai’s most expensive real estate.
That’s all made possible by Mavala - a 2,300 tonne, 12 metre wide tunnel boring machine
that was manufactured in China and is now the largest bit of kit of its kind in India.
When complete, the tunnel will run for just over two kilometres, with roughly a kilometre
running underwater before connecting to a road overland.
That road will then eventually link to a new interchange at Haji Ali,
one of 13 interchanges planned for the route.
There’s also a 2,100 metre long bridge that’s built on 176 single pillars using a mono-pile system.
Typically four pillars are built as a group, but officials say using single large columns
will save money and interfere with less of the seabed.
Phase one also includes underground car parking and 70 hectares of green area with pedestrian
walkways, parks and promenades – much of it on the newly reclaimed land.
Officials project the new highway will be used by 130,000 cars a day, and that it will
reduce travel time from more than 2 hours to just 40 minutes.
But Professor Anand says the project will serve just 3% of the population, as most people
tend to use public transit or walk.
Mumbai’s municipality has so far not responded to our request for comment
on criticisms of the project.
While the Mumbai Coastal Road is India’s most ambitious highway project to date
it’s far from the last, and the country actually has at least 23 new expressway and highway
projects set to complete by 2025.
But as India continues to develop, it’ll need to invest in more than
just roads and sea links.
There's a power of these symbols and dreams of modernity, of high speed, of flow, right?
Mumbai simply does not have the space for everyone to drive fast in a car,
no matter what the city does.
But to get the dream, powers develop real estate and infrastructure and construction
in such a way to make some semblance of the dream real for some,
at great cost for many others.
Mumbai’s Coastal Road project is a bold show of what India is capable of when it comes
to construction but also of the challenges and debate that surrounds complex projects
like this in congested cities around the world.
Building a road in the ocean was never going to be easy, but once again engineers in this
remarkable industry are making the seemingly impossible happen.
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