City Limits, from Silly Point

Agony of Mumbai lover is captured well in this article. Every year(at least for the last 5 years) the city roads are dug up every year after the rains as a ritual and Mumbai progresses through the traffic snarls to the next monsoon. One year they were laying the Gas Pipeline. The next they were laying fibre optic cable. Then they decided to Concrete the road and out came all the utilities buried under the tar road. I could see kilometers of orange fibre optic cable bouncing off trees and street poles. Some time back some hardworking labourer plunged his shovel in Mahanagar Gas pipe under the pretext of broadening the road. The damn thing caught fire and there was a huge traffic blockade on Andheri Kurla while the firemen fought the flames.

I understand that all this digging of roads is to create an "illusion of progress". The only prompt activity in the entire project is the digging. Activities such as clearing the debris after digging or consolidating the utilities after digging or laying or road or cleaning of road after it are after thoughts.

Why do we pay a contractor to dig the roads? I have a better idea. We can lease roads to farmers for at least one season. They would pay BMC oddles of money. Dig the road for free, to plant the crop. Irrigation will be provided by the broken sewer. By the time the utilities guys come in to consolidate the farmers would have harvested the crop.

Once I saw a PCO standing proudly as a lighthouse of hope to encroachers in midst of all the digging. On all sides the land was dug up about 2 feet but the PCO was left untouched. To make a call you had to stand 2 ft below the PCO. If you were just 5'2", too bad. Standing in the pit you could not see the dial and so you'd request the PCO owner to dial the number for you while you stood in the pits. Reminds me of First World war clippings where the soldiers lay in the trenches ready to pounce on unsuspecting enemy. Maybe we can suggest Mumbai as a location for any war movies being planned in Hollywood.

What irks me most is the manner in which the work is completed. There is not even a pretense of planning. Along the road where ever ther are no encroachments the digging begins promptly. On a 2 km stretch of road I saw a dozen 25 meter stretches of disconnected 3rd lane. Maybe the contractor forgot to join the dots. So now we had the project status 95% complete and yet the road is absolutely unsuable. In any case I do not think the additional lane would have helped the traffic flow as where ever a new lane was added or concretized, it was promptly taken up by trucks, tempos and autos to park themselves. I fail to understand the economics for creating 1000 cr worth of concretized free parking space.

Well so it is. Mumbai lives in its own illusion of progress. I've been to Shanghai and I think our PM is either a day dreamer or a rhetorical street politician to have promised a Shanghai to Mumbaikars.