Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
to be raising 'the quality of municipal and state governance, the provision of personal se-
curity and of law enforcement' that would need to 'improve dramatically from third-world
to first-world standards'. Mumbai would also 'need to be seen as a cosmopolitan metro-
polis that welcomes and embraces migrants from everywhere - from India and abroad'
with 'more user-friendly visa/resident permit mechanisms, making all arms of government
expatriate-friendly, and exhibiting a gentle, tolerant, open and welcoming culture'.
The committee might have simply said, 'forget the idea'. Instead, it correctly noted that
an international finance centre was 'too small a tail with which to wag the much larger urb-
an development dog'.
There have been individual improvements since the report, but they are fragments com-
pared with what needs to be done. There are new airport terminal buildings, with a new
airport under construction, plus a part-completed expressway with an elegant cable-stayed
bridge called the Bandra-Worli Sea Link across a bay on the urban coast. There is a new
financial district of good modern buildings adjacent to the city's airport highway. Mumbai
is not however tackling the macro problems, and it is failing to monetize large-scale up-
market residential, office and retail development, thus missing a big opportunity to harness
the government-funding suggestions made by McKinsey. It is also failing to make signific-
ant progress on clearing Dharavi and the other slums, while Navi Bombay, a satellite city
that was planned in the 1970s, is only half-built and has a massive slum problem.
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Perhaps the committee was doomed from the start. Its 'high powered' title predictably
had the opposite effect, and its report called for action 'on a war footing', which is a public
relations line, not a clarion call for action. Such is life in India where, perhaps more than in
other countries, when one thing is said, the opposite is meant.
Crony Delhi
Now regarded as a hive of corrupt crony capitalism, the Delhi Development Authority
(DDA) was set up in 1957 when Jawaharlal Nehru's government merged the capital's plan-
ning and development agencies. It was given sole responsibility for the city's development
with 'public purpose' powers (dating from an 1894 legislation) to acquire land forcibly be-
low market prices. Delhi's Nehru Place office centre on the city's southern outer ring road,
which was proudly built by the DDA in the 1970s and 1980s, is a monument to all that is
wrong with bureaucratic control. It is a dreary multistorey concrete jungle of offices and
scruffy shops with unmade roads and broken pavements. Car parking is pure jugaad, with
touts using every possible space to squeeze in vehicles. It was a blot on the capital city's
landscape when I used to go there in the 1980s to visit companies like the Modi family
