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.
