Mumbai is basically a story of unused spaces.
Air, land, sea, underground, we’ve wasted all of them. Air we should have gone
vertical, we are starting to do that now but we’ve wasted 40 years and that too
because of reasons like convoluted slum redevelopment , tdr etc..which were
important , but certainly did not require that much time. On land we don’t have
enough freed up paths or commons. Sea and underground could have been used for
transportation. In a way we’ve wasted spaces , wasted ideas which were common
three or four decades ago. Imagine what Mumbai
could have been had we made the right decisions in early 70 -80’s. Lot of these
are workable ideas, solutions have been known through the decades but we ignored
them.
For all these years, Mumbai has been my
home, very little has changed, few taller buildings have come up. Life is built
on memories of our neighborhood, in the homes, in the city that we live in.
One starts wondering, why we did not worked hard enough to make Mumbai a great
city.
What has been missing is the vision and
will, from both politicians and us citizens. We all are responsible for this
mess. We've created our little islands, our little cocoons, a gated world of Home,
Office, some of us Schools, Colleges, and malls on weekends. We've paid very
little attention to the building of the city and demanding a city with livable
communities.
THIS is what has to change. Transforming
Mumbai and other cities is going to require us to change policies and politics.
Because bad politics is what has created this mess, and good politics can get
us out of this. As good politics mean good policies and voting. Change has to
come through our votes; the reality is many of the citizens don’t vote. So who
really votes? Our contribution at the ballot box is only 55% to 60%. It is very
little wondered then, that we get the policies we do. And the outcome is no
surprise, we are writing off our own future.
Why we need urbanization? Urbanization and
development are conjoint twins, one leads to and means the other. In India we’ve
had this misplaced notion for a long time, this rheumatics of villages and that
has does us harm from pre-independence days. The future of India is urban, if
you don’t believe me try going out and living in a village for more than a
week, it just doesn’t happen. But everyone likes this, that India lives in
600-1000 villages. The reality is India needs to live in hundreds of cities. Cities
are growth engines. They are there for wealth creation, innovation hubs and
much more; we’ve seen it through the history of mankind. Now around 50% of the
people in the world live in urban areas. For India to develop it has to urbanize.
Today around 60% of India involved in agriculture. If some part of this
agricultural labour shifts to urban city’s labour intensive manufacturing.
India has a unique opportunity here, just like China had 30 years ago.
Labour costs
have been rising in China. China has moved up the ladder. In late 70’s India
and China had pretty much the same per capita income, today China’s per capita
income is 3 times that of India. Both started off in 1947-48, and we could have
done what China did in late 70’s onwards, we lost a lot of opportunities out
there. China itself needs a China that was there 30 years ago in case of low
cost labour in large numbers. Chinese companies have been looking at Indonesia,
Bangladesh and Vietnam and other such countries and are trying to move some of
their manufacturing out there. India can be that, that’s the way development,
if we move some of the people move from agriculture to low-cost manufacturing, we need people in manufacturing as we need to
produce stuff for consumption.
India has a unique opportunity to kick-start
a 30 year old cycle, like China did, if it can solve its land, labour and
infrastructure problems. But what how can this be achieved? As I said before, if we move at least some
percent of the people in agriculture to new cities. We do have migrations daily,
but in small numbers , but that’s not good enough to get millions of people out
of poverty. We need to move them to manufacturing. This would be one of the
greatest migrations in history, other than what happened in China. And what do
we have to offer them? We have existing but legacy cities like Mumbai. We are
bursting at our seems ,look at Mumbai , Delhi or Bangalore or any other major
cities, and what’s the plan for renewal , it goes by the initials JNNURM (Jawaharlal
Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission),
the only time you see these words are painted on buses. – A plan for
renewal, that’s our plan for revamping cities. In reality, nothing exists, the number
of Urban planners for Mumbai is just One as opposed to China , who has a whole
institute producing urban planners for the country.
We seem to have forgotten the
art of planning, looking 10 – 20 years ahead, what cities will become? What’s the
evolution of neighbourhood? What’s the progression we need to have? The fact is
our existing cities cannot accept more people, what India really needs are new cities,
atleast a hundred new cities, movable, sustainable, well managed cities. A lot
has been written, solutions are all there , there’s a Romer’s concept of
charter cities where people come together based on certain rules, there are
designer cities, that are planned according to a purpose. But the first problem
we have to solve when we look at the cities is the governance, and what’s
needed out here is vision and will for good policies. And it’s not going to
happen automatically , we’ve seen 65 years post independence and nothing has
changed, it’s almost development , whatever change happens is by default and
accidental, Urban Governance is our greatest challenge , we need good policies
and for that we need good politicians , for that we need to vote. The challenge in India is that only 55
percent of voting happens in urban India. The reasons are like , what
difference one vote will make it’s a combination of ignorance I don’t know
where my polling both is ? It’s a question of complacency, apathy- all are
equally bad so it doesn’t matter whom I vote for, waiting in the queue at the
polling booth. And the answer is not voting for independent candidates , what
they do , is they end up being vote cutters.
Compiled by:
Isha R Ganatra
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