Thane: Don't believe glossy real estate ads, this city is no escape from Mumbai

This merits being told for the simple reason that Thane is the biggest city in the Mumbai metropolitan region after Mumbai, is contiguous to it, connected with it by trains from when the first Indian railway ran in 1853, and has the fastest growing urban population now at two million.

It is where real estate prices haven’t flattened in over two decades, much less drop, the rents keep going up, and commute to Mumbai for work shows at least 7.5 lakh footfalls each day at its station, making it the most ill-equipped and crowded on the suburban system.

And yet, every week, full-page and front-page real estate advertisements try to lure more and more people to escape the clutches of Mumbai and harp on Thane being a city of lakes and malls as if the two alone determine quality of life. And the city government does its best to ensure that its contribution is negative.

Lakes and malls are fine, though lakes dry up and malls empty out – two are virtually lifeless now - but they don’t constitute the only yardstick for a good life. The city suffers from inadequacies which makes Thane just another Indian city, hardly something to die for as builders make out in their marketing spiels.

They actually sell a pup and if you noticed it, promote the idea of gated communities though some are single-building apartment blocks. This at once removes one from the dependence on the city around it and gives the feeling that life is, well, going to be good.

But here are the things in Thane that are out of sync with what even a moderately likeable city ought to have. One is the municipal governance; it is, to put it kindly, atrocious at its best. It is politics and more politics and money meant for the city just evaporating with nothing to show for it.

When the city government is only nominal, the rest is easy to guess. It is so laidback that when flyovers are built, it cannot even decide how traffic under it should move: around a pillar or otherwise? They become parking spaces and hawking zones with none worried about them.

Let me deal with a few more concerns. One is stray dogs. The second is intra-city public transport, and the third, the tree cover which the city had in plenty but no longer. Even the industrial units were once located on sprawling lush acres, and when passing by, you thought you were skirting a bungalow.

The city has any number of strays and the civic body does not even have a count but officials speak of numbers sterilised to prevent their proliferation in percentages. How could they when you need to know the total to talk of proportions? Money is spent but the canine population grows.

Recently a boy needed 100 stitches after a stray attacked him. And yet residents have hardly ever seen a dog van. Dogs have to be hauled off to an operating table before they are sterilised. Antidotes for dog bites are expensive and not easily available.

Thane’s public transport is owned and poorly run by the Thane civic body itself. Half the fleet, yes literally so, is in the garages, their parts cannibalised to keep the other half on the roads, no telling when they would stall causing traffic jams. Now they are due to get another 200 buses with no idea where to stable them in the nights.

They don’t run to a reliable timetable. The dependence on autorickshaws is near total, with cars and their parking becoming a menacing problem. If there are any reliable buses that Thane residents can use, they are operated by neighbouring Mumbai’s municipal operator, BEST – better buses, mostly on time.

Politicians, or their proxies, operate illegal bus services as stage carriers, stopping just anywhere to pick up passengers, and the Thane Municipal Transport had to kneel to the demand that they be contracted instead of being banned. People agree that they fill a gap in service, just like BEST does here.

Now, the trees. According to a latest census , reported by The Times of India, the city has added 1.23 lakh trees to its stock, taking the total to 4.55 lakh. This means over 3,500 trees to a square kilometre of the compact cityscape, a fact also recorded by the Thane Municipal Corporation’s portal.

What the portal fails to indicate is that about a decade ago, it had guesstimated their numbers, and the increased tree cover is on a doubtful base and therefore, meaningless. It also does not indicate the number of trees felled because there wasn’t a mandatory Tree Authority to permit them.

This claim of more trees flies in the face of the regular media reports of careless, reckless or illegal felling of trees across the city. Trees are regularly being cut to widen roads or enable new development by builders, and the portal does not account for them. When an industrial house felled 586 trees over a weekend, the TMC woke up after the fact.

Only in May, the High Court had instructed the TMC to appoint a Tree Authority which it should ordinarily have had in place and when it did comply, it was packed with politicians. Two months later, the newly set up Authority was declared illegal for not complying with the law of having NGOs on board.

These guys don’t even realise that every car dealer worth its name is on the arterial Ghodbunder Road and Eastern Express Highway and eat up service roads to park hundreds of cars. The police permit it, the civic body issues licences to do business under the Shops & Establishment Act, even as the remaining surface appears more potholes, less road.

If anything, these point to a failure of the city’s governance which is preoccupied with politics. Due to that, for over a year after the last civic polls, it did not have a Standing Committee as required by statute to deal with approvals of contracts. The city was adrift, not that it has found a direction now.

The litany can hardly ever end. But the governors – officials and politicians just don’t care.