Why should Mumbaikars risk their lives every time they travel?

Three people died  today in a train accident in an eastern suburb of Mumbai as they hung off a overcrowded train and struck a signal pole. It perhaps would not have garnered anything beyond a mention hadn’t a dozen others fallen off with them. A railway official admitted he was rather puzzled by the media focus on this incident.  He shouldn’t be blamed, over 20,000 people have died on Mumbai’s tracks over the last six years, which would mean almost 9 people die daily, and that’s when things are operating normally.  It’s sad but it’s a reality that Mumbai needs to get used to. Mumbai is a metropolis bursting at the seams – the city’s authorities have known it for years but have done nothing about it– and it is being held together by a very thin, strained string of transport facilities. The moment one of them falls out of sync, the entire system seems to fall apart, an ominous sign for a city that is the financial capital of India. [caption id=“attachment_281275” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“At the core of Mumbai’s transport problems is the lack of communication between the authorities. Reuters”] [/caption] There was a time in the 80s and the 90s when Mumbai had the best transport infrastructure in the country. The local trains were a boon and ran mostly on time. BEST buses were cheap, reliable and covered almost every square inch of the city. The rickshaws and the taxis would actually use a meter – not a rigged one – to charge fares. But while Mumbai has been fed a stream of unfinished, corruption-infected dreams – the Mumbai Trans-Harbour Link, the seven proposed metro rail lines and multi-modal transportation systems to mention a few, cities like Delhi and Bangalore have seen concrete measures like a metro line and new airports turn them into vastly more liveable cities. Mumbai, in a certain sense, should be a transport planners’ dream. The number of private vehicles has increased in the city at a crazy rate but despite that a huge majority of the population still uses public transport to get from one point to the other. That means that almost as soon as any new service is introduced, it will quickly gain traction. It may not even need to be subsidised. In advanced countries, the introduction of a new service also means a long wait to make it financially viable. Mumbai, simply, won’t have that problem. As things stand, any little thing will perhaps help. At the core of Mumbai’s transport problems is the lack of communication between the authorities. A case in point being the suburban Andheri-Kurla road, which connects the west of Mumbai with the east and for a long time, was the only road doing that. So in every sense it was vital. It is also the road that allows everyone living on the eastern suburbs – Bhandup, Mulund, Ghatkopar, Vikhroli and other suburbs to get to the international airport. So it was a vital road. But now, perhaps it is a symbol of a malaise that plagues almost every infrastructure project in Mumbai. In 2002, Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) decide that it would concretise the road . It took a while to finish work on the road – almost three years. So by 2005, it was finally done. But before you could get used to the big, wide roads, in June 2006, the Prime Minister of India, Manmohan Singh, inaugurated the first phase of the Mumbai Metro project. So it was time to dig up the roads that crores were spent on, so that a few more thousand crores could be spent on. Make no mistake, Mumbai needs the Metro line and it needs it quickly but couldn’t this have been planned better? The same holds true for trains. Authorities keep promising Mumbai grandiose projects. From air-conditioned to longer trains, to simply more trains. But nothing ever seems to happen. But of course, if the President were to visit, as he did after the 2006 train serial blasts, it would take the authorities little time to clean up their act. Mahim is one of the smaller stations on the Western Line – it is dark and dingy. But because the President APJ Abdul Kalam was going to visit, they installed lights, tiles, put up a plaque and a flag pole. Bandra station was cleaned up as well. The same thing happens to the roads in the city. The moment a high profile politician is about to visit the city, the roads undergo a transformation. President Pratibha Patil’s visits evoke fond memories since because of her Mumbai gets one of its arterial highways smoothened overnight. The dividers are cleaned and re-painted. The roads are re-tarred so that these politicians, who don’t even live in the city, have a smooth ride to their destinations. So the politicians can have a smooth ride but what have we, who live in the city, done wrong? Why do we have to put our lives on the line to get to a place on time? Why do we have to hang outside trains or buses? Why do we have to interact with potholes more than our families? Mumbai is a mess and at this point, the only way to sort things seems to be the option to give the president, the PM, Sonia Gandhi or Rahul Gandhi a guided tour to every nook and corner of the city. Because somewhere, the authorities and the politicians have forgotten that Mumbai belongs to the people. They are mere caretakers… not good ones either and when that happens, they deserve to be sacked. The death of the three commuters is just a sign that a bigger revolution is needed.