Mumbai railway chaos: The anger is not at trains, but an uncaring govt

To view the Diva rampage as a manifestation of annoyance at disruption of morning peak hour commuting due to a malfunctioning pantograph would be simplistic.

It would be equally simplistic to see it as a build-up of anger at the inadequate and poor service by the Central railway. It could well be a rage at being seen as second-class citizens by the state.

Look at it this way: those who cannot afford housing closer to work in Mumbai spread themselves far and wide in the distant suburbs in the larger metropolitan region and face a daily hardship of not just commute. They find that their lives are at the mercy of an imperfect, and often non-functioning or venal state.

Diva is a part of the Thane Municipal Corporation, the largest civic body for a city by population in the metropolitan region, after Mumbai. And what does it have? Illegal buildings for which the buyers have paid cheaper prices, relative to Mumbai, that is, but still at unconscionable levels.

Even the civic body has ignored it – those who think of Thane don’t even think it, and another suburb, Mumbra, a part of the city. They are outlaying appendages for an even badly managed city. Nitin Yeshwantrao aptly describes the situation there in The Times of India today:

“From a small village having an Agri population, Diva’s transformation into a dense jungle of multi-storied buildings, illegally-built chawls, unpaved roads and overflowing drains has turned it into a potential powder keg waiting to explode.

“On Friday, locals who have been living in near-squalor and with lack of social infrastructure, revolted against authorities for years of neglect.”

The apparently mindless violence, disregarding the cascading effect which ultimately hurt the commute plans and work of as many as three million people , could well have come somewhat close to the Tunis moment. Remember how a women police constable’s verbal abuse of a street vendor set off a wave of demands for reform across the Arab world?

Apparently the state’s approach to the policy of managing the city of Mumbai is to convert the earlier dormitory cities into warehouses of people who have to serve that city and find their own survival. The poorer get stashed away in the outlier cities as if only their inputs matter and how they live to provide that just doesn’t.

These other cities may have different thresholds of tolerance towards neglect. We would know of it only when they erupt. It cannot be that the outlier cities so vital to Mumbai could be of only incidental relevance in the larger urban planning process. This approach has already excluded large swaths of slums, from half to a third of populations living there, from such processes even in Mumbai.

Take Diva itself.

There is a higher interest in the real estate business there because of the unmet demand for housing across the metropolitan region and the push of people towards them. They are built without any proper planning, because they are gold mines to the rentiers in the governing processes without providing commensurate civic services.

The sale of commuter tickets from Diva went up by 87 per cent in the five years since 2008, indicating the increasing population. Have such regions been served well? No.

Those who are at the root of such poor governance – the politicians, the conniving bureaucrats, the grabbing developer – and catalyse such poor habitations with little or no facilities find it easy to blame the railways for not coming up to scratch.

They never made even a mild attempt to plan with the railways. It was as if transporting them to work so they earned enough to pay the EMIs was not their concern.

Commuters topple off trains, they are forced to cross the tracks because foot over bridges are choked by hawkers, and in the bargain lose their lives. This doesn’t make for any satisfactory commute and over a period, the anger is bound to explode. When they do, the target is the railways though they are counter-productive because they are disrupting their only lifeline to work.

Whatever their grievances, targeting the railways was a ploy to draw attention even if it meant inflicting a self-wound. Since April 2012 to December 2014, the railway stations in the Thane region have seen 13 rail rokos which is in stark contrast to the Western Railway. Attacks on them become highly visible.

Ill-served locations take their toll on residents. The breadwinners spend longer hours away from home, several of them spent in cattle-car commuter trains, robbing the family of any quality time that could be otherwise had. Waiting up to fill water as and when it drips out of the tap breaks disturbs the circadian rhythms. People can be driven to the edge.

Diva is a first warning shot of the likely trouble ahead if the neglect continued.