Mumbai: Mirror of urban India's decay

The flooding reveals all that has gone wrong with a country that is an IT and nuclear power but lacks a basic but working drainage system.

The torrential downpour that devoured Mumbai, killed innocents and crippled life, leaving India's financial and entertainment capital gasping for breath, is symptomatic of the growing urban decay amid glitz and poverty.

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Mumbai's unprecedented flooding reveals all that has gone wrong with a country that is an IT and nuclear power but lacks a basic but working drainage system.

Right from the days when New Delhi discarded four decades of semi-socialist policies to embrace a free-market economy, it became a fashion among the chattering classes to assert that India was poised to become another Singapore. For many of us who had the opportunity to live in that city-state, this was always amusing, to say the least.

Despite its flaws (mostly political in nature), Singapore is today widely accepted as a world-class place to live in because it offers a quality of life that can be matched only in the West (besides Japan). It would pour and pour during the monsoon in Singapore but we would never find even a pool of water on any street.

Singapore's wide network of open drains would absorb all the rain, leaving the roads always passable.

An army of poor Indians and Bangladeshis worked from dawn until late evening every day to maintain Singapore's excellent drainage system besides its numerous tidy parks and spankingly clean roads and streets. It is a different matter these workers came from cities and towns that lacked all these facilities - and more. Surprisingly, I came across educated Indians who were disdainful of Singapore (because of its size and minuscule population), dismissing it as "just a municipality".

But the Mumbai that failed its citizens is also a municipality! So why does one municipality succeed where another collapses? Why do people in Singapore walk or drive without much worry during torrential rains while those in Mumbai wade through waist deep water (if they can walk) or are forced to put up on rooftops and in buses and trains that won't move?

Without exception, Indian cities and towns, both old and new, have over the decades become hellholes thanks largely to unplanned growth, unending migration from villages and the complete lack of discipline - epitomized by the Indian male who doesn't bat an eyelid before peeing along the pavements although he would never dare do this in Dubai, Singapore, London or New York. If he did that in any of these cities, the state would come cracking down, without mercy.

No wonder, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh remarked: "I am convinced that Indian cities cannot continue to develop in the manner in which they have done in the past few decades."

"The fate of cities will (more than ever) determine the well-being of nations" - so opined experts at a conference in Australia. The world's population has doubled in the last 40 years, but the urban numbers have jumped by five times. Mumbai, already choking, will become the second most populous city with 22 million souls by 2015. How will it cope?

The myth in India, even among those who are educated and should know better, is that a Singapore is built with shopping malls, classy cinema halls, beauty shows, long-range missiles and satellites and, of course, the world of computers. But no progress will have any meaning if people end up living in homes that get no potable water, cry for uninterrupted power supply, when residential areas are considered privileged if they receive water supply for two hours a day, or where roads in even upscale neighbourhoods are not cleaned for days or when even drains are encroached upon without realising the long-term consequences.

Mumbai may be home to the rich and beautiful, but it figures very low on the quality scale. A Forbes analysis ranked it 163rd among 218 cities. Another survey, called the Hardship Index, put the city at number 124 out of 130.

The local Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation is among the world's richest municipal bodies but does that get reflected in the quality of life! Can Mumbai ever become a Singapore?

(MR Narayan Swamy is the chief news editor of IANS, who has previously worked in Singapore.)