Our urban planning and executive authorities seem to be doing more harm than good. CIDCO, city and industrial development corporation of Maharashtra is more brazen in being pro-builder, against the public interest. Can anything be more outrageous than its insistence to promote the interests of a golf club over wetlands that attract flamingos, its proposal to allot the Karave island area near the Thane creek and Nerul for residential development which means development for the very rich.
Another anti-public proposal to allot a sports complex land for development has drawn a sharp rebuke from the high court and it seems corrupt elements can only be subdued by the courts, they no longer care for public opinion, public good.
Corruption may not be the hallmark of MMRDA Mumbai Metropolitan regional development authority but financial, ideological bankruptcy, a megalomanic vision certainly seem to be its characteristic. It is visible all over if only one carefully looks and analyses.
One should not be fooled for a minute by the grand illusion of the Metro railway as the panacea of Mumbai’s transport problems. The Metro railway network will take years and years to complete. A carefully hidden fact is that the authorities just do not have planned for funds, so many works are stuck but construction has started without rudimentary planning for land, financial resources. Experts all over the country have been warning for years against the infliction of the Metro in several cities which just do not need it but vain government authorities want to inflict them to get votes. So, even small Bihar towns are to be burdened with this expensive mode. And this is on cities which to begin with do not even have rudimentary bus and cycling and pedestrian network.
Common people are paying a high price for the grandiose projects for the rich. The myth of the Vande Bharat trains has been thoroughly exposed by recent events, these trains are having a very adverse impact on trains for common people.
It is not that the government does not have enough money for people oriented projects, it has a huge financial surplus as was clear during a discussion on the recent train crash. But , it does not want to plan and work for the poor.
So we find the Mumbai suburban railway system in a crisis, like the BEST bus undertaking. These together carry over nine million people daily but these are being severely and brazenly discriminated. And all attention is showered on the Metro railways which are by every indication a white elephant in the current format. The Mumbai high court recently passed severe strictures against the suburban railway bureaucracy, it should have done that about the political class as well.
There were 75 per cent more breakdowns of buses in Mumbai till June than all of last year as Somit Sen and Nitasha Natu wrote in the Times of India recently. This gives us a magnitude of the enormity of the brazen neglect of such a loved, old, lauded bus system. Can one imagine such a neglect of facilities for the rich ?
Even fascists are more polished, they do not show such open contempt for ordinary people.
Vidyadhar Date is a senior journalist and author of a book on public transport
