The missed opportunity to reimagine Mumbai If Charles Correa’s vision for Mumbai had been implemented inthe 1990s, the Elphinstone Road stampede could have been avoided Livemint, 04.10.2017 For all the success he achieved internationally, CharlesCorrea was unable to truly leave his imprint on the city he made his home. Thatis to Mumbai’s lasting detriment. It has paid a heavy price for the politicalapathy and corruption that scuttled the architect and urban planner’s work. Thestampede at the Elphinstone Road railway bridge last week is a reminder of thatprice. Through the post-independence decades, Mumbai’s industrialstrength had been built on the back of its textile mill heartland. This endedin 1982 with the year-long mill workers’ strike led by Datta Samant. Of the 58mills in the city, 26 were deemed sick and taken over by the government.Unsurprisingly, what should be done with this vast swathe of centrally locatedhigh-value land proved to be a contentious question. In 1996, Maharashtra’sBharatiya Janata Party-Shiv Sena government set up a study group, headed by Correa,to come up with an integrated development plan. The group submitted the so-called Charles Correa committeereport by the end of the year. It proposed a three-way split: one-third of theland to be used for public spaces that could accommodate gardens, schools andhospitals, one-third to be developed by the government for affordable housing,and one-third to be given to the erstwhile owners for residential or commercialpurposes. The plan, incidentally, included the redevelopment of the ElphinstoneRoad station, with a broader overbridge allowing exit into a largeplaza—measures that would have left it far better situated to deal with therush of commuters that ended in tragedy last week. Nothing came of this. “Open land” was redefined so that theland reserved for public use shrank from 166 acres to 32 acres. The bulk of theland was used for private development without any semblance of planning. Thisresulted in the absence of, as Correa put it in his essay, The Tragedy Of TulsiPipe Road, “the enabling sub-structure of roads, of engineering services, of arational decision-making system”. This was Correa’s second great disappointment. The firstcame decades earlier in the 1960s when his plan for the creation anddevelopment of New Bombay was implemented half-heartedly by the government. Ifvenality was to be the cause of his mill land plan’s downfall, it was apathythat did the job this time. Instead of a well-connected sister city built aroundcommercial districts, relieving the strain of Mumbai’s exploding population,New Bombay remained a dormitory town for decades. The suburban railway wasextended to it only in the 1990s. None of this is likely to come as a revelation to anyone whoresides in Mumbai—or indeed, in urban India. Delhi apart—its being the nationalcapital affords it certain advantages in this respect—no metropolis in Indiahas been well served by its administrators and state governments. Corruption isan easy answer to the question of why this is so. So is the failure to fulfilthe directives of the Constitution (74th Amendment) Act, 1992, and adequatelydevolve authority and autonomy to urban local bodies—and with it, bring aboutmore accountability. These are not wrong answers. But they are incomplete. At the heart of India’s urban planning failure is a failureto understand what urban planning truly is. Correa held that “market forces donot make a city, they destroy them”. He was wrong in this. While regulation andplanning are necessary, the inhabitants of a city will naturally organizethemselves in a manner that allows them to best participate in economicactivity. This dictates the urban space around them. At the other end of the spectrum, Jane Jacobs, who deconstructedurban planning in 1961 with The Death And Life Of Great American Cities,believed that urban growth should be organic and central planning, broadly, wasan evil. She was vastly overstating the case as well. But where both schools ofthought converged was in their concern for the inhabitants of a city—the beliefthat cities should be organized in a manner that enhances the well-being andeconomic participation of all strata of urban society. Indian urban planners have rarely observed this, defaulting insteadto a largely mechanistic vision focused more on infrastructure than theinteraction of citizens and infrastructure. Inevitably, this has resulted instatic, non-participative master plans that are outdated even as they are made,or just plain don’t work. Witness the endless attempts to redevelop slum landin Mumbai and resettle its inhabitants. Or the crores of public funds pouredinto cleaning Mumbai’s Mithi river—a Sisyphean task when the slums and shantiesalong stretches of the river and its numerous feeder drains don’t have accessto sewage or garbage disposal systems. Or the fact that it took until the Metrorail policy released last month to recognize the need for nodal transportationbodies that coordinate the development of discrete public transportationsystems in a city. Last year, Prakash Javadekar, then minister of state forenvironment, forest and climate change, said the greatest failure “afterindependence is in our urban and town and country planning”. Recognizing theproblem is only the first step. *
