City blights

The condition of Indian cities, as thrown up by every recent study that looks at development, is shameful and pathetic.

We are unable to provide a basic standard of living — housing, sanitation, water, electricity — and that means we fall even lower when it comes to quality of life.

People in Mumbai and Delhi are among the worst paid in the world and have to work more man hours than other places to get the basics in life, says one recent survey.

Luxuries are then like a dream. This means that while we imagine that India is improving and that we are all better off, it is only when we judge ourselves by our own standards. When it comes to the rest of the world, we are far, far behind.

We already know that nationally we are at par or lower than sub-Saharan Africa when it comes to infant and natal mortality. But we condole ourselves that these figures come from our most backward states. It is something of a shock then to learn that Mumbai — often considered India’s premier city — comes last on a list of Asian cities when judged on life expectancy, literacy and per capita income.

Even Colombo, the capital of war-torn Sri Lanka, is ahead of Mumbai. The Mumbai-based NGO which did the study used the UN’s Human Development Indexes.

A study done by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation and the United Nations Development Programme has gone a few steps further and carefully mapped human development in every municipal ward of the city.

The results show that the city’s richest areas have done the best — Malabar Hill, Breach Candy. Areas which appear to be posh — Bandra and Khar (West) have fared fairly badly because they have large slum populations. And the area which has done the worst — Deonar, Trombay — contains the slums of Govandi and the rehabilitation tenements of Mankhurd. The inferences are clear — over 50 per cent of the city’s population lives in slums and the authorities are failing them in just about every way. Other cities across the country have lower slum percentages and they would do well to learn from Mumbai’s mistakes.

The one ray of hope from the report is that it advocates concentration on the satellite towns to reduce the pressure on Mumbai proper. This has happened to some extent but everywhere the problem is the same — insufficient infrastructure, ad hoc planning and not enough political or civic will. A mirror is being held up to us and it is not a very pretty picture.