Plan for second New Mumbai panned

Despite the limited success of a new city to draw people from India's overcrowded financial capital Mumbai, the authorities are planning to build a second New Mumbai, inviting flak from experts and activists alike.

"We are thinking of (setting up) a new city at Nhava (across the harbour from Mumbai) on about 60 sq km of land, to decongest Mumbai," said Mr Sachin Ahir, the junior housing minister of Maharashtra state, of which Mumbai is the capital.

"This is a dream project for us (but) it is still at the planning stage," he told The Straits Times.

This is despite the fact that another new city, Navi Mumbai, also built across the harbour from Mumbai some 40km away by road, has failed to attract jobs and people from the congested city that is also India's film and fashion capital.

Navi Mumbai, after four decades of development from 1972, has only 1.5 million people to Mumbai's 17 million.

"Indians do not like to relocate unless the quality of social and cultural life is as good," said transport expert Sudhir Badami, explaining why Navi Mumbai did not succeed in attracting significant numbers of people from Mumbai.

Despite its chaos, "most people are willing to hang on in Mumbai. So I am not sure if any significant migration will happen to the new city", he said of the latest project.

Yet, something needs to be done about the burgeoning metropolis and its overtaxed infrastructure.

Census figures show Mumbai's population grew 0.5 per cent every year in the decade to 2011 over the previous decade. But the population of cars, motorbikes and other vehicles grew 2.8 per cent annually between 2001 and this year to 2.5 million.

Mumbai's infrastructure has not kept pace with this growth and massive traffic snarls are now common during peak hours. A journey from the Nariman Point business district to the international airport 24km away, which should be covered in 35 minutes, now takes around 90 minutes during rush hour. The city's suburban trains and buses are horribly overcrowded.

To attract people to the proposed new city, the state government is planning a 22km trans-harbour link. Said Mr Ahir: "Unless there is connectivity to Mumbai, the new city will not be viable."

However, a government tender in August for construction of the bridge did not receive any bid for the third time, with Mr Ahir acknowledging that "there is an issue of viability". The government is now planning to build the link with a World Bank loan.

There are also plans to build two new towns and a new international airport in the vicinity of Navi Mumbai.

But there are those who believe that there are cheaper options to building the new city at Nhava, including urban planner Shirish Patel, one of the three who designed Navi Mumbai.

"A lot of land in Mumbai is now unutilised. For instance, the salt pans, the mangroves along the coast, vast lands with the Mumbai Port Trust and vacant land along the coast," noted Mr Patel. "Added up, this will equal land for a new city."

He added: "Releasing these lands into the market will ease Mumbai's congestion. These lands are already in Mumbai and the city's existing road and rail infrastructure can be extended to them at a marginal cost as compared to building a new city."

However, despite putting across these ideas to senior bureaucrats over the years, nothing has happened, he said, adding that "the real estate developers who drive land use policy in Mumbai have managed to keep land in short supply", thereby earning huge profits from high-priced apartments.

Mr Pankaj Joshi of the Urban Development Research Institute, a non-governmental organisation, sees Mr Ahir's plan as a conspiracy by vested interests to profit from speculation in land. "A lot of land was acquired in Nhava for a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) to be set up by Reliance," said Mr Joshi, referring to plans to build a tax-free manufacturing zone by business conglomerate Reliance. "The SEZ plan was shelved after a curious referendum in 2011," he said.

"This is typical of what happens in India: Land is acquired by industrialists to set up manufacturing units and then state policy changes mysteriously to allow land speculators in as the industrialist loses interest in the original plan."

He added: "So, the plan for a new city in Nhava is not as innocent as it seems."

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