The Weekend Intelligence: Bombay, open city?

Ryan Reynolds
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Ryan Reynolds
The Economist.

Ore Ogunbi
One of the great things about working at the Economist is being able to tap into the knowledge of correspondents who come from and are based all around the world. So if we want to know what's happening on the streets of Montevideo or eavesdrop on the latest debates playing out in the Vatican City, we've generally got it covered. On the weekend intelligence, Weve decided to take advantage of this. So were bringing you dispatches, love letters, if you will, from our correspondent to their home city, detailing everything thats great about it while not shying away from the challenges that it faces.

Im ore Ogunbi and in this episode of the Weekend Intelligence, my colleague Leo Merani reports from his home, Mumbai, or Bombay, as Leo insists on calling it. Mumbai is famously an open city known for welcoming all comers, regardless of their colour, caste or creed. But as the city goes about constructing its future, Leo fears that Mumbai's diverse character is being buried beneath the rubble. In this episode, he asks, how will all this construction change the city of dreams? And who is the Mumbai of the future really for?

Leo Mirani
Hello from Bombay, where I am sitting in my cozy, cool, and relatively quiet office. It's only cozy, cool and relatively quiet because I have the doors and windows closed and the air conditioning turned on. Outside, it's baking hot and humid, and the sounds of digging and construction are everywhere. That's because I live in the middle of a construction site. I'm not talking about my building, or not just my building anyway.

This street, this neighborhood, this entire city is under construction right now. I made a short list of what's going on, at least what I could remember. There's a big new highway running along. There are bridges over the sea running north from here, where I have. There's ten or twelve metro lines.

Smaller residential streets like mine are being ripped up and resurfaced. The rail system is being expanded, including a new high speed rail project and its terminals. There are seven sewage treatment plants being built. Dharavi big slum is being redeveloped. There's also a bunch of apartment blocks being knocked down and rebuilt, to say nothing of all the new office towers coming up everywhere.

But I am doing something journalists are always told not to do, which is I'm telling you rather than showing you. So let's go outside.

I'm standing on the pavement outside the building in which I live. And when I say pavement, I use that term very, very loosely. So behind me is the building in which I live. Let me describe it. It's three stories tall.

It's quite old. It's probably 50 or 60 years old. It's currently under scaffolding. This happens to Bombay buildings every 15 to 20 years because, you know, there's a lot of rain here. It's a normal thing, except in my building, it's now been under scaffolding for eleven months.

Then there's the street in front of me that is currently dug up. The pavement on which I'm standing is currently in a state of, let us say, some disrepair. The drain covers have all been removed and this is just my street. So you might think I'm complaining because, you know, I am personally having to suffer this. But no, everybody in Bombay is going through this at the moment.

Actually, that's twelve months now. But when I look at my street and my building, I can at least feel a sense of hope. Maybe this monsoon my ceiling won't leak, and maybe this new concrete road will be less bone shaking in the rickety rickshaws into which I clamber to come home from a night out. But looking beyond my street, looking at all of the projects going on now, I'm less confident of the end goal. I acknowledge that any city will always be a work in progress, and that applies to Bombay more so than to most cities, given the years of neglect it has endured.

But for decades now, the people in charge of the city have promised to build a new Singapore, or a new Dubai, or a new Shanghai, or even a New New York. Rarely, if ever, have they promised to build a city that works for all of the 20 or 25 million people who, like me, call themselves Mumbaikars. Just this week, a gigantic billboard toppled over during a freak storm and killed 14 people. Its worth asking them as I survey this chaos around me. Who is all this for?

Is it all a fantasy? Us looking at photos of the first world, imagining ourselves living like them? Buildings and cafes and offices populated full of people like me. People with good salaries and air conditioning and the Uber app installed on our thousand dollar iPhones. Or does this vision encompass everyone else too?

Regular middle class families in pokey flats? Blue collar workers crammed into tenements? Or the roughly 50% of the city that lives in slums? The real question then, I suppose, is who does this city belong to? Who in the end, does any city belong to?

Whenever I have questions about how to think about the city, I turn to one of my good friends. Yeah, my name is Naresh Fernandez. I edit a digital news site called scroll. Let me do that again, because news sites can only be digital.

Naresh Fernandez
My name is Naresh Fernandez. I hate it.

Leo Mirani
Naresh is a journalist, but he's also written some of the best books about the city, including one about its jazz era. He's also one of my mentors. And you forgot to mention your greatest claim to fame, that you got your. First permanent job with Timeout Mumbai. As our life nightlife editor.

Did you not correct that you were my former boss? This is how everyone knows you. Oh, that is true. Its in for me. I will have to live with.

Were sitting in his flat, which, as you might expect, is cluttered with books and papers and records and would be a delightful place to read or think or even make a podcast were it not for the racket outside today that includes not just construction and digging, but also the shriek of a very annoying myna bird.

This flat is in Bandra, the neighborhood that today features in dumb listicles called things like the world's coolest districts. But it's more familiar to both Naresh and me simply as home. So I feel very attached to Bombay, and especially this little part of Bombay that we're now sitting in called Bandra. My mother's family has lived here for several hundred years. My grandfather was a farmer not so far from here, and so that side of the family has sort of seen the city spring up around them with all the possibilities that embodied from the time that urbanization started in this little neck of the woods in about the 1920s or the 1930s, and then they descend into relative chaos that we now see us around us less than 100 years later.

You and I are from the same part of town. My family's history doesn't run as far back as yours, but you know, my grandfather lived here, my mother grew up up here, I was born here. It's somehow this little corner of Bombay, of India manages to be, while, you know, subject to the same forces happening everywhere else, manages to retain a little bit of its civility, its livability. Why do you think that is? Well, not for very much longer, because we can't hear it now, but there's construction happening all around us.

Naresh's family has seen a lot of change here, but Naresh is not impressed by the changes happening around him right now. Buildings that are relatively new are being torn down for what they call redevelopment, which is a ridiculous way of saying everything will be reconstructed much higher and much posher, thereby completely changing the class character of this city that always prided itself on affording space and jobs for working class people from around India. That is happening increasingly less. I don't always agree with Naresh. For example.

I think it's good that buildings of eight or ten flats are turning into towers with 30 or 40 densification is necessary. It's normal for a growing city. But I do agree the class character is changing. These flats are all aimed at bankers and CEO's. My family would never be able to buy or even rent here today.

The only reason I can live here is because I owed a London salary. And it's not even like Bandra is some grungy neighborhood being regenerated. Though don't be fooled by my use of the word suburb. There are no acres of lawns here. There are no children riding bicycles.

It is now indistinguishable from the rest of Bombay. There are homes, there are offices, shops and workshops all mixed together in one sweltering mass of concrete. Still, this part of town is still referred to as the western suburbs. And if you want to go to the historic heart of the city, the one you'd recognize from the movies, that's at the southern end. I spent many years of my life hanging out there.

It's where I went to college, it's where I started my professional life and it's where I'm going to go now. To do that, I'm going to get on a local train and head to the terminus at Churchgate.

Bombay's trains are a marvel. They're reliable, they're efficient, they're incredibly cheap. That's because they're subsidized, they're the lifeline of the city and they keep running no matter what. But they're also so ludicrously over capacity, the authorities had to come up with a new word to describe the conditions.

There's like four or five people hanging out of every second class compartment and only two or three out of every first class compartment. That tells you it's an empty train, but a pack train. You have 17 people per square meter. And the word they came up with to describe this is super dense crush load. Super dense crush load.

That's actually a pretty useful metaphor for how we live in the city. With its own small flats and lack of parks and creaking infrastructure. People tend to assume that the ones hanging out are doing so out of duress. Quite the contrary. Hanging out of the train is a thoughtful privilege, whereas if you're hanging out of the train, yes, it is somewhat dangerous, but you get the nice cool breeze on your face.

The journey from Bandra to Churchgate takes around 30 minutes. It takes twice as long to make the same journey by car at Russia, even with some of these new roads. But many people prefer sitting in traffic to being crushed with a bunch of other sweaty dudes. At least their cars are air conditioned. I made this journey almost daily for many years.

I was one of those people hanging out of the train. I took it to college, though I have to admit I didn't really go to class that much.

Instead I went to this dive bar called cafe Oval, where I used to drink beers and eat omelets. The attraction is not the cheap beer, or not just the cheap beer, but the setting. It's a hole in the wall. But in one of the grand art deco buildings that line the street. Bombay has a lot of art deco buildings.

In fact, the only city in the world with more art deco buildings is Miami. But ive been to Miami and I think this is humbug. Anyway, even if its true, ours are grander. Theyre bigger, theyre more beautiful, theyre bolder, theyre simply better.

In front of this row of gorgeous art deco buildings, theres a large open field on which dozens of cricket matches are going on at the same time.

These cricket matches, as you can hear, involve a lot of plaintive yelling. On the other side of this field is a row of magnificent Indo gothic edifices. These were built in colonial times and they include the high court and the university. This whole district, this Ensom, as they put it, was recently declared a World Heritage site. And it's pretty cool drinking beers in a world heritage site.

The other thing that's cool is the sign that hangs in this bar. It proudly declares, shop is open to all caste should be casts. But, you know, let's not get nitpicky. However, when I showed up this time, that sign seemed to have disappeared. Interesting.

They've removed the sign that says shop is open to all costs. He didn't say. He said, the boss has decided. And I was like, does that mean the shop is no longer open to all costs? And he says, no, that is not the case.

We're still open to all costs, but we've removed the sign. In its place is a big neon sign which says Budweiser. They shrugged when I pointed this out to them. It was all the same in their eyes. Look, I get it.

I work for the Economist as a cog in the machine of global capital. I kind of see their point. And though capitalism gets a bad rep these days, it's definitely superior to all the other ways in which India has been run over the past couple of thousand years. Whether that's the caste system, feudalism, colonialism, or a socialist planned economy. And capitalism built Bombay.

This has always been a commerce oriented, market driven city, which helped make it indias most progressive city. A place to shed the caste prejudice that a lot of India still suffers from. Its also how Bombay sells itself. Bollywood, the stock market, the city where the streets are paved with gold, where anyone can make it. Bombay is supposed to be, as this bar suggests, open to all.

But I'm not sure that's true anymore. It's a nice story we tell ourselves. Bombay might once have offered community an opportunity and openness, but now, as Naresh laments, it's closing itself off.

Naresh Fernandez
And we have that very strange phenomenon for Bombay, the gated community in a city that has no crime to speak of. And we're not quite sure what people are walling themselves away from, but it also means that they have walled away playgrounds and facilities that should, by right, be enjoyed by everybody in the city. And they have privatized what should be public amenities. You can't make common cause unless you have common ground, literally. And so one of the reasons that Bombay doesn't have the civic actions that it used to at one time is that Bombay's middle classes and affluent classes have just seceded.

Leo Mirani
Yeah, we're no longer all in this together. Quite so. This, this more than anything, is what has changed about Bombay. This more than anything, is what has been bugging me and I've been unable to put my finger on.

A couple of years ago, I visited Manila. And like many other big asian cities, it has islands of wealth connected by highways. But what struck me is that unlike other places, unlike Bombay, where you at least have to confront the site of poverty as you go from tower to tower, island to island. In Manila. They had walled them off, rendered them invisible.

The rich of that city had seceded into their first world archipelago. There's no need to think of the oceans of poverty that surround them. So when the president of the Philippines starts a program to murder drug addicts in the slums, it doesn't matter. Those people are not us. And that is what happens when the rich secede.

The whole social system breaks down. And thats what I fear were now doing in India. One part of our society is walling itself off from the rest. When rich and poor and middle class rub against each other, whether in parks or public transport or even just on the street, when the Venn diagrams of their day to day lives overlap, then they can make common cause to improve their city for everyone. There's a sense, as Naresh said, of being in it together.

But when their horizons are narrowed, they, or we, I suppose, no longer have a stake in the system. And that is when, no matter how many roads and bridges you build, it all falls apart.

Ryan Reynolds
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Leo Mirani
I say this, but I too am guilty of it. I tell myself I am different because at least I don't live in a high security luxury tower. But I mean, I hide away in my air conditioned office in Bandra. I often take an air conditioned Uber when I could have just as easily taken a train, because, let's face it, any sensible person would secede.

The bombay outside is a chaotic and maddening one. The noise never stops. The traffic never stops. Disorder is everywhere. People are everywhere.

The smell of the city is a mix of sewage and feces and drying fish. There is no space to think, and theres barely any room to even exist. What people are walling themselves off from is not crime, its chaos. Theyre just trying to preserve their sanity.

But it doesnt have to be this way. This madness is not an inherent feature of Bombay or of any indian city. What it is is the result of choices, human choices, and of poor planning. And so, to understand how planning in India works, I went to see one of India's foremost urban planners.

Bimal Patel
Where shall we start? Shall we start with riverfront? Yes, please. I'm standing on a balcony on the top floor of an office building in Ahmedabad, a city in Gujarat, which is about 50 minutes flight from Bombay. I'm chatting with Bimal Patel, who, among other things, designed India's new parliament building.

Leo Mirani
In front of us is a vast public space that Bimal designed. It's called the Sabarmati waterfront. It runs for miles and miles along both banks of the Sabarmati river, which runs through this delightful city. This waterfront used to be a trash heap of rubble and slum land. Now it's obstruction free.

There are walkways on both sides for strolling and sitting and even canoodling. And what was important was that on both sides, the city had come right up to the edge of the river, right? And you had no public space, no road, no walkway, nothing. You couldn't walk along the edge of the river. So the river was just a dead area.

Dead and filthy area. The slum dwellers have been moved to proper homes, which is to say, small flats and concrete buildings with actual kitchens and indoor plumbing. This, of course, caused a bit of controversy. Some people were worried about the rights of the slum dwellers, and that is a worthy concern. Vigilance is required to ensure that the poor are not displaced in projects such as these, which happens far too often.

Yet at the same time, one must not romanticise slums. It is nobody's right to live in squalor and filth, nor should any government be allowed to get away with letting that state of affairs persist. You know, even in a fractious democracy such as ours, that you can make a project like this happen. Very important demonstration, in my view. After Bimal shows me the waterfront from the terrace, we walk back into the offices where dozens of employees are tapping away at their computers, working on some of the most prestigious projects in India.

Bimal Patel
I think presently they are only working on the prime minister, which you are not allowed to see. You know, things like a new house for the prime minister, things like someone without security clearance probably should not be allowed to see. But what I can see are the posters and 3d printed models that line the wall and sit atop surfaces everywhere. These represent projects in cities around the country. But the one that catches my eye, obviously, is a big map of Bombay.

Leo Mirani
Bimal tells me his grand plan. Here, the opaque white that you see is the port of Mumbai. And that's what Mumbai grew around the port of Mumbai. This opaque white area is 7 km². That much?

Before we continue, I need to explain the topography of Bombay. Bombay is not like other cities. It's not an inkblot, spreading slowly in all directions as it grows. Instead, it's a thin peninsula of land sticking out into the Arabian Sea, surrounded by water on three sides. So space obviously is at a massive premium.

And the port is the last big tract of land that could give the city some breathing room. At one level, what Bimal wants to do with the port lands is nothing special. It involves creating housing and parks and offices, all the usual stuff. But his real aim is about a lot more. Its about much more than erecting a bunch of towers.

What Bimal wants is to change how we think about our cities. He wants Bombay to redo its planning policies. He wants to set an example for all of urban India. You know, this was one project which I thought Bombay is. You know, we get going in Bombay, then its a fantastic example.

Heres the problem. Planning regulations in most indian cities, including Bombay, insist that buildings leave space, open space on all four sides. This open space is sometimes used for parking or for gardens or for kids to play or for storage or for junk or nothing at all. It's a spectacularly inefficient use of space. Let me offer a comparison.

New York or San Francisco, both of which are space constrained and surrounded by water, dedicate some 85% of land to roads, buildings and public spaces, and less than 10% to private open spaces. In Bombay, these enforced little slivers of private open space around buildings together combine to make up 50% to 60% of land use. It's totally mad. And Bimal has seen first hand how this happens. Complete.

Bimal Patel
I've sat in on those meetings myself, so I know that. I mean, I'm not talking about from, from. I'm not imagining these things. I've sat in and argued and said, but why 3.5? You're asking somebody who leave an additional 0.5 meters of land open in costly land.

You know, why don't you let him build? No, I think it'd be nice. Then there are rules that will tell you. I think you should have a little green space. Middle of Bombay.

You want me to have a green space? Yeah, it'll be good for them. I mean, if it's an apartment, children can play there. Why the hell don't you give them a public park? All of this nodding and head shaking and arbitrary decision making is a system I like to call the uncle based model of rulemaking.

Leo Mirani
The problem though is that when this model is scaled across an entire city, I mean, apart from the fact that it's not remotely driven by logic, is that it creates an unlivable mess. So every time you are writing this rule, you have no idea how much cost you are imposing on the land. Bimal had opened my eyes to this problem in earlier conversations when I first heard you say this. I never thought about it before. Ever since I first heard you say this, I will stop looking at it.

I see so much wasted space every time I'm walking around the city. It's a bit like being a fish, you know, you don't really notice the water until someone points it out to you. They've never seen a different city. You see, you were telling me that once I pointed this out, now you're suddenly seeing the waste everywhere. Most of them are not seeing a waste, they're seeing what they've always seen.

Bimal Patel
And they think this is what cities are. This is one big problem with urban planning in India, but hardly the only one. Another big one is the Alphabet soup of agencies and authorities that are responsible for different aspects of the city. In Bombay. These include the BMC, the MMRDA, MHADA, MMRCL, MIDC, SRA, MPT and of course any number of SPVs.

Leo Mirani
Occasionally someone talks about setting up a UmTA or an HLC to coordinate between these TlA's, but that never comes to anything. It leaves a lot of us thinking WTF? Only much less politely and often not in English. But the main problem is that the cities themselves dont have any power. The mayor is a figurehead, the actual chief executive is an appointed bureaucrat, and the political power is in the hands of the chief minister of the state who has 100 million other citizens to worry about.

But despite all this, Bimal is an optimist. He knows that these things take time. Never once has it seemed okay that things are on the right track. Never once has it been not frustrating. It's hugely frustrating.

Bimal Patel
And by Jove Leo, 1995, when I got going on this whole 94 when I got going on this 30 years now it's I'd rather be living today than living that time. And despite all my whingeing, so would I.

Leo Mirani
I'm always so happy to be back in Bombay airport. For one thing. It's just nice to be home. Right? And being back at the airport means I'm going home to my own flat from whatever dusty corner of India I've just come from.

I mean, having said which, today was not a day. Dusty corner was quite a nice corner. Even so, it's going to sound weird, but I genuinely like the carpet. Lots of airports have hideous carpets. Delhi has a ghastly carpet.

I also think this airport is just gorgeous. Look, I'm not a carpet fanatic. It's just a great airport. It's a piece of aspirational infrastructure. It's designed to make you feel proud to be inside it.

And it's both the first and the last thing you see when you visit the city. Its something weve actually got right. This airport has been functional since around World War two. But this terminal, which was designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, one of the worlds great architecture practices, is only about ten years old. However great the terminal, the problem is this airport has only one Runway, and as a result, flight movements are severely congested.

Theres no space to expand. There are homes and slums and other things on all four sides. So they're building another airport on the mainland, which is supposed to open early next year. Ah, that's another building project, which I forgot to mention. I travel around India quite a bit for reporting, and I have the same routine whenever I get back.

I like the fact that as soon as you get to baggage reclaim, there's a nice big smoking lounge. I have a quick cigarette in the smoking lounge that someone has very considerately plonked right next to the baggage belts. I collect my bags, if I have any, and then I get in a taxi and go home. Ah, you say, why am I not taking public transport? Well, there are some buses, but they don't go to where I live.

And there's no rail connection and no metro connection, but they are working on that. And so obviously the front of the airport is a construction site. However, today I'm back in a taxi, soaring above the airport. So they built this new airport and they built this new access route. And now what happens is you land in Bombay from London or wherever or.

Bimal Patel
Dubai. And you get in a taxi and you get on this elevated road, and for a whole, like ten or 15 minutes after you land in India, you're fooled into believing you're in a proper, developed first world country, and only then do you realize that you've been had first world pretenses apart. This airport, like the World Heritage rail terminus for that matter, represents what is greatest about the city, which is that it's made up almost entirely of people who came here from somewhere else.

Leo Mirani
Bombay is a young city by indian standards, about the same age as America. And it was built, admittedly, by the colonial Portuguese and the British, but also, and much more importantly, by immigrants, by Jews, by Armenians, Gujatis, Parsis, Muslims, and over the centuries, people from all over India, all over the world. Even like any sea facing port city, it is an inherently open one. I mean, you have to be. If your main interest is trade, this is probably a good time to explain why I call it Bombay.

While many listeners may find themselves wondering, wasn't it renamed Mumbai? Isn't that what we're supposed to call it now? Well, the simple answer is that Bombay is just what slips off the tongue. You will hear other people in this podcast do the same thing, but a deeper answer is that the city was called Bombay in English, Bombay in Hindi, and Mumbai in Gujati and Marathi. These are the four main languages of the city.

When it was renamed in 1995 by the local nativist party, that was an assertion of the city's Maharashtra character above all others. Many, including me, disagree with that position. We think the city belongs to anyone who wants to call it home, whatever language they speak. Anyway, back to the infrastructure. So to get to my place from this fancy airport road, you get on a very unfancy highway, and then you turn off just before another big infrastructure project, the Bandra Worley sea link.

It's a soaring, cable stayed bridge that sweeps over the Arabian Sea, whizzing you from near my flat to central Bombay. It's oldish now. It was first mooted in the 1960s, then work actually started sometime in the early two thousands, and it was eventually completed in 2010. It is a magnificent bridge, and it has become an emblem of the city. And it's a fitting emblem because in many ways, it's incomplete.

It was meant to be only one link of a series of causeways and bridges to the north and to the south. Those are the ones that they are now, 15 years later, working on. Earlier this year, they threw one of those open with great fanfare. It's called the coastal road, and it runs, in theory, from the sea link all the way to Churchgate. I say in theory because they haven't yet connected these two things and they've only opened half of it.

So in other words, it's not actually complete. But what do you do? My former boss, Naresh, of course, is not a fan. What about the coastal road? Will that help?

Naresh Fernandez
The coastal road will definitely not help, because as we know, it just brings their traffic jam closer to you. It was not going to be any. Other way I mean, yeah, we all knew that was going to happen. Although I am pretty optimistic about the coastal road, this is one of the places where we, we diverge. So my arguments on the coastal road are as follows.

Leo Mirani
Number one, it'll speed up traffic, which will make the cars more efficient and therefore there should be less pollution in the city. Number two, it'll clear up your road and my road, which should not have through traffic on them. It should hopefully clear those up because the reason people Naresh's argument is something called induced demand. This holds that building more roads just causes more traffic. And in fact its pretty well established that this is the case.

But I think that in India the dynamic is slightly different. The cars are coming anyway as people get richer. Besides, Bombay devotes only 15% to 20% of its land to roads. Well functioning cities set aside around 30 or 40%. The fact is we need more roads.

More roads will hopefully ease the congestion. And here's the cool thing. Since the coastal road, the sea link, the new bridges north of the sea link that I mentioned, all of these, they're on the sea, they're at the edges of the city or outside the city. They're not tearing up people's homes or scarring the center of Bombay for them. Instead, they will hopefully take these miserable vehicles off crammed city streets, off my street, and send them out to sea.

Not in the sea, sadly, but at least out to sea. Lastly, I would agree that this is a misallocation of resources if public transport were being neglected. But I've mentioned before, the city is building a dozen metro lines. So cars are not the only focus. Having mounted that robust defense of these roads, it's time for me to get in a car and try it out.

I haven't yet been on this new coastal road, so I decided to go for a ride.

We zip along the sea link and then because they haven't yet actually connected it, we exit back onto land, sit in traffic for quite a while, and eventually re emerge onto this whizzy new coastal road. I feel like this has been both underwhelming and very cool at the same time. But maybe the point of infrastructure is that it should be underwhelming, right? Like, you just want it to work. You want it to just work.

My uber rating has come down to 4.49 and it keeps going, like further and further down. Right. And I was trying to figure out what. Yeah, what did I do? And the conclusion I came to is that I have turned into one of those uncles who lectures Uber drivers about honking.

I once tried a sort of philosophical tactic. It started with, you know, tell me something. He was like, mm hmm. I was like, do you think your honking achieves anything? We had this kind of long conversation, but I don't think it had any fucking effect.

Look, you can actually see the skyline. This is a good gauge of how polluted the city is on both the ceiling and this new road. It gives you a bit of a distance from the city, and it usually gives you this gorgeous view of the skyline. But what it also gives you is a sense of how polluted it is. Sometimes all you can see are the outlines of buildings shimmering in the haze.

Other times they just vanish behind the smoke. Thats another downside of all this construction. Beyond the congestion, Bombay would never have won any clean air awards. But its become much, much worse. On various occasions this year, the papers have had screaming headlines about how the pollution is worse than Delhi.

Worse than Delhi. If theres something Mumbaikars cannot abide, it is the idea of being worse than Delhi. Even when it's better than Delhi, it's still pretty bloody awful. And it's a source of constant anxiety. We Mumbaikars talk about the pollution like british people talk about the weather.

And that is where the conversation turned when I went to see an urban affairs expert for this podcast. So I have bought her an air purifier. She refuses to use it. That's another question because she likes opening windows and likes fresh air. Fresh air.

Hrithika Hingorani
But I think that's part of the normalization that we do, right? We just say, no, no, it's fine. I'll deal with it. Hrithika Hingorani runs a policy organization that works with cities and states throughout India on improving our cities. She has also become a friend, which is why our chat has digressed slightly to talk about the air purifier she bought for her mum.

The truth is, there's nobody you can talk to about the air because it is nobody's mandate to fix the air. And even if there is political pressure, who does that political pressure sort of go up to? Right. So what tends to happen is, you know, we keep looking at spot fixes, so we buy these smog guns and various things that don't work. We don't.

What are the four leading here? Again, we run into the problem of assigning responsibility. Who's actually in charge of the cities? Air no. 170, third and 74th amendment to the indian constitution is about decentralization, right?

So you central government, state government, and then decentralizing authority to local government. But spatially, the structure of the country has changed. So it was about devolving power to municipalities. But, you know, cities have grown so much that it's not just about a municipality, but it's at a metropolitan region. So what you would need is a metropolitan authority with the power to deal with pollution, because air does not respect human made administrative boundaries.

Leo Mirani
Not cities, not states, not even countries. But as youve heard, coordination is a perpetual problem in India. But simply throwing your hands up and saying this is hard is obviously not the answer. Prithikas argument is that whatever the grouping is, there has to be more accountability and clearer lines of responsibility. The funny thing is, Bombay now has the most billionaires of any city in the world, after New York and London.

I find that very amusing. Bombay is not a place that offers the sort of things the hyper wealthy usually prize. It's true. They have helicopters and private jets and they get privatized water, and they can even make their little private parks. But you can only privatize so much.

They still have to breathe the same air as the rest of us. I asked my old friend and ex boss Naresh, who has the great virtue of making me look less grumpy, why he thinks the rich and powerful don't make a fuss about pollution. You would think that they would think about their grandchildren, but their grandchildren are all now living in London and New York. Yeah, their grandchildren would go abroad. The other thing they don't make a fuss about is climate change.

But that, too, is not something they can escape, or I guess they can, by leaving. But if they want to stay here, they and the workers who populate their companies will suffer the same catastrophic effects. I mean, here's a good reason for them to care about both pollution and climate change. These things are bad for business. They lower productivity, they make your workers unwell.

Here's 120 years ago, one of those. Once in a century rain submerged the city all the way up to the top decks of double decker buses that shut down offices and services for days on end. And these sorts of events are likely to only become more common. According to one study, huge chunks of the city, though not Bandra, I'm happy to report, could be underwater by 2050. That's only 26 years away.

Are you optimistic about the future of Bombay? You know, people often speak about cities dying, and it takes a lot to kill a city. So I think we sort of lurch on for a long time until we are reclaimed by ocean. I guess if you could read that as optimistic. I guess most nights when I finish work, I walk down to the sea.

There's a beautiful view of the sunset from the seafront promenade near my house. It's called the bandstand promenade, and there's always plenty of people, but tonight it's particularly crammed. I ask a passing policeman why it's so busy.

Bombay, he tells me, is a city of celebration. Yesterday was Eid, tomorrow is Saturday. So we're celebrating, I guess, Friday.

In a city that is so heavily lacking in parks, public spaces, open spaces of any sort, this is the one thing that everybody in the city has. It belongs to all of us, this wide open sea.

Everyone in the city is here. You know, you see rich people here having jogs and they're expensive trainers. And you see poor people here having peanuts and taking selfies. You see kids here making Instagram videos and you see granddads going for their evening walks to try and stay fit. And sometimes theres this great, great moment of community.

This is what cities are for. This is what cities can do. Its bring people together just through the act of being in the same space. And what I really worry is that thats going away, this gorgeous sunset right, this horizon thats going away. Were going to have a break bridge right here.

I can see this in front of me right now as I'm saying this, there's cranes in the middle of the sea. And the road is hopefully, you know, even though it's going to take away the horizon and it's going to take away that gorgeous sunset, maybe it'll return something to us as well. Maybe it'll return our open spaces here on land and the cars that are here will go away and maybe it'll allow people to come together a little bit more and maybe it will even clear up the skies. I'm optimistic about Bombay and I hope one day when this is all over, when the city is finished, although no city is ever finished, but when this phase of building, the city is finished, I hope Bombay becomes livable again.

Ore Ogunbi
Thanks for listening to this episode of the weekend Intelligence, which was presented by Leo Mirani and produced by Barclay Bram. Sound design was by Nico Rorfast. And the executive producer of the weekend intelligence is Gemma Newby. In a few weeks, I'll be reporting from my home city of Lagos. You can let us know if you like our city dispatches by emailing us@podcasteconomist.com and we'll bring you more.

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The Weekend Intelligence: Bombay, open city?

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2: The Local Perspective

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