Mumbai: With a population of about 21 million people, and ranking third among the world’s cities in terms of the number of billionaires (386 according to the latest Hurun Rich List), Mumbai suffers from a number of challenges. While the new metro lines, coastal road, Atal Setu and Goregaon Mulund Link Road are promising development, the city is also beset with issues related to infrastructure, transport and public service. As the new government takes shape, here are five things it needs to focus on.

Mumbai needs corporators

The country’s richest civic body and its life force – the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) – has been functioning without corporators for the last three years. The absence of 227 sitting corporators, the longest vacancy in the 150-year history of the civic body, has had a significant impact on governance and the lives of the people.

Unlike MLAs and MPs, councilors are the most accessible elected representatives, often the first point of contact during a crisis.

BMC elections have not been held in the last three years, mainly due to legal challenges over issues such as demarcation of ward boundaries, increase in the number of wards and corporators and holding elections in 92 municipal councils and panchayats without OBC quota. ,

While most of the legal issues have been addressed, the state government has shown little interest in holding elections (although they are conducted by the State Election Commission, the timing is effectively decided by the state government).

Now, with Mahayuti’s impressive victory in the assembly elections, BMC officials are optimistic that the long-awaited civic elections will be held soon.

Since March 2022, the Municipal Corporation Commissioner has served in several key roles – state-appointed administrator, de facto mayor and head of the standing committee. As a result, the system of checks and balances has been replaced by a single decision-making authority, where proposals for the betterment of the city are made, approved and executed by the Municipal Corporation Commissioner alone.

Former Congress corporator Asif Zakaria called corporators “the bridge connecting BMC to citizens”; There is no accountability from the administration in his absence.”

more metro lines

The promise of a well-oiled metro networking 337 km of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) inspired optimism among Mumbaikars when the project was launched in 2008. Sixteen years later, the Mumbai Metro Rail Corporation Limited, 50 kilometers long. The Chief Minister will have to ensure that work is expedited on at least 125 km more to connect Greater Mumbai with MMR.

The 125-km network will have five metro lines, which will reduce passenger load from suburban railways. These lines are expected to carry a cumulative 4.5 million passengers per day, although actual ridership numbers are likely to vary once the routes become operational.

Currently, five metro lines exist only on paper.

The 125 km long line includes the 35 km long Airport Line connecting Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport to Navi Mumbai International Airport (Metro 8), the 9.20 km long Gaimukh-Shivaji Chowk/Kashi Mira line (Metro 10), the 12.70-km long . Wadala to Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus Line (Metro 11), 23 km Shivaji Chowk/Kashi Mira to Virar Line (Metro 13) and 45 km Kanjurmarg to Badlapur Line (Metro 14).

Dhawal Ashar, Program Head of Integrated Transport at the World Resources Institute, said: “Over the next five years, the MMR is set to expand public transport capacity like never before with over 300 km of metro and hopefully over 10,000 buses. However, to realize the full potential of this potential, the focus needs to be on creating people-friendly infrastructure for all road users; The declining infrastructure for pedestrians is a matter of concern.”

Fast-Tracking MUTP

Although Mumbai’s dense suburban rail network is constantly being upgraded and improved, two phases (3 and 3A) of the Mumbai Urban Transport Project (MUTP), which are currently running at a cost of approx. Monetary stimulus is required from the state to fast track projects worth Rs 45,000 crore.

Estimated cost of MUTP-3 Out of which Rs 10,947 crore Rs 6,129 crore will be raised through debt, while the Union Railway Ministry and the state will have to spend the remaining amount on 50:50 cost-sharing.

A railway official told HT that Indian Railways has been consistently funding projects, but the state government has not been as consistent. The official said that when Uddhav Thackeray was the chief minister, the funding was allegedly stopped due to different political arrangements in the state and the Center and the then CM’s own cautious working style. When Eknath Shinde took command, it gradually gained momentum. “However, the pace of fund disbursement remains inconsistent since the focus is on building metro lines,” the official said.

Some of the major projects planned under MUTP-3 include procurement of 47 AC local trains and quadrupling of Virar and Dahanu Road lines. MUTP-3A includes procurement of 191 AC rakes, renovation of 19 stations and new tracks on the Western and Central lines and extension of the Harbor Line from Goregaon to Borivali.

Nandkumar Deshmukh, president of the Federation of Suburban Railway Passengers Association, blamed red-tapism for the frequent clashes between the railways and the state government. He hopes that things will move forward faster now.

More Best Buses

Brihanmumbai Electricity Supply and Transport (BEST) Undertaking completed 150 years in May. But with the declining fleet size and mounting losses over the years, the undertaking was in no mood to celebrate.

The transport branch has been struggling to survive for a few decades. This year it has sought grants An investment of Rs 2,812 crore will be made from its parent body – Greater Mumbai Municipal Corporation – to increase the fleet size from the current 2,913 to 8,000 by March 2026. Of the existing fleet, the undertaking owns 1,013 buses, while the remaining 1,900 buses are on lease.

Citizen transport forum, Amchi Mumbai, Amchi BEST (AMAB) has been pushing for the need of 6000 buses to cater to the population of Mumbai for almost a year now.

Every year, BEST seeks financial assistance from the civic body, but “availability of funds remains a challenge, to the extent that we have approached financial institutions for credit lines”, said a BEST official on condition of anonymity. But said. Due to lack of funds the undertaking was forced to hire buses. The leased fleet faced some struggles when one operator shut down buses and took 280 buses off the road, affecting half a million passengers recently.

Passengers and BEST unions alike have called for an overhaul of BEST. As Mumbai Metro lines become operational, last mile connectivity becomes important to discourage people from taking private transport.

Another issue hampering the expansion plans to serve 3.2-3.5 million passengers daily is the non-availability of new buses despite placing orders. BEST has proposed to add 1,200 double-decker A/C e-buses, 2,100 single-decker A/C e-buses and 2,650 single-decker A/C e-buses. While orders for 200 A/C double-decker e-buses were placed with Switch Mobility, the manufacturer has supplied only 50 buses so far – rising manufacturing costs have put the rest of the orders on hold for almost a year. The undertaking is also struggling to procure 2,100 single-decker e-buses from Olectra Greentech, which has supplied only 300 buses so far.

The dwindling fleet will only mean that more people will switch to self-owned vehicles or use cabs, leading to more congestion on Mumbai’s already jammed roads.

Fleet expansion is the key to BEST’s revival, but the buses should be owned and operated by the transport utility and not through contractors. The performance of the contractors has proved disappointing,” said AMAB convenor Hussain Indorewala. “While BEST is already an arm of BMC, its budget should be merged with BMC, the way the Indian Railways budget was merged with the Union budget,”

Old Sobo buildings need revival

There are more than 19,000 derelict buildings in South Mumbai, of which only one-third have been rebuilt. The remaining 13,000 buildings older than 80 years are awaiting reconstruction. Over the past three decades, a handful of buildings have collapsed every monsoon, causing loss of lives. Residential buildings constructed before 1960 in Maharashtra are called cess properties because they pay cess (also called repair fund) to the government.

The new government needs to immediately address the plight of lakhs of residents living in these cessed buildings. Along with embarking on the redevelopment of Dharavi, one of Asia’s largest slums, the state will also need to focus its attention on revitalizing South Mumbai through policy interventions that are beneficial to its residents.

Eknath Rajpure, who heads residents’ organization MHADA Sangharsh Kriti Samiti and himself a resident of one of the 388 dilapidated MHADA buildings, said the government is promoting cluster redevelopment, where multiple plots have been merged (Bhendi Bazaar , Kamathipura, BDD) Chawl and Abhyudaya Nagar), the small plots on which their buildings stand in South Mumbai have not been attractive to builders. “The state should amend the existing development control and promotion rules to make such stand-alone buildings viable for developers and bring a change in the lives of people,” Rajapure said.

Devendra Fadnavis dominated the Maharashtra political stage with his regular “exposes” of alleged corruption in irrigation projects between 2009 and 2014, targeting Ajit Pawar, Chhagan Bhujbal and Sunil Tatkare of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), who were then Were in power in partnership. Congress.

Fadnavis’s attack on corruption charges, including Mumbai’s Adarsh ​​apartments, was so effective that it became a national talking point, and one of the factors in the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government’s eventual ouster from power in 2014. Emerged.

On Thursday, Fadnavis, 54, will be sworn in as Maharashtra chief minister for the third time – and next to him, sworn in as his deputy will be former CM Eknath Shinde, and leader Fadnavis once frequently targeted, Ajit Pawar.

Nagpur man Fadnavis’ rise to power in the state, and consequently as one of the most powerful leaders in the country, has been both meteoric and fraught. His father Gangadhar Fadnavis, an old Jan Sangh loyalist, was a Legislative Council member who was arrested during the Emergency. Young Fadnavis, who was only eight years old at the time, was so enraged by the arrest that he left his convent school because it was named after then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and instead entered Saraswati Vidyalaya in Shankar Nagar, Nagpur. Took. Apart from his late father, his aunt Shobhatai, who was the MLA from Chandrapur, was another seminal influence on him.

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“Devendra was from the Dharam Peth branch of the RSS. He and his brother Ashish joined when they were little boys and they used to religiously attend the RSS winter camp in Khapri,” says senior Sangh worker Avinash Sangvai. He recalls that while older workers like him had to supervise the child volunteers, “Devendra, though young himself, would do our work; His leadership qualities were evident even then.” This haste became more evident when Fadnavis became a councilor of Nagpur Municipal Corporation at the age of 22 and mayor of the city at the age of 27.

In 1999, he was elected Member of the Legislative Assembly from Nagpur West, which he represented three times, before contesting from Nagpur South-West, from where he won three more times. Former BJP national general secretary (organisation) Sanjay Joshi said that Fadnavis was selected and groomed by the RSS from an early age. “His commitment to the ideology and caring for all regardless of caste, creed or religion was instilled in him at an early age.”

enter the big league

When the BJP was in turmoil after the death of Gopinath Munde in a car accident in 2014, there was a sudden leadership vacuum in the party in Maharashtra. When Narendra Modi came to power just days later, he turned to his “young friend Devendra” to take over the state leadership of the BJP. But as soon as the biggest opportunity of his career opened for Fadnavis, there was a chink in his armour. The BJP appointed a team of Eknath Khadse, Sudhir Mungantiwar, Vinod Tawde, Pankaja Munde and Fadnavis to lead the party in the assembly elections to be held in a few months. The party also decided for the first time to break away from its ally Shiv Sena and contest the elections independently.

But when the results came, she fell 22 seats short of a simple majority and took outside support from the NCP for a month before striking a deal with the Shiv Sena. The first alienation from his ideological partner, and the gradual sidelining of Khadse, Tawde and Munde, were all attributed to Fadnavis’s ambition.

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In his first term as Chief Minister, he brought freshness and youthful energy to the Chief Minister’s office by initiating several major infrastructure projects for the state, including metro lines for Mumbai and the Mumbai-Nagpur Samriddhi Mahamarg to boost the rural economy. His government offered large-scale loan waivers to farmers and created a rural irrigation grid for Marathwada under a scheme called Jal Yukt Shivar. But the doubt remained that he would face no obstacles on his way to the top. In the 2019 assembly elections, BJP and Shiv Sena contested the elections as a pre-poll alliance, but the alliance soon fell apart with the Sena demanding the top post. Fadnavis’s misguided attempt to form government with a breakaway faction of the Ajit Pawar-led NCP in the early hours of October 24, 2019, tarnished his image and destroyed his goodwill. “Me Punha Yein” (I will come back), his cinematic line while leaving office after 80 hours as Chief Minister, became the subject of countless memes.

Once again on the opposition benches, Fadnavis became a formidable opponent for the newly formed MVA. He led a high-decibel campaign against alleged corruption during Covid, created a conspiracy theory over the suicide of actor Sushant Singh Rajput, and brought the MVA government on the backfoot by alleging that police informer Mansukh Hiren’s body was found hours before His life was in danger. Washed up on the shore. The whole fiasco of gelatin sticks being found outside Mukesh Ambani’s house led to the then Mumbai Police Commissioner making sensational claims of corruption against MVA Home Minister Anil Deshmukh, who ultimately had to resign. In March 2022, Fadnavis handed over to MPs on the floor of the House a pen drive containing 125 hours of audio recordings, allegedly secured by IPS officer Rashmi Shukla, which contained evidence of an MVA conspiracy to frame opposition leaders like Girish Mahajan. It was claimed to present. cases.

The playbook was familiar: relentless attacks on the government, only this time every allegation was amplified by an army on social media.

The attack on MVA was as overt as it was covert. In June 2022, Fadnavis was part of an extraordinary midnight coup that split the Shiv Sena and resulted in the fall of the 21-month-old MVA government. But in this moment of victory there was also a setback for him. Instead of Fadnavis taking over as chief minister, as was widely expected, rebel soldier Eknath Shinde was appointed chief minister, with Fadnavis asked to serve as his deputy chief minister.

In the face of this apparent disdain, Fadnavis relied on his old RSS training, and despite initially being refused the deputy’s job, decided to toe the party line. Sandeep Joshi, a friend from his Nagpur days, said, “His demeanor is calm and his nature is calm, which allows him to make a comeback without any fanfare.”

what lies ahead

The RSS training also meant that Fadnavis, who took part in the Ram Janmabhoomi movement in Ayodhya in 1992, took action against beef consumption, sale and transportation as one of his first decisions after taking charge as CM in 2014. Was banned. In the recent assembly elections, he had participated. He called that campaign “Dharma Yudh” (holy war), and repeatedly raised the issue of “vote jihad”. As part of the investigation into the Bhima-Koregaon violence on January 1, 2018, Fadnavis also took action against what he termed “urban Naxalites”. As part of this action, activists, lawyers and academics were put in jail. For six years he has been waiting for the case against him to begin.

Fadnavis’s first challenge in his first term as Chief Minister was to control the Maratha movement. The seemingly leaderless movement brought the state to a brief standstill with massive marches across Maharashtra. His government had made provisions for 12% and 13% quota for the community in education and jobs respectively, which were ultimately struck down by the Supreme Court in 2021. The Maratha demand for reservation, which continues to persist, will remain one of their biggest challenges upon their return. Chief Minister. And in this he will face Sharad Pawar, who is considered one of the forces behind the rise of Maratha leader Manoj Jarange-Patil. Pawar often took aim at Fadnavis, citing his Brahmin roots and minister Anaji Pant, who conspired against Maratha king Shivaji and Sambhaji.

Actually, Fadnavis became the second youngest CM of the state after Sharad Pawar. YearHe is often compared to the latter in terms of his acumen and political adeptness. However, unlike Pawar, Fadnavis may be less cautious. At a public meeting ahead of the 2019 assembly elections, Fadnavis declared that the Sharad Pawar era was “over” in the state, but was left stunned when Pawar held the MVA together. This battle for supremacy between the two now seems to be going in favor of Fadnavis. He not only broke Pawar’s party, but also returned as chief minister to potentially serve a second five-year term, which even Pawar could not do.