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Mumbai wants to become like Shanghai
A leading American environmental
scientist, Jesse Ausubel, last week told an Australian oil and gas
conference travellers wanting to see a 21st century city should
visit Singapore or Shanghai rather than New York or Paris.
It is easier to understand Singapore’s role as one of the world’s
most modern cities since it had already highlighted its desire to
become “a global city” some 35 years ago, pinpointing productivity
growth as a lynchpin for rapid economic progress.
What this means is that the Port of Singapore Authority can move
many more shipping containers than almost any other port in the
world, measured in terms of units moved per worker or per hour
around the clock.
This is reflected in relatively higher wages for port workers.
Tiny Singapore, with a population of 4.5 million, is also among
the world’s top three crude oil refining centres even though it
does not produce a drop of crude oil and the operator of one of
the world’s most profitable international airlines.
Yet Singapore is a far cry from Shanghai, a small city-state
versus the commercial capital of the world’s most populous nation.
What they have in common is that both are undergoing rapid
transformation as social and financial centres, with billions of
dollars invested every year in the upgrading of infrastructure.
In both cases, change is driven by authoritarian governments that
set specific national directions and back these up with vast
capital expenditures, in contrast to the largely private sector
driven urbanisation of the western world.
Three years ago, Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh announced
that India’s key commercial city, Mumbai, should become like
Shanghai by 2010, a plan that is likely to be stymied by its
relatively poor infrastructure and the fact that 60% of its people
live in slums.
Some of the catching up seems almost impossible for Mumbai, where
democratic forms of government ensures that almost any major
infrastructure project will suffer hold ups from political
activists and environmental groups.
This is a sharp contrast to China’s ability to bulldoze through
many national projects.
Like Shanghai, Mumbai has a population of 18 million people.
But rapid population growth will make it the world’s most populous
city with 28.5 million people by 2020, second only to Tokyo.
One of India’s newspapers, The Times of India, described Mumbai
and Shanghai as “two of Asia’s greatest cities, washed by the
seas, blessed by history”.
A typical example of why Shanghai is hurtling itself into the
future, a point mentioned by the American environmental scientist,
Ausubel, is the US$1.3 billion magnetic levitation train from
Pudong airport to downtown Shanghai.
It is the world’s fastest train, taking eight minutes for the 50km
journey.
An Indian journalist in London, Salil Tripathi, discusses the
formidable challenges for Mumbai’s plans in a detailed article,
“Bombay’s Growth Gets Shanghaied”, in the latest issue of the Far
Eastern Economic Review.
The large Indian city has made an attempt to brush aside obstacles
to development with 90,000 makeshift homes demolished last year,
mainly affecting the poor and some middle class people.
The demolitions only stopped, Tripathi wrote, when national
government officials realised that poor people living on prime
land – housing costs in the city average US$52.74 per square foot
a year – “may not make economic sense and may be an eyesore, but
have the right to vote”.
Tripathi suggests it is “a good thing” that Bombay may never
become like Shanghai, given national and local political
processes.
“As the home of India’s financial capital and as the home of
Bollywood, Bombay combines the drive of Manhattan with the hype of
Hollywood, creating a unique amalgam of ruthless efficiency and
unexpected emotionalism.
“Parts of the city run incredibly well – such as the lunch
distribution business of dabbawallahs, and the overloaded trains
that carry more passengers with greater frequency and for longer
hours than comparable mass transit systems in the world.
“As a trading city, Bombay has thrived by being open to money,
people and ideas, a city where anyone can make it big – as a movie
star or a tycoon – and the divisions of caste, language and
religion, which plague mainland India, doesn’t seem to matter to
most of its inhabitants most of the time.”
Bombay, he writes, is home to a staggering 80% of India’s mutual
funds and its two stock exchanges account for 92% of India’s stock
market turnover.
Where once Indians suggested New York should be the role model for
Mumbai, the suggestion that China may overtake the United States
as an economic power in the decades to come has made “many in
Bombay want to look at Shanghai”.
Tripathi writes that the chief minister of Maharashtra state,
Vilasrao Deshmukh, has announced a US$6.5 billion infrastructure
development programme that includes a metro rail link, a variety
of highways and beautification of the city’s airport.
But therein lies a dilemma. The author notes that three out of
five Mumbai residents live in slums – they includes the city’s
police force, lower court lawyers and other skilled and unskilled
workers.
“Displace them, and you destroy the network of relationships that
continue to make the city hum.”
 
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