The Hindu Business Line : Mumbai's happiness and hardship index

INDIA is home to the fourth happiest group of people in the world. Only the Australians, the Americans and the Egyptians are happier than us. If this was the finding of a survey by market research company Gfk NOP published some days back, a `hardship index' survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit, published before the happiness index, ranked Amchi Mumbai a lowly124 of the 130 cities it put under the scanner.

Mumbai scored high in this rating — 62 per cent — against the highest hardship rating of 80 per cent scored by the least liveable city in the world — Port Moresby, capital of Papua New Guinea. The three broad categories of hardship were: a) health and safety, b) culture and environment, and c) infrastructure.

While Mumbai may not have fared too poorly on such aspects as threat of violent crime or terrorism/armed conflict, things could not have gone the city's way with factors such as corruption rating or recreational availability. Of course, faring well on the basis of climate was totally beyond the city's control, as the July 26 deluge made amply clear.

Surely, what should have been within the city administration's control was the infrastructure rating on the basis of transport, housing and utility network.

And it is in this context that one should see the Bombay High Court's October 17 order, quashing the sale of mill land almost purely for commercial gains. Many feel the judiciary had no other option in the face of the inertia of the administration to get its act together.

This is by no means end of the legal battle as up for grabs are hundreds of acres of mill land in central Mumbai. Also, the issue cannot be viewed solely in the light of developing only one-third of the total mill land or the mill-owners being forced to repay excess money received from the developers such as Indiabulls, which has decided to file an appeal in the Supreme Court against the Bombay High Court order. The others will soon follow.

The central issue here is the exclusivity that would have been there for prospective buyers with almost 90 per cent of the mill land being put up for commercial development. Instead, the reality facing the future residents/commercial space owners in central Mumbai is that the inhabitants of low-cost housing would be virtually rubbing shoulders with them.

Adding insult to injury would be the tens of thousands of commoners who would be moving around in the public parks that will come up in the remaining one-third area.

Meanwhile, it may not take more than a couple of days before all the protagonists in the highly profitable land sale soap get their act together. Those who wanted to make a maximum city in central Mumbai to the virtual exclusion of public amenities, green or otherwise, and the rather low-market, low-cost housing residents will be looking to the apex court to provide them succour.

In essence, the ones who wanted to carve out an exclusive residential and commercial zone in central Mumbai would suffer the hardship caused by further overloading of infrastructure, such as transport, housing and the utility network, provided it is shared by people from similar income bracket. It is now widely perceived that the reversal on mill land-sale will push real-estate rates up in the suburbs by 20-30 per cent.

The middle-class aspirations of owning a house in Mumbai will come under further pressure and some fear that the court order could actually lead to exactly the opposite of what was intended. Not necessarily, feel others. That is, if the city planners take up in earnest the mission of decongesting Mumbai by putting in place good infrastructure.

A beginning could be made with the city's public transport that is now a severe trial to the people who use it. And the island-city should be better linked to the mainland with more bridges and other forms of access.

Realistically, Mumbai could try and put more space between its living standards and those in Algiers, Phnom Penh, Dhaka, Lagos, Karachi and Port Moresby.

The distance between the Mumbai city hardship index of 62 per cent and the world hardship index average of 27 per cent itself would be a tough ask. Perhaps, a start could be made with Mumbai getting close to 200 acres of open space, because, most of all, this city needs to breathe.

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