The BMC has been stealthily bringing in privatisation in the past few years to the detriment of Mumbaikars; this has to be rolled back

This election to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has turned out to be the mother of all battles, as the saying goes. Every party and every alliance has gone out of its way to be polarising—some playing the communal card with that distasteful map of the city turning green in a veiled attempt to show ‘Islamisation of Mumbai’ and others playing the xenophobic card, drawing on 60-year-old impulses of Marathi Asmita—while also promising the moon and the stars for the city’s future in the name of development.

The alliances stitched together represent not ideological allyship or programme-based common ground; yesterday’s rivals, even the most bitter ones, became today’s political pals. Political formations, not only in Mumbai but across the state where elections were held for urban local bodies, turned out to be dalliances of political convenience and little else. That’s why their manifestos held little relevance. How many voters study manifestos anyway before deciding whom to vote for?

But whichever party or alliance gets the maximum seats will be in control of the BMC, India’s richest civic body by a long mile, for the next five years. The party or the alliance will have to get down to the business of urban governance of a city of more than 16 million, an estimate based on the last census, with political-economic interests pulling in different directions. The party or alliance may have an agenda, but this need not be in the best interests of the city. The BJP-Shiv Sena alliance, which virtually held the reins since 2022 when the city’s administration moved to the state headquarters by virtue of there being no elected body in the BMC, has demonstrated what it can do. The Thackeray cousins, Uddhav and Raj, together after 20 years, have made their agenda public. The Congress, the Nationalist Congress Party, and others count for little.

What Mumbai does not need is polarisation along communal, cultural, and linguistic lines. No, we have had enough of both sides carving up the city as if it were the golden prize between Gujarat and Maharashtra. There was no need for such a polarised and communal election campaign, among the worst many of us witnessed in the past 30-40 years. For saying similar, perhaps even a tad less offensive lines than what we heard, in the 1987 by-election in Vile Parle, the late Bal Thackeray was disenfranchised. By that yardstick, this election campaign should have sent the state’s and the city’s top leaders into the gallery of the disenfranchised. But times, they are a different; election officials too.

All said, Mumbai’s future is not a zero-sum game—and must never be—for any political formation or commercial entity. A zero-sum game, of course, is a situation in which one person or group wins or gains from something only by causing another person or group to lose from it. 

The tragedy is that Mumbai is not seen and treated as a city but only as real estate, among the most high-priced in the world, parcels of real estate on which to mount multi-crore projects. 

But what Mumbai needs is not hard to see:

n Land, housing and open spaces: The city’s land use plan allocates land parcels, but what of the public land, acres and acres of it, now being brazenly sold or given on long leases to private entities for commercial ventures or passion projects? From slum and housing redevelopment projects—and Mumbai has a handful on virtually every road across the city—to so-called public amenities, the city’s land is being carved out into parcels for private entities. Even the prime land owned by essential services like the BEST bus depots is sought to be privatised and handed over for commercial exploitation. In a sense, the mistake made with the surplus textile mill land is being repeated on a larger and more damaging scale. In this land market, affordable housing and open spaces are not even considered worthy of discussion, whereas Mumbai’s reality is that it needs enormous quantities of both. 

n Cohesive nature-based development: The direct and indirect attack on Mumbai’s natural areas has gathered momentum in the past few years—nearly 46,000 mangroves earmarked to be hacked, 256 acres of saltpan lands that will be constructed upon, and vast areas of the eco-sensitive zone of the Sanjay Gandhi National Park to be opened for planned construction. This is while the BMC presides over the Mumbai Climate Action Plan, prepares the climate budget, and makes a song and dance about “creating a coastal forest” on 100 acres of reclaimed land in south Mumbai. 

This is not mere dissonance on environmental issues; it is being ecologically blind and deaf. Mumbai needs a cohesive nature-based development plan, especially as climate change impacts intensify, even if it means revising the Development Plan 2034.

n Strengthened public services in transport, health, and education: The ideological basis that every civic service must be revenue-healthy and make profits—in other words, that users pay full charges and profit margins—has not been the foundation on which large, liveable, and healthy cities are built. Mumbai’s BEST and train services must remain fully publicly funded—the BMC can definitely afford the former—while the public access and services in its hospitals and schools must be made available to the last person in the line. The BMC has been stealthily, through the backdoor, bringing in privatisation in the past few years to the detriment of Mumbaikars who depend on these services; this has to be rolled back. And yes, give us back our roads and pavements in good condition, which is not too much to ask for. 

At the end of a fractious and controversial election, whoever occupies the seat of power must remember that it was not for nothing that Bombay, as it was then, was called the Urbs Prima in Indis. Can the party or alliance in power in the BMC now live up to that?