Bursting Mumbai to get overspill city
DELH I — An Indian state government is planning to build a “New Mumbai” as an overspill for the country’s commercial capital because overcrowding has brought India’s largest mega-city to a halt.
There are now more than 20 million people living in Mumbai, traffic is so gridlocked it can take two hours to drive from the city centre to its airport, and the constant tide of new immigrants chasing their Bollywood dream has sent rents soaring.
The state government has already built a new city, Navi Mumbai, on its outskirts, to ease the pressure, but the influx of people seeking new lives and fortunes in India’s most glamorous city has prompted calls for a second overspill. Navi Mumbai’s population has already risen beyond a million.
Now Maharashtra’s state minister for housing, Sachin Ahir, has backed calls for another new city to be constructed 80 kilometres away in Uran, a fishing village of 23,000 people just across Mumbai’s Dharamtar Creek. If the plan succeeds, it is expected to grow to a quarter of the size of Mumbai itself. Ahir said the private sector would help build a metropolis on a 106-square kilometre site. Officials plan to integrate two private ports, a gas power station and other major infrastructure projects to lure people from Mumbai.
T hey are considering making the new city part of metropolitan Mumbai to make sure it shares in major transport developments. A new airport at Navi Mumbai, the city’s Trans-Harbour Link, and the prospect of cheaper homes, are expected to play a major part in attracting people away from the “mother city.”
Meanwhile, protests erupted Friday in southeast India and several federal ministers tendered their resignations, after the government bowed to a campaign for a new state called Telangana. It will be India’s 29th state if it gets parliamentary approval, and will be created out of an impoverished northern area of Andhra Pradesh.