Pandemic-pummelled Mumbai needs to fix public housing

Back in 2008, when people still did brunches and struck deals while hobnobbing in business class, artist Sudarshan Shetty bumped into real estate tycoon Manish Maker on a flight. The young Maker who well understands his art, asked Shetty to create something that best represented the city of Mumbai. On a paper napkin, right then and there, Sudarshan Shetty sketched a BEST double decker bus with giant wings that reached for the skies. medium nocaption81901137The Flying Bus, luminous cherry red with glittering silvery wings, now stands at the Bandra-Kurla Complex looking to fly the minute a driver steps in and turns on the ignition. In reality, the stainless steel wings attached to the bus considerably outweigh the double-decker, necessitating the bus to be welded to the floor. The Flying Bus is part celebration, part lament for the city Shetty calls home. Money plus people equals power, and this has been Mumbai’s cachet. But the pandemic has shown that in an interconnected world, power is only as good as one’s weakest link. Malcolm Gladwell, who collects theories for a living, cites the idea of a football team to illustrate this one. A soccer team, says Gladwell, is only as good as its poorest player because it’s an interactive sport unlike say basketball which he calls a ‘strong legs’ sport. A LeBron James can single-handedly move across the court for a slam dunk but a mediocre player can fluff the best pass set up by a Messi or a Xavi. Improving weak players’ performance is more productive for football teams in the long run than raising the standard of their top players, he posits. medium nocaption81901141In that vein, a public health crisis — unlike a personal health crisis where one might choose the top doctor and a ‘super-speciality’ hospital for themselves — calls for an inter-connected response from multiple agencies: municipal authorities, public health officials, contact tracers, vaccinators and a common code of public behaviour. How has Mumbai, reporting the country’s largest Covid caseload, linked together in this public health crisis, and what lessons can we draw from it when planning ahead? On February 2 last year, when the coronavirus wasn’t even close to India, investment banker Hemendra Kothari sent a message to the then municipal commissioner Praveen Pardeshi, requesting him to alert and prepare Mumbai for the spread of the virus. Subsequently, Mumbai billionaires worked directly with the administration to ramp up Mumbai’s health infrastructure in a matter of weeks. The Ambanis lent their private plane, and the Tatas an Air Asia aircraft to airlift a few thousand PPE kits from a private manufacturer in Tiruppur even before the Tamil Nadu government knew of him. It was just one of the reasons Mumbai health workers did not lack PPE kits from fairly early on. When public transport was shut, all top hotels, including the five stars, gave their rooms at highly subsidised rates to BMC health workers. The Tatas worked with BMC to ramp up facilities at Sion Hospital, one of Mumbai’s top civic hospitals, while Reliance Industries, Birlas and L&T turned around Seven Hills Hospital, virtually abandoned due to NCLT litigation, under 90 days to create a 1,300-bed, fully equipped Covid facility. A WhatsApp group linking bureaucrats to Mumbai’s top corporate bosses ensured that overstretched BMC had sufficient ancillary support from the city’s wealthiest citizens. medium nocaption81901144The usually-maligned BMC proved how effective civic outreach can better ordinary people’s lives. On top of running field jumbo hospitals to contain Covid in India’s densest slum at Dharavi to creating containment zones in packed suburbs, the 1.2 lakh strong staff made sure the city never broke down. BEST and the water, fire, sanitation, health and disaster management teams, the 24 ward officers ran full pelt through the year. Mumbai is a high-risk, high-reward city. People come here to escape the past, the hinterland, the oppression of old money to make their own new money. Over the years, the city has built up institutional and personal trust. This pact that the citizen has with the city — to follow law and order, to not harass women, to queue up, follow traffic rules etc — reduces transaction cost, the friction of daily life in an overcrowded city, leading in turn, to what economist Douglass North called path dependency.This composite philanthropy, social compact and institutional robustness have been Mumbai’s strongest links in this crisis. Its weakest link continues to be lack of public housing. As per the 2012 NSSO, every four in ten Mumbaikar lives in slums with non-existent civic facilities. The already scandalous number is only likely to have gone up. If the city has to use the pandemic as a transformational opportunity, its top priority has to be to remove slums and create landbanks for public housing. Without that, it can never take wing.(Disclaimer: The views expressed here are the author's own)Untitled Carousel 81607857