Central Railway and Western Railway together ferry over 7.5 million commuters daily in a feat which is unparalleled in the world. Mumbai, which is geographically linear, is expanding northwards since most people cannot afford to buy homes even in the extended suburbs. Vasai, Virar, Nalasopara, Kalwa, Mumbra, Vasind, Badlapur etc are the kind of places where Mumbaikars can think of buying apartments and that too with bank loans. And the only means of travel to their places of work in the city is the suburban train system. The railways have added several trains and provided amenities at many stations under an upgradation programme. But now they appear to have reached the saturation point. A report on the "Rising trend of accidental death in Mumbai suburban system" talks of an 'explosive situation' in 2030. But that situation has already arrived.
The problem is that the government, which was mostly headed by persons from outside the city, has never come out with a holistic plan to upgrade travel for the millions of Mumbaikars, but has only catered to the well-heeled. Take the case of the coastal road on which over Rs 12,000 cr has been spent. It is a brilliant piece of civil engineering, but benefits only motorists. The bulk of the population has been left out. Now there is talk of extending it to Vasai-Virar by spending an additional few thousand crores more. Again the target audience are the motorists. The other problem is that most M.Ps elected from the city have rarely shown any interest in issues concerning local train commuters even though they form a bulk of their vote bank. The passenger associations too have proved to be weak entities.
The BEST Undertaking, which carries over 3.5 million passengers daily, was once the pride of Mumbai. Today it has been reduced to a pale version of itself. It has been systematically killed by a nexus of corrupt bureaucrats and politicians, which ended the Undertaking's monopoly over the supply of electricity to the island city. The BEST is used to make profit selling electricity and used the surplus to subsidise the transport wing. By letting other players in power distribution in the island city the authorities emaciated BEST. As a result BEST services have deteriorated rapidly forcing passengers to spend a long time waiting for their bus. In disgust, many have switched to local trains.
The newly-introduced metro rail system would ideally have been a boon, but except for the Ghatkopar-Versova sector, which carried over one billion commuters, ridership on other lines have not been encouraging for a variety of reasons, including high fares.
An obvious solution to Mumbai's transport problem has been staring at its face for decades and that is water transport. The metropolis is surrounded by the Arabia sea and any government with even a fraction of vision would have gone in for sea transport as is being done in several other cities in Asia and the West. Several experts have suggested the use of high-speed boats with large carrying capacity to be operated from Nariman Point to Vasai-Virar on the western coast with halts at Worli, Dadar, Mahim, Bandra, Versova et al. On the eastern front such services could have been operated from the Gateway of India to Trombay, Vashi and beyond. But for some inexplicable reason sea transport has not been considered seriously by the government. One of the entrepreneurs, who was keen on operating such a service, backed out because a bureaucrat demanded a big kickback.
The situation is alarming and unless the governments in Mumbai and Delhi wake up, more disasters like the one which happened on Monday may take place.
