The relief and joy of boarding a suburban local train in Mumbai cannot be explained to those who dismiss the unique experience. Millions felt the rush this week after a long 16-month gap when the city’s famed lifeline was initially locked down – first time in its 168-year-old history – and then reopened to a select few. There are vaccine-related restrictions but Dadar platform, that perennial Mumbai marker of normality, has been packed with crush-level crowds. Suburban train travel, more bone-crushing and life-sapping than exhilarating, left Mumbai feeling less like itself. As the crowds return to the railways and roads, shopping districts and offices, it is time to imagine the post-pandemic city and work towards it. Yes, you read that right. Post-pandemic is a reality on the far horizon even if we are still debating and dreading the onset of the third wave of Covid-19. The third wave will come and go, as will the fourth, maybe the fifth and so on. It may well be that the mutating virus will never leave us and we cannot return to life as we knew it before March 2020. Even if we do, our lives with its meaningful actions and interactions would have changed. If nothing, enochlophobia or the fear of crowds perceived as dangerous to oneself, which has set in among people is likely to linger. What happens when enochlophobia meets Mumbai crowds is the subject for a cutting chai party someday but pandemic-related changes are here to stay.
When the virus entered India through international airports last March and laid low its largest cities, repeating a pattern that ripped through international cities such as New York, London, Madrid and others, urbanists were quick to foretell the death of cities and end of urban life. This had echoes from the past when epidemics would make cities wither away. They did not, they were transformed: whether European cities after the Black Plague of the 14th century, New York after the cholera epidemic of the 19th century or world’s largest urban centres after the Spanish Flu in 1918-20. The cholera outbreaks led to New York’s cleaner drinking water network, tree-lined boulevards, and large parks which architect Frederick Law Olmstead said would be “…(its) urban lungs, outlets for foul air and inlets for pure air”.
Mumbai survived through the plague in 1896-97 and the flu barely 22 years later. The story of how Bombay Improvement Trust came to be in the post-epidemic years which led to planned housing with supportive infrastructure in Dadar-MatungaWorli is often revisited these days. Mumbai was devastated and scarred by epidemics, but it was pulled back together on each occasion. An epidemic leaves its imprint on cities in their transformation. It is certain that India’s largest and vibrant cities will transform – or are transforming – after their brush with the pandemic. The debate is about the nature of this transformation, its purpose and impact on citizens, and its leaders. Governments, whether at the centre or state or urban local bodies, must start paying attention to these questions and open files on the post-pandemic city. Maharashtra, after all, is among the urbanised states in India.
A significant lesson of the last 18 months is that there is no substitute for the public sector, especially in life-critical sectors such as health and transport. It was eventually Mumbai municipal corporation’s large Covid-specific facilities or its mandate-cum-monitoring of private hospitals that prevented the city from going into the shortage spiral that Delhi’s Covid patients did. It was Mumbai’s battered and about-to-be-shut network of BEST buses, backed by state transport buses and semi-public taxis, which kept the city connected in the absence of local trains.
The municipal corporation’s “Mumbai Model”, which earned high praise from the Supreme Court to a grudging BJP, was based on the civic body in the driver’s seat drawing upon multi-sectoral resources. Beyond the immediate fire-fighting, the true Mumbai model must extend to the city’s post-pandemic renewal and reconstruction in a cross-sectoral way touching upon health, transport, housing, economic activity, environment, and people which includes vulnerable sections such as migrant workers and women-children. Each sector has borne the impact of the pandemic in different ways and presents diverse challenges in the reconstruction, but none can be tackled in isolation. What’s needed is for the Maharashtra government to coral the dozens of agencies working on Mumbai, give the pre-eminent place to the municipal corporation, and get them to draw up a comprehensive post-pandemic Mumbai Plan. Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray, or better still his son and minister Aditya Thackeray, should get down to this soon.
Other cities of the world are on the job, urbanists are writing research papers, and the private sector-think tank cliques are signing off recommendatory reports on the post-pandemic city. Urban India policies suffer from lack of substantial and clean data, this comes to bite us again. For example, there are only guesstimates of how many migrant workers left Mumbai last year for which states, how many returned, and how their rental housing concerns are addressed. Data, if used honestly, helps draw better plans. Even with the sparse data available, it is not too early for the Thackeray government to start work on the Mumbai Plan. The bottom-line must be a better quality of life for every Mumbaikar in a safer city. Easier said than done, yes, but get started.
Smruti Koppikar, journalist, urban chronicler and media educator, writes on politics, cities, gender and development. She tweets @smrutibombay and surfs Insta on @bombayfiles
