Mumbai: With just three days to go for the campaigning to end for the fourth and final phase of the Lok Sabha polls in Maharashtra, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Congress chief Rahul Gandhi will address public meetings in Maharashtra on Friday.
While PM Modi will address a rally at Bandra-Kurla Complex in Mumbai on Friday evening, Gandhi will speak in Sinnar in Nashik district around the same time. In Maharashtra, the Congress president has so far addressed rallies in Nagpur, Wardha, Chandrapur, Nanded and held an interactive session with students in Pune.
Battle lines are drawn for 10 of the 11 Lok Sabha seats that fall in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region and have largely common issues of amenities, infrastructure and transport that remain unresolved for most part. The seats are Mumbai North, Mumbai North East, Mumbai North West, Mumbai North Central, Mumbai South Central, Mumbai South, Thane, Palghar, Bhiwandi, Kalyan and Raigad.
All of them, save Raigad which voted on April 23 in the third phase, go to polls in the fourth and final phase in the state on April 29. Over 8.5 million people in this region commute by local trains in torturous conditions, besides another two million by BEST buses, autorickshaws, taxis and private vehicles, with many spending an average of 3-4 hours in their daily home-office-home ordeal.
The key issues in Mumbai and its larger Mumbai Metropolitan Region pertain to the lack of open spaces, few recreational areas, quickly vanishing greenery, grandiose projects planned and being implemented – but many have come too late, as a state official says.
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With a population of over 17 million, the 600 square km island of Mumbai is city of dreams – and also contrasts, There is big business, big glamour, big money, but also big slums, big cars on narrow roads, small hearths but big hearts, and so on. It is home to some of the wealthiest people in the country and also the poorest, in sprawling slums or homeless on pavements, with glamour and grit living cheek-by-jowl.
There are big infra-projects with investments of thousands of crores of rupees in the pipeline, including the Metro railway network and the coastal road project, but time is not saved, and there are problems of congestion galore despite the city growing vertically with over 7,000 skyscrapers, some over 250 metres tall, glaring at slums at their doorsteps.
In the past couple of years, the city has seen several bridges come crashing down, a huge stampede, roads caving in and other problems associated with a crumbling infrastructure and growing population. Against this backdrop, the BJP-Shiv Sena combine will seek to retain all the 11 seats they currently hold after the 2014 “Modi wave” while the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party plus 56- party alliance will try to wrest them back.
