First Post Mumbai: Say Goodbye to the Mumbai You Know

My new column in FirstPost.
for the full article, click here:

Say Goodbye to the Mumbai You Know

excerpt:


"Here then, is an incomplete and flawed view of the Mumbai of the present. In the future, this ELU is what the authorities in the Municipal Corporation and the ward offices will base their decisions and permissions on. If transformations are to be effected using readings that do not square up with ground realities, urban planning, however well intentioned will not amount to much.

Pankaj Joshi told his audience of how difficult it was to get hold of the ELU. Not in the public domain, he had to extricate the documents from the authorities by invoking the Right to Information (RTI) Act.

This is symptomatic of the ways of the state these days. Either by their own resources or by outsourcing these studies to various consultants and planners, the information gathered and the documents generated from them are increasingly held back. The citizens at large shall only experience the consequences slowly, over time, as the new Development Plan gets implemented. Consider this: the previous Development Plan was published in 1981, but sanctioned for implementation only in 1993, twelve years after."