Doing a Shanghai

Shanghai is about lovely, wide and clean footpaths for pedestrians that we don’t seem to worry about. These footpaths are also disabled-friendly so even older people in wheel chairs go around the city without fear of being knocked down. In fact, we have never seen so many older people in wheel chairs, sometimes unaccompanied, out in the open in any city in India. Contrast this with the ongoing widening of roads in Mumbai that is destroying whatever little footpaths we have, to make way for additional lanes for cars. This project is also destroying old big trees along these footpaths. Shanghai, on the other hand, has well-tended trees all over.

Shanghai is clean, really clean, like all Chinese cities we visited in our three-week stay. There are large dustbins everywhere in the city. There are attendants for these bins. There are trolleys to take the bins away. Shanghai is also about clean toilets for men, women and the disabled, almost at every street corner. My finicky wife did not complain even once as she is wont to do in Mumbai and whenever we visit Delhi.

And yes, Shanghai is about large, well-kept street corner public parks, accessible to all, all the time. There are guards and there are gardeners, there is beautiful grass and blossoming flowers. But there are no gates to keep the poor out and no charges to ostensibly maintain these parks. They are as public parks are meant to be: for the public, for all.

Above all, Shanghai is about exclusive and wide cycling lanes for the working class everywhere. Even school children happily cycle to school and parents don’t fret. Thousands and thousands of cycles greet you on busy main streets during office hours. Besides, public transport is so cheap it makes you wonder about city finances.

And lest we forget: Shanghai is about modern China, built on the foundation of socialist, Maoist China that effectively solved the problems of abysmal poverty and illiteracy in a generation. Is this the holistic vision of Mumbai and India that our politicians share? Or is it that our politicians and elite want to use the pretext of Shanghai only to grab whatever little land that the slums of the poor happen to occupy in this most expensive and richest metropolis of our country!