The 944-mm Lesson

But these are hard times for Mumbai.

Ask Anand Mahindra, Managing Director of auto major Mahindra and Mahindra. ‘‘I have foster families and friends across the world. I got only one call,’’ said Mahindra. ‘‘For all its aspirations and dreams, Mumbai is a blip on the world’s radar screen.’’

This is the time, he says, to ‘‘turn adversity into opportunity’’. The examples: Surat and arguably Kolkata, cities that used crises to fix endemic problems and arrest what appeared to be terminal decline.

‘‘We have made mistakes, I don’t deny that (but), of course, we are looking at long-term issues, we will address them,’’ said Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh. ‘‘I have already set up the Mithi river authority.’’ Deshmukh alluded to a new body—number 17 in the list of authorities governing Mumbai—that will now examine how the city’s narrowed and encroached western drainage system can be fixed.

Sounds like a pipedream? Well, it doesn’t have to. Even Kolkata, not exactly a shining symbol of urban renewal, is getting its act together. Since 2002-03, a fund of Rs 1,518 crore—cobbled together from Asian Development Bank loans and state contributions—has been available to the municipal corporation to build sewers, redo slums, clean garbage and increase water supply.

And Kolkata may not have suffered 944 mm (378 mm in 1978 is the single-day high), but the city’s perennial water-logging problems are now largely fixed.

Perhaps, the most sterling example of urban transformation available to downcast Mumbai is Small Surat, a filthy, chaotic city that hit the front page with a plague. ‘‘The biggest problem I had to confront was that the entire civic machinery had been demoralised,’’ said S R Rao, then Municipal Commissioner and now Health Secretary in Gandhinagar.

Rao reorganised Surat’s entire civic infrastructure, cleaned up slums, built roads and laid down a modern storm-water system.

But on the ground in the city right now, planning is the last thing on anyone’s mind. If great cities are defined by their ability to turn crises into opportunity, Mumbai’s representatives aren’t losing out.

Over the past three days, as officials cranked up relief, there’s been a great, messy push among Congress MLAs, ministers, innumerable corporators and political wannabes to corner food, kerosene and other relief now being distributed by the state.

So being eight months pregnant did not deter prospective Congress MP Priya Dutt—daughter of late star and Mumbai North West MP Sunil Dutt—as she roamed the miserable bylanes of Kalina near the international airport. Thousands got handouts, leaving out those deep inside the dark interiors of the slum. ‘‘At least, aid is not falling into the wrong hands,’’ said Dutt on Thursday, accompanied by husband Owen Roncon. ‘‘We’ve brought it to the people.’’

The next day, The Sunday Express received a call from an agitated aspirant to the same constituency—also from the Congress: ‘‘Why is she getting all the publicity?’’

Across town, Sharif Khan, brother of Kurla Congress MLA Naseem Khan, slapped S Annamalai, husband of Congress corporator Lalita Annamalai, for not inviting the former minister to a relief-distribution function.

‘‘He wanted to know why I had not invited his brother,’’ said Annamalai. Countered Khan: ‘‘Annamalai has been bad-mouthing me and my brother in television interviews.’’

MLAs, corporators and others criticised heavily for their absence during the rain—citizens in the western suburb of Oshiwara offered a reward for their MP, film star Govinda, who defends himself on television—are now popping up with alacrity.

On Friday, politicians fanned out across the city to accompany wheat, kerosene and rice supplies sent by the government. ‘‘From Govt of Maharashtra, arranged by Prof J C Chandurkar (MLA),’’ said an official-looking chit distributed in the shanty towns of Bandra (East). Congress MLA Chandurkar was one of those criticised by his constituents for being absent during the crisis.

Further out in the western suburbs, two Shiv Sena, one BJP and one Congress MLAs and some corporators managed to block the distribution of relief for four hours as they squabbled with officials and amongst themselves. The whole lot finally landed up in a police station.

(with reporting by Subrata Nag Choudhury in Kolkata, Bashir Pathan in Gandhinagar and Kavitha Iyer)