A drop in the ocean

Vidyasagar Setu,across the Hooghly,is no longer Indias longest bridge. That honour goes now to the half-kilo-metre main span of the Bandra-Worli Sealink in Mumbai,an eight-lane,cable-stayed structure almost six kilometres long in all which is already,like its older sibling in Kolkata,the site of police arrests of young bikers for illicit racing. The Sealink provides an alternative route to motorists through Central Mumbai; the famed bottleneck at Mahim Causeway,spark for a thousand migraines and incidents of road rage,may no longer terrorise commuters as much. The nightmare is far from over once they cross the Causeway: to travel the 7.7 km between its end and Worli,they have to stop at 23 traffic signals. Bombays planned answer first mooted in the high noon of such sea-bridges internationally,in the 70s may have taken a tortuously long time to arrive,but is finally here.

Yet Vidyasagar Setu is not just an example,but also a cautionary tale. Traffic across its elegant eight lanes never met original estimates,because approach roads were problematic. This should give the Sealinks designers pause their internal estimates are for 80 per cent of the Causeways traffic,which may be an overestimation. Cars might well speed across the 6 km to pile up in an almighty mess at Peddar Road,where locals anxious to safeguard their sky-high property values are stoutly opposed to the construction of a flyover to aid commuting. The question of whether the Sealink properly incentivises public transport is also disputed: Maharashtras road corporation and Bombays transport utility,BEST,disagree on the tolls that each bus should pay. And two- and three-wheelers arent allowed on nor are pedestrians,raising questions of equity.

All these questions link up to the same burning issue: the stunting of local government and politics in Indias great cities. When one local public utility debates another,when some residents are to be inconvenienced to aid commuters,the issues are local,and should be settled locally,by an active municipal politics and an empowered municipality. Discussing and solving problems at this level leads to solid political backing,which gets projects going: Delhis Metro benefited greatly from the fact that it was answering to no state government with divided loyalties. As long as Indias state governments continue to,for their own reasons,resist the devolution of power to local bodies,Sealinks will be but a drop in the ocean of the infrastructure necessary to create cities that rival the best-equipped in the world.