Budgets, it is said, are 25 per cent vision and 75 per cent execution. Last week, the financial capital of India saw two of them; the national and the civic. So, what do both exercises mean for Mumbai at a time when the city is expected to lead the country out of economic slowdown?
The civic budget is fairly simple in that the thrust areas are health, education and infrastructure. The Union Budget is not so clear, being a cautious exercise, although it can be said that it is pro-industry.
A paradigm shift in urban planning is a central part of the Union finance minister’s vision. Will that translate into livable cities and affordable housing? It is true that urban planning is a contradiction in terms; our development plans remain on paper for decades. For instance, the development plan for Vasai-Virar, prepared by CIDCO, has been in limbo for the past 13 years.
The real business of urban planning today is run by tweaking rules, such as those governing FSI, in favour of private developers. Only last week, the Bombay high court directed the Pune Municipal Corporation not to go by Section 3.5.1 of the Unified Development Control and Promotion Regulations, which had arbitrarily reduced the space meant for amenities in a building, but by its ruling on a PIL on this issue. Take Mumbai’s Development Plan-2034, finalised in 2018. It frees 22 per cent of the city’s No Development Zone – by no means a never development zone – to focus on rising housing requirements by the year 2034.
What this means is that salt pans, the city’s last open spaces, will be lost. But will that create affordable housing? Today, a one-BHK apartment built by the MHADA in Mumbai costs Rs 23 lakh. It’s not in affordable housing but in lucrative redevelopment schemes that the state government is really interested.
More so, in slum redevelopment. Even as the redevelopment of the BDD chawls in Central Mumbai is pending, the MHADA is rushing to grab slum redevelopment schemes in Palghar, 108km from Mumbai. So, the FM is right in decrying the `businessas-usual’ approach to urban planning and proposing a highlevel committee of urban planners, urban economists and institutions to update building bylaws and town planning schemes.
The glitch is in implementation. The 2014 Budget promised to create 100 Smart Cities for the urban middle class. Today, no one talks about it. Coming back to the Union Budget, it promises 80 lakh homes for the economically backward classes under the PM Awas Yojana, for which Rs 48,000 crore has been earmarked.
Once again, a reality check: Aurangabad MP Imtiaz Jaleel claimed last week that of the 80,000 applicants for the PM Awas Yojana in the district, only 355 have got homes in the last six years.
In Navi Mumbai, empty plots near railway stations have been taken up for the PM Awas Yojana and in Mumbai, the Central government is eyeing the salt pan lands. However, Maharashtra minister Aaditya Thackeray nixed an MMRDA survey for it, saying that he would not allow a concrete jungle to come upon salt pans.
The housing industry hoped for some sops and the pandemic-hit middle class for cheaper home loans but both were disappointed. However, the harried Mumbai commuter has been taken care of. The Budget allocates Rs 577.5 crore for carrying out various ambitious railway infrastructure projects under the Mumbai Urban Transport Projects. These include procurement and the introduction of as many as 247 AC local trains, commutation-based control systems, as well as new corridors. The FM mentioned modernisation of Transport Oriented Development but the Budget proposes Rs 19,130 cr expenditure for Metro rail, a marginal increase over the previous year’s figure of Rs 18,998 cr.
The metro rail once again brings us to the absurdity of urban planning. The Unified Mumbai Metropolitan Transport Authority is defunct, so piecemeal planning reigns supreme. Thus, we have the white elephant of a monorail and Navi Mumbai’s first metro line leading from Belapur to Taloja, instead of linking Navi Mumbai with Mumbai. In fact, Navi Mumbai’s metro line deserves a heritage tag for being 10 years behind schedule. Mumbai’s commuter has some relief in the civic budget as well; Rs 800cr have been set aside for the struggling BEST. The poor will get 100 new clinics where 139 diagnostic tests will be done at a nominal cost. As much as Rs 7,000cr or 15 per cent of the total budget has been kept for this.
The efficacy of these clinics will depend on how efficiently they are run. After all, the ‘mohalla clinics’ of the AAP in Delhi have shown what is possible in public health. Another AAP scheme that the BMC is trying to ape is the one on education. The education budget is Rs 3,300cr, of which a significant part is for digital education.
If the Sena can pull off the promise of free and quality education for all, it will be able to expand its voter base in the working class. For the well-off, the good news is that the Coastal Road should be ready in a couple of years; it has received the lion’s share (Rs 3,200cr) of the civic budget. An equivalent amount (Rs 3,777cr) has gone for roads and bridges.
There’s precious little for the Mumbai Climate Action Plan, except for Rs 1 crore to set up a climate action cell and a new network of air quality sensors. No new taxes have been imposed but a sharp hike in property tax has become inevitable, since it had been frozen for ten years and now, there’s a waiver on property tax for flats below 500 sq ft.
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