The Price of Progress
4 years, 7 months, 8 days, 3 hours
14 December 2024
Hanging Gardens in the affluent Malabar Hill area of south Mumbai is a green oasis offering spectacular views over the city and Chowpatty Beach.
But its amenity is far more important than the casual visitor might realise, because underneath is a vast subterranean cavern built in 1887 and extended in 1921 as a reservoir to supply the rapidly growing city. Its storage capacity of 80 million litres per day provides water for one million residents – about one-sixteenth of the total city demand.
Today, having given good service for 137 years, it is leaking. A plan was drawn up to replace it with a larger tank, at a cost of nearly 700 crore rupees (about $80 million) closing the gardens above for 3 to 4 years, and involving the loss of around 200 trees. That led to an outcry especially from nearby residents, and a few months ago the authorities announced that the replacement scheme was scrapped in favour of options for repair.
And herein lies a story that plays out every day across the world, and eloquently articulated by one of the city’s most senior and respected officials, shortly after we had strolled around the park together and poked our heads into the four foot square hatch separating the Victorian control room from the caverns.
Mumbai is fortunate to be a rich city, in a country that is now the fifth largest economy in the world, and enjoying a much faster growth rate than the G7 countries. It is also part of a country that has a hugely skilled workforce of engineers. Resources are not a constraint to building and renewing the infrastructure the country needs. What can be a constraint is securing public support for what needs to be done. Or as it was put to us – ‘a million people have a million views’.
There are two fundamental challenges, common across the world. First nearly all major infrastructure benefits a very large number of individuals. But the cost, which may come in terms of disruption, inconvenience or even the loss of property, affects a much smaller group, who are strongly incentivised to resist, especially if they are well-off under the status quo. Second the benefits accrue to multiple future generations, but there are usually no voices in the room advocating for their interest (except in Wales, where The Wellbeing of Future Generations Act provides for that).
I find it deeply uplifting spending time in a country that is transforming so rapidly. Witnessing the huge programmes of investments in everything from sanitation to highways to healthcare brings home the importance of the world acting in the interests of the whole not the few, and the future more than the present.