Tough city

Life in Mumbai, as we all know, is tough. It might be the only city in India which really works and an exciting buzzing metropolis, but living here comes at a price and we don’t mean the high cost of real estate.

Right now, it’s an early death from an unhealthy lifestyle with little chance of improvement. This is underlined in the recently released Human Development Report 2009, prepared by the National Resource Centre for Urban Poverty and the All India Institute of Local Self Government, and with support and help from the United Nations Development Programme and various government ministries and agencies, including the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation.

The report may not tell us anything new but when all the facts are gathered together in one book, it serves as a stark slice of what life is like in this city. Take mortality — not only do Mumbaikars die at least seven to 10 years before people in other parts of Maharashtra and India, there is little chance of the quality of life improving under the current circumstances.

Mumbaikars may have access to better healthcare facilities than elsewhere but stress, lifestyle diseases and the lack of hygiene in slums are killing people faster than anywhere else. As for slums, there appears to be little chance of improvement, as per this report.

Over 50 per cent of Mumbai lives in slums, where 81 people share one toilet. Only one in six households has access to piped water compared to 50 per cent in the rest of the city. Other social indicators like sex ratio, domestic violence, immunisation of infants, morbidity and so on show that slum-dwellers are far worse off than the rest of the city.

This puts paid to the myth of happy, well-off slum-dwellers living like parasites on the rest of the city. Although they keep the wheels of the city turning, these are people barely hanging on. It is perhaps ironic that the report has been released at the same time that a controversy has blown up over the redevelopment of Dharavi, Mumbai’s most famous slum. If nothing else, the figures emphasise why urgent and cogent action is needed to tackle  Mumbai’s slums.

There are other pointers here, like benefits brought by migrant populations. The ambition to become a world class city has to be squared with harsh realities. A pessimistic view maybe, but the report has brought home what Mumbai is all about behind all that neon and glitter.