BKC: Working globally, failing locally

Now that Bandra-Kurla Complex has trumped SoBo to become the premier business precinct in the megapolis comparable to Honk Kong’s prime office pocket, changes are afoot to further transform the countenance of the corporate hub which, not so long ago, was flanked by rank mangroves, shantytowns and a dying river on three sides.         

Today, BKC houses glass high-rises with landscaped gardens for worldwide enterprises, pubs and clubs, schools the upwardly mobile can aspire to, posh consulate offices, starred hotels and artisanal eateries. With a rental of $80.1 sq m per month, it has risen to become the fifth priciest business district in Asia Pacific, according to last year’s Asia Pacific Prime Office Rental Index. Metropolitan authorities are now preening it to raise the country’s first global arbitration centre, the International Finance Centre. 

That’s on the face of it.    

Under uber-upscale sheen lurks familiar scenes and sounds of an up-and-coming urban centre struggling to reconcile old realities with new. To wit, try getting to, or away from, BKC. First, without a car. A flat refusal is an auto driver’s first instinct. In a shared auto, rash driving, overcrowding and overcharging are common. The city’s bus service, BEST, is woefully inadequate, not to mention uncomfortable for the office crowd. App cabs can take atrociously long to show up. Then, if you have a car, try finding a parking spot outside of the office-allotted one. 

Its cycling track, the city’s first, costliest and most vaunted, lies unused, except for desperate motorists using it to park their vehicles. Like the cycle track, a dedicated bus lane didn’t work out.  

Peer outside the rarefied corporate complexes with their boutique diners, and the smell of roadside grub mingles with the air, among the worst in the city, drawing throngs in search of something ‘cheap and quick’ to eat, before heading back to insular offices or making the racking commute back to the suburbs on an overcrowded local.

In short, for the roughly 2 lakh people visiting BKC every day, the rewards of working in BKC do not level out with enduring it. 

The Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) has plenty in the pipeline to smoothen things out. But the road to proposed resolutions is under construction, not to mention long and bumpy and polluted.         

DNA takes a look at how the authorities are negotiating the tricky transition of Bandra-Kurla Complex into a global hub, if it is enough, and where does the district go from here.

Projects to decongest BKC that failed

Cycling track

The MMRDA had in 2011 launched a 13-km-long dedicated cycling lane in BKC at a cost of around Rs 6 crore, but in 2016, it dismantled the track, saying it was not being used. The lane can be better utilised to ply the rising  number of vehicles.

Dedicated Bus lane 

In 2016, MMRDA came up with the idea of reserving lanes in BKC for buses. It claimed that the frequency of buses had improved as they got an exclusive lane, but after complaints of inconvenience caused to motorists in BKC during peak hours, the lanes had to be levelled.
Pravin Darade, additional metropolitan commissioner, MMRDA, said, “Having bus lanes without giving citizens another option for public transport is not right. So now we have decided that first we will give citizens an option to ride on the Metro, and later carve a lane on the same road for buses.”

Podcars

Another project was that of having podcars run inside BKC. Podcars are meant for personal rapid transport and are designed for travelling between short distances. However, the project did not see the light of day, 
considering its carrying capacity was not satisfactory, and the cost was much higher making the project financially unviable.

Plan to make BKC mini smart city on hold

In 2015, MMRDA had conceptualised turning BKC into a mini smart city. A tender was also floated in 2016, but now the MMRDA is saying that the project has been put on hold and will be taken up after the construction of DN Nagar-Mankhurd Metro-2B corridor that passes through BKC. The mini smart city had proposed features like WiFi hotspots, solar-powered streetlights and CCTV cameras. However, they will now be accommodated after the construction of Metro corridor is complete.