My 20 Million Neighbors

Mumbai is crowded. It was my first impressions when I arrived and spent two hours slogging 7 miles through traffic to get to my guesthouse and will most likely be my last impression when I depart.

First the facts: The island city of Mumbai has a population of 13 million people packed into an area of 25 square miles. If you include greater Mumbai the population number rises to 20 million. By comparison Manhattan has 1.6 million people living in an area of 23 square miles. Mumbai is almost 10 times as densely populated in what is essentially a horizontal city. In fact at nearly half a million people per square mile, Mumbai is by far the world’s most densely populated city. (source: Wikipedia) Manhattanites imagine being surrounded by ten times as many people in everything you do, then role back the infrastructure development and standard of living by about 65 years. Voila, you have Mumbai.

The experience of living in Mumbai means dealing with too many people in too small of an area everyday and in every facet of one’s life. The traffic is horrible, the trains are incredibly crowded (see forthcoming post), the rents are astronomical, and even walking down the street becomes a major chore.

A walk down any street in Mumbai means dodging people, cars, and construction rumble. At one point someone had the good sense to build sidewalks but they range from packed to totally usable. On the main thoroughfares hawkers set up their stalls selling clothes, refurbished mobile phones and pirated DVDs, effectively reducing the sidewalk to half its intended width. On the shady side streets near my office the side-walks are inaccessible at times, blocked by double parked cars and impassible at other times with sleeping people, construction refuse, and even sewage leaks barring the way. Getting on the sidewalk is like entering in a maze, you may be able to get to the end, but more likely than not you’ll hit a dead end and be forced to back-track. So that leaves just the street with its honking taxi’s rushing by. A total lack of directional discipline by fellow pedestrians exacerbates the mess.

So how did Mumbai get here? Before the Brits set up a trading post, Mumbai was essentially uninhabited. As always happens, economic opportunity drives increasing immigration and with no effective controls on population people just keep poring in. Mumbai is also an infrastructure and urban planning disaster (a topic for another post) which compresses the population mass into a few small corridors and limits vertical expansion, leading to a much higher effective density. Imagine! Hence, crowded it is and crowded it will remain until either Mumbai looses its luster as the preferred immigration destination for India's masses or the government takes comprehensive action to address the problem. The good news is that you won't hear me whining about crowded highways, T-cars, restaurants, theater or sidewalks in the U.S, because in comparison to Mumbai it is a walk in the park