Someone said to me the other day, “India has built one sea-link in 70 years. China would have probably built 70 in a year.” Leaving aside the exaggeration, it just goes to show how poor we are on envisioning what is needed and how slow we are on executing public infrastructure projects.
If there is one city which is screaming for the use of the sea for transportation, it is Mumbai. We should have had a bridge ring around Mumbai with touchpoints at different places on land. And as buildings go higher and higher (the latest being an announcement for the world’s tallest residential building), there is little being done about the roads around. And many of the footpaths have been either encroached uponby shops or taken over by slum-dwellers (each with a vote, so almost impossible).
Mumbai needs a a citizen’s activist group to start looking at the infrastructure city – because the government ministers, with their red-light cars and advance vehicles which clear the roads, won’t.
