On Mumbai

Completely Solvable Problems that are Not Solved

In November I spent just over a week in Mumbai, having productive meetings with colleagues at IIT Bombay, but also exploring the city. It is my first trip to India. This follows my trip to Warsaw, by way of the new Istanbul Airport cum Shopping Mall.¹ The research aims of the trip were met I think, and with the students and faculty at IITB, we have started several good research projects the outcomes of which we may see in a year’s time.

The Mumbai Airport was fairly straight-forward if a bit dated, but I cleared immigration quickly (after having printed² out my e-visa at Warsaw Airport, because why wouldn’t you have to print out the e-visa to satisfy Turkish Airlines (which presumably is penalised if they don’t check if someone going to India doesn’t have a visa). The meaning of “e” in “e-visa” seemed lost on everyone.³)

Customs was quick, baggage claim took a while, but it was a large plane. Customs however didn’t open until 5:30 am, even though flights arrived early, so there was a standing queue at “Nothing to Declare” before they showed up. It cleared quickly enough, but one of many completely solvable problems.⁴⁵

Then is the question of how to get from the airport to the hotel. My hotel is not served by public transport (the airport is served by buses) or an airport shuttle as far as I can tell. So taxi. Then where are the taxis? And how do you pay for taxis if you don’t have local currency? Found a taxi cab, negotiated with four people (dispatcher, driver, and I guess two other drivers just hanging around for good luck) speaking Hindi and broken English and looking up exchange rates. It wasn’t worth the time, but most of it was logistics, how much Australian currency into equivalent Rupees. So I paid in Australian dollars and got Rupees back. They delivered me to the hotel, which thanks to Pakistani terrorism elsewhere (not at this hotel,⁶ which is remote from the city), has a bomb checkpoint half-way up its driveway. Driver pops the hood and trunk, they run a mirror on a stick under the car, and there is a dog sniffing.⁷ All clear, neither me nor my driver were carrying a bomb, and we proceeded to the hotel. The hotel also has a metal detector and X-ray, but it’s far more casual than an airport, and I suspect a motivated terrorist could somehow get past this security theatre.

Fortunately they had a room at 6:30 am, since I did not sleep much on the flight. The hotel lobby had background music: Creepy doom filled ambient music like you would hear in a dystopian indie film about an environmental apocalypse that is shown on AppleTV+ and no one would watch.⁸

Overnight construction blasting (or fireworks, not sure which) may awaken you. Similarly one can hear Indian music as late as 4am, not sure where it was coming from, possibly the IIT Bombay campus, whose hostels are only a few hundred metres away, in terms of airline distance. By walking or road however, see the Figure. While it looks like one should be able to go from Pipe Line Road to the IIT Hostels, and thus the main campus, one cannot. I have already discussed the Unwalkability, so this trip was undertaken by Taxi or 3-wheel Auto-Rickshaw when Taxi was unavailable.

Really, this is how it is. (Unless you want to walk on dirt embankments and under pipelines.) A completely solvable problem.

The Mumbai Metro is coming to near these places, supposedly by 2026, but it has been under construction for 6 years, and judging from my casual view of the construction sites, it is NOT proceeding apace. The roads generally don’t have lane markings. Where they do, lanes are a suggestion. Overall this is a game of chicken between pedestrians, bicycles, animals on occasion, motorbikes, auto-rickshaws (tuk-tuks), cars, buses, trucks, and emergency vehicles, among others using the roads.

Traffic will periodically self-organise into lane like structures,⁹ but these ebb and flow and are very narrow. On one Uber trip, the vehicles were so close the left-side view mirror of our car was knocked off by the right-side mirror of another car. After exchanging words in Hindi, my driver got out, picked up the (fortunately unbroken) glass, and reinstalled it, and started moving again. We didn’t really lose any time because it is that congested. The congestion problems of the west are twee compared with Mumbai and I imagine other similarly overgrown cities. On the other hand, Mumbai starts late, work begins after 9 am, and morning peak seems to be 9-11 am (The frequent, but not-maxed-out in terms of frequency or carriages, Metro was standing room only at 11 am, e.g.). There is scope for more peak spreading, especially into the early daylight hours.

Mumbai is possibly the last place on earth that AVs will come, so long as human drivers remain, given the lack of compliance with rules of the road.

A key feature of India, even more than other places, is middlemaning, The Hotel staff want to put themselves in the middle of every transaction. The obsequiousness is excessive to the point annoying. You ask them where the pharmacy is, and instead they order for you (not what would you pick yourself, so this is in many ways a degradation of service). You ask for a taxi, or tour, they do it themselves. Unless you are extremely clear what you want, the hotel will get a share of the transaction. They will call you in the room to make sure everything is ok, even when you would rather be doing anything than helping them achieve their key performance indicator of how often they survey customers to measure customer satisfaction.

The country as a whole appears to design processes that are robust to efficiency. I think the theory is that if we do our job more efficiently, the queue for the next process will just be longer and we will just have more work. So why bother.  This is contravened by the Airport Customs queue discussed above, where if travellers had gotten through this queue, they could have progressed to their respective destinations sooner. (For a contrasting view, see the HBR article on Mumbai’s Models of Service Excellence.)

The CBD of Mumbai, the historic part, where the Britishers left a slew of colonial headquarters architecture, interlaced with vernacular and subcontinental architecture is fascinating. But the city was laid out for a population of about 1,000,000, (~1900) not 20,000,000 (today). Even as it has spread spatially, it has intensified greatly, roughly doubling in the past 30 years. The infrastructure in all forms is not really designed for this load.

The Indians love to bash the British for creating all their problem, not questioning how dysfunctional a place must already be to allow a small island nation half a planet away to somehow conquer their whole subcontinent with a few thousand mercenaries. One positive remnant of British culture is that passengers still queue for buses.

The Air Quality is generally terrible, and must be more so locally at street level, where tailpipe emissions occur. Since you are walking in the street, you are walking in the wake of vehicles.

So if think I seem pretty negative on the place. That assessment is correct, it has a lot of problems. Completely solvable problems that remain unsolved. But there is opportunity for improvement.

From a transport perspective, getting cars out of the dense areas entirely, and reining them in elsewhere and finishing the Metro would help.¹⁰ Given the densities, prioritising mass transit, more investments in trains and buses, rather than freeways and road intersection flyovers, would also be important. Better pedestrian conditions, and maybe bike and motorbike lanes and bus lanes would help. I am not sure if enforced traffic control (lanes, traffic lights) would actually work in this context, or add throughput if it did.¹¹

It appears, however, that neither I (nor anyone else) can solve the institutional problems and environment that have made so many of the problems that have been solved elsewhere in Asia. Besides transport, adequately housing the poor most notably, half of whom live in slums, remains unsolved here. The Slum Replacement Housing appears bad, where high rises are so close together one can reach from the balcony of one to another.

Slum Rehabilitation Housing. Not a surprise many slum-dwellers prefer their existing housing. Source: https://architecturebrio.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/mumbai-slumrehab02-blog.jpg...

The obvious comparison is China. Now life is not perfect in China, and freedoms we in the so-called “developed countries” expect are missing for Chinese people, but the housing stock is better, in surplus, and less inequitable. We can debate which is more important in the Maslowian Hierarchy of Needs, but shelter is near the base of the pyramid.

If you had last checked in around 1978 or so, after the India “State of Emergency” was lifted and before Deng Xiaopeng was installed in China this is not the ranking you would have expected. India had advantages of private property, democracy-ish-ness, a basis in Common Law, and many people speak English.

India has largely solved the food problem, and there is a reason you don’t hear stories about starving children in India anymore, as I did as a child. Yet the number of beggars beggars belief. They knock on the window of your car, especially the car I am in since I am obviously non-native, and perhaps perceived to be less callous.¹² But they also don’t seem to be starving. Instead many are apparently victims of child trafficking. The police must know this, the children and others are at the same places every day, but the police also don’t do anything. What about the institutions are broken that permits this to continue so openly?

The education problem also remains. Many more people need better and higher education. In the western countries, roughly half the population at least begins higher education. It is much less in India.

So many jobs in Mumbai are at best make-work, while many important things need to be done. Again, other countries have solved this allocation of resources better than India.

Diversity of religion is far more tolerated in India than most places, though political assassinations have been over religious disputes. There are so many deities in Hinduism, what is one more?

Probably not finally, but there is also the caste/class problem. The upper castes resent the set asides (affirmative action Americans would call it) for people of lower castes in terms of university education slots, positions in the bureaucracy, etc. claiming it doesn’t go to the poor, but to the well off in those castes, which may be true, I don’t know. Obviously Caste and Income don’t perfectly align. This is similar argument to those I heard in the US, especially in the 1970s and 1980s.

I believe that more money is not the answer. Instead India requires better organization of the human and capital resources already there. The leadership of the country has failed. This is not necessarily the fault of any one person (though certainly at least some individuals are blame-worthy), but a collective action problem the system has thus far been incapable of resolving.

1. The Döner was disappointing.

2. I had received an email notification of the e-Visa with a number on it. But that wasn’t good enough for the airline folks, who sent me to a desk, where they looked up my ID in some database, then printed out a form, which I then presented to different airline staff, who said ok. They check this at both legs of the trip. I also presented it to the Immigration person in India, but I am not sure if he actually needed it.

3. The India e-visa application form asked my religion. “None” was not an option, though “Other” was. Because of how backwards the form was, I had to switch browsers to fill it out. Because under “Other” they want you to specify, which did not pop-up in modern browsers, though seemed to work in Firefox. Then they asked follow-up questions by email. I am unclear as to the rationale here.

4. I fully recognise there are problems elsewhere in the world, including the US and Australia that are solvable but not solved. They pale in comparison.

5. Of course, they could do better, especially on the last queue. The “Nothing to declare” for customs line at the airport wasn’t open til 5:30, which is the last queue before freedom, so there was a long line of people who had already gone through passport control and collected their luggage from flights which landed at 4:30. There was no need for this queue except customs workers (or their supervisors) didn’t want to start before 5:30, assuming everything else would take an hour (assuming operations start at 4:30). Now maybe they were just on a 30 minute break, but again, it’s a critical service in the flow of people.

6. Westin Powai Lake.

7. This dog is separate from the packs of wild dogs roaming the streets around the hotel (but not on the grounds itself as far as I can tell.

8. Unfortunately the microphone on my iPhone was insufficiently sensitive to record this for your benefit.

9. A possible research topic

10. It’s not that the cars are excessively large as in the US or Australia, the dominant make seems to be Suzuki. It is just there are so many of them.

11. Another item for research

12. Missing the mark on that one.