With 64% of the city’s residents relying on buses and trains so overloaded that up to 10 passengers die a day, anger is rising over a taxpayer-funded road most will never use
M
umbai is known for its graphic inequality, its gleaming high-rises where the rich live with panoramic views of the Arabian Sea standing next to windowless hovels perched over drains. It is home to 90 of India’s billionaires, but also to more than six million slum dwellers, about 55% of central Mumbai’s population.
Now Mumbai has a new symbol of the gulf between rich and poor: a high-speed, eight-lane motorway on its western coast, which critics say serves only the wealthy despite being built with taxpayers’ money.
The road was intended as a solution to the gridlocked roads of India’s commercial capital. But Mumbai is a densely populated peninsula, 25 miles (40km) long and 6 miles wide, where land is as scarce as snow.
