The wretched of the local trains

In current times, violence is palpable and conspicuous in India: violence with religious undertones, caste animosities, struggles over sexual orientation, territorial disputes. But while some forms of violence are highlighted and acknowledged, others pass largely unnoticed in the routines of daily life..The local suburban trains in Mumbai – which form the geographical and metaphorical backbone of the city – carry over four million passengers every day on the Central Railway lines, and around 3.6 million on the Western lines. An estimated 4,700 people, on average, travel in a nine-car carriage during peak hours, whereas the ideal capacity is just 1700 – claiming the dubious merit of having the highest passenger density in the world. Although primarily maintained by Indian Railways, since July 1999 Mumbai Rail Vikas Corporation (MVRC) – a public sector undertaking anchored jointly by the central Ministry of Railways and the Government of Maharashtra – has been entrusted with the responsibility of improving the infrastructure of the Mumbai suburban railway network..When I first arrived in Mumbai, I was drawn to the locals (as the trains are popularly called), as they are a cheap and efficient means of local travel, ideal for students. But as I entered the workforce and began to use the trains for my daily commute during rush hour, more complex, conflicting feelings arose. At the time, as part of my work, I was attending the consultation meetings of the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) on the issue of developing a more people-centred development agenda for the city. The MCGM was pushing for a swanky 'world class' city vision, which included multi-million rupee sea-links and expressways. It was disturbing to attend these meetings while daily enduring the local trains – being part of that greatly tormented mass that is the Mumbai 'public' who count on these trains. Electrocution from overhead lines or falling out of the overflowing trains happened too frequently, although people continued to nonchalantly hang by their fingertips from the doors, or ride on top, dangerously close to the high-voltage electricity lines. The world-class city touted in the meetings I was attending did not promise any respite for this precarious public..At this time, I was reading Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (first published in 1961), the great thesis on the colonial world in the context of Africa, and his suggestions of decolonisation, which most analysts understand as being overtly violent. Reading this while being hurled around in the trains, I could identify many of the loose behavioural patterns that Fanon had observed in colonised Algerians on Mumbai's local trains. I could also find similarities with the power-play within colonisation that he elaborates (highlighting the physical distancing of the colonised and the usurpation of resources by the coloniser) in the efforts to 'develop' and 'plan' the city of Mumbai. I started to see the postcolonial situation in Mumbai, and especially the institution of public transport, in light of the colonial experience, and I was drawn to explore the similarities between the strategies of the settler colonialists of the past and the present native post-colonial authorities..Fanon states that closely examining the 'system of compartments' between the colonised and coloniser in the colonial world would reveal the intentional 'lines of forces' that these separated compartments imply. The more I researched the more I realised that these partitioning "lines of forces", which mean to characterise the boundaries created by discriminatory practices, are carefully and consciously crafted by specific policy preferences and targeted decisions, and act as tools in the hands of the authorities to maintain a particular social 'ordering', as well as to promote a specific geographical layout of the city..Active creation of lines of forces.Having exposed an intimate tie between the 'colonialist bourgeoisie' and the 'colonised nationalist intellectual' at the expense of the indistinct mass of the indigenous population, Fanon argues that native leaders being the spoilt children of erstwhile colonialism and today's national governments, organise the loot of national resources. They use national distress for personal benefit through scheming and legal robbery. Although this claim is admittedly reductive in nature and also written in a different context, such a stark statement could be of some political value in analysing the trajectory of public transport policies in Mumbai..In an article on transportation in Mumbai, Bina C. Balakrishnan demonstrates that the split in terms of everyday transportation in Mumbai has always been over 80 percent in favour of mass/public transport. That means that more people are inclined to use public transport than any other means of getting around. Balakrishnan points out that numerous studies since the 1960s, commissioned by the government to recommend improvements in transport systems in Mumbai did not give precedence to this crucial aspect of public transportation usage – the fact that it is so popular. The bulk of such recommendations concentrated on improving road infrastructure, with just passing mention of the need to devise other modes of mass transport to augment the existing local train network. This is despite the fact that the suburban railway accounts for the highest percentage of total transportation in terms of usage and average trip length. The need to improve pedestrian facilities was also completely ignored, and BEST buses – the second major means of public transport – were called an 'agent of congestion'. The specific recommendations mostly consisted of supply-side solutions that favoured vehicular traffic (mostly personal), such as road widening, construction of new links to connect business districts, flyovers, restriction of pedestrian movement and discouragement of slow moving vehicles on major arterials..Most transport policies implemented in cities throughout the world – especially in 'third world' cities such as Mumbai and Lahore – are modelled on the USA of the 1950s. Such models lead to society as a whole, as well as the environment, bearing the cost of individual mobility. Government financing is focused on facilitating smoother transitions for personal vehicles. Mumbai's transport policy, particularly since the introduction of the New Economic Policy in 1991, has vigorously focused on the enhancement of facilities for private transport, which only benefits around nine per cent of total commuters. Like for instance, in the mid-1990s, the BJP-Shiv Sena coalition in Maharashtra spent around INR 15 billion on building over 55 flyovers in Mumbai. However, it mostly bypasses effective facilities for public transport usage, including the intermediary public transport comprising the remaining 91 per cent of commuters. The pillars of such transport reforms have been flyovers, sea-links and freeways, such as the restricted Eastern Freeway, the toll-based Bandra-Worli sea-link and now the controversial proposed coastal freeway. The skewed public use and doubtful cost-effectiveness of some of these hugely capital-intensive projects have been the subject of extensive academic study. The purported benefits with regards to lessening environmental pollution and easing congestion have been highly contested as well..'Target partially achieved'. The biggest transport project in India in recent times, touted by the World Bank as the largest in scale in Southasia, is the Mumbai Urban Transport Project (MUTP). Between 2002 and 2011, the World Bank lent USD 542 million to the Government of Maharashtra (with some component to the MVRC) to enhance the inadequate transport infrastructure of Mumbai. The committee behind the megaproject's conceptualisation viewed inadequate transport as a bottleneck for economic development. It aimed to ameliorate the situation. But in addition to the project being mired in controversies regarding the rehabilitation and resettlement of people uprooted from their original dwellings in the interests of 'public purpose', it has also exacerbated the problems of travel for the relocated. Such people were moved to the outskirts of the city, far from their original dwelling, work and business, thus increasing both the expense and time needed for travel.