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Mumbai: The Revival The city of dreams is back on the top of the heap after a period when it seemed like the passing of the old economy would see it left behind by other newer rivals like Bangalore and Hyderabad. By Brian Carvalho
Anuj Puri lives in Juhu, a swank suburb in Mumbai that hugs the shoreline and is home to many a Bollywood pin-up. It takes the Managing Director of Chesterton Meghraj, a property consultancy, some 50 minutes every morning to reach his expansive-all of 6,000 sq feet, carpet area-headquarters in Worli, central Mumbai. When returning home, he's in his car for all of an hour. Now Puri has lived most of his life in Delhi, having moved to Bombay only recently (from here on let's call it Bombay, because everybody right from corporate head honchos to even some senior bureaucrats serving the state government can't resist that slip of tongue, if at all it is one). ''It's a change from Delhi,'' is how Puri puts it mildly. ''The road and traffic conditions are bad, and in the monsoons I even have days when water enters the car,'' is how Puri puts it bluntly. Cut to Ashok Wadhwa, high-profile investment banker, once-upon-a-time with Arthur Andersen and now Managing Director of Ambit Corporate Finance. Much a Bombay boy Wadhwa, who is also a member of the Bombay Chamber of Commerce & Industry (BCCI-they haven't yet become MCCI), has few reasons to gripe about the city, perhaps the under-utilisation of the waterfront being the only one once you really prod him.
But, then again, if Wadhwa had set up his deal-shop in any other Indian city, he might have well put up the shutters by now. ''In my business Bombay is the place to be, the only place to be,'' points out Wadhwa. ''I have been in Bombay for 30 years so I may be biased, but despite all its problems Bombay is still the most professional city to do business,'' adds P. Krishnamurthy, Vice Chairman, JM Morgan Stanley, over a meal at the snobby Bombay Gym (now can you ever imagine this cosy club ever calling itself the Mumbai Gym!) Like it or lump it, Bombay, which is slated to become the second-largest megalopolis in the world with a 25 million-strong population by 2015, is where the action is. No more a manufacturing centre of any significance, Bombay today is home to key service sectors such as banking, equities, law and accounting, consulting, media, research, education and it.
Over 90 per cent of the country's merchant banking transactions happen in Bombay (in value terms); 80 per cent of the mutual funds are registered in this city; the BSE & NSE account for over 90 per cent of trading volumes and as R.H. Patil, Managing Director, NSE, loves to point out, trading volumes on the NSE on some days are, on good days, higher than those on the Hong Kong bourse; the three largest banks and the top two financial institutions are based in Bombay; and the largest number of cheques-10 times more than the second-highest city-are cleared in this city. Now, if only the infrastructure could keep pace. More than half of the city's 10 million residents (and this includes the suburbs and the extended suburbs)-5.5 million-use the local train every day. Eight lakh of them pour out of Churchgate, the station that leads to the financial district. The peak hour train load is 4,200 passengers per train, which is 2.5 times the capacity. If you think you're better off on the road, well, with over 200 new vehicles hitting the road every day-and not much room for road widening-you won't get very far, very fast. Thirty-six new flyovers have been built but they can do only so much. There are some 55,000 taxis on the road, but some 25,000 of them are over 15 years old and largely responsible for the pollutants in the air, which are 15-20 times above permissible levels. The silver lining, as Azeez Khan, Development Commissioner (Industries), points out, is that as far as connectivity and power are concerned, Bombay is right up there. ''Of course this is balanced out by high real estate costs,'' he adds. The fault rate of telephones in Mumbai is 20 per 100 lines per month, which is much better than most Indian cities, but yet compares poorly with the 2 per cent norm that prevails in developed countries. What's more, the mean time between failure for MTNL Mumbai is five months for an average subscriber. Think that's good? Not when you look at the fault rates of British Telecom and for telecom services in Japan and the US-four, five and 10 years respectively. Yet, if Bombay has been voted the best city to do business in by a motley bunch of corporate execs, housewives and students, it's simply because there's not much to compare it with. Bangalore's infrastructure bottlenecks makes Bombay's roads look like a Formula One racetrack; Delhi's idea of professionalism would probably make the likes of Krishnamurthy blush; Chennai, we are told, has a nightlife but so does Kolhapur; and Kolkata's corporate circle is actually a straight line-it starts at ITC, and ends at RPG. 1 2 |
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