MUMBAI SNAPSHOT

SIZE 437 sq. km POPULATION 11.9 million NUMBER OF CARS 3.38 lakh NUMBER OF TWO-WHEELERS 4.80 lakh PER CAPITA INCOME (2002-03) Rs 54,821 IMMIGRANT INFLOW PER YEAR 73,000 ROAD LENGTH 1,889 km PEAK POWER DEMAND 1,800 mw WASTE GENERATED 7,000 tonnes per day

Every morning, during the peak traffic hours when everyone is trying to get to work (read: South Mumbai), buses of the Brihanmumbai Electric Supply & Transport Undertaking (best) deposit 14,000 people in the business district every hour. In the same period, on the central track alone (Mumbai's suburban rail network has three tracks that cover the lenth of the city on its western, central and eastern trajectories), 22 trains deposit between 40,000 and 60,000 people at vt (Victoria Terminus). And the average waiting time, at this time of the day, on the western track, acknowledged to be the most efficient of the three, is three minutes. "Mumbai transporters have understood the concept of peak hour traffic and that is the city's biggest advantage," says P.G. Patankar, a former head of Delhi Transport Corporation, and a transportation expert who now works for Tata Consultancy Services (he has also worked for best). "Have you noticed that a best bus often runs with one or two people during non-peak hours, a sure sign that it has invested in excess capacity?" The city's breakdown-free power supply comes from the need for seamless transportation services (on the rare days that the trains do not run in Mumbai, an event that happens once or twice every year when the tracks get flooded during the monsoon, the city grinds to a halt). "We have built an islanding system for Mumbai," says Firdose Vandrevala, Managing Director, Tata Power, one of the main electricity distributors to the city. "That means that whenever the Western Grid has a problem, we isolate Mumbai from it and continue supplying power."

Mumbai does have its problems-people writing off the city never tire of repeating these, a chronic housing problem, the proliferation of slums, inadequate city planning-that threaten its pre-eminent position as India's commercial and financial capital, but the city is in the pink of health when compared to the five others covered in this article.