The Coastal Road: A Colonial, Classist Dream

While the BMC may have a “noble ambition” of connecting the suburbs to South Bombay with the Mumbai Coastal Road, it is worth examining the troubling, problematic, colonial roots of the plan.

Mumbai Coastal Road 2019 by Larsen & Toubro. Aerial photograph of South Mumbai from March 2019. Coastal Road reclamation work is visible off of Nepeansea Road (bottom left). Photograph by Robert Stephens

It’s no news that the 149-km long Mumbai coast, where the BMC has contracted Larsen & Toubro and Hindustan Construction Company to commence the Mumbai Coastal Road project, has been subjected to much debate. Political parties, environmental activists and fisherfolk have been at loggerheads over the supposed benefits and legitimate disadvantages the project will make. At an estimated cost of Rs. 14000 crore, the Mumbai Coastal Road is slated to be the most expensive road project in the history of India. But it stands to question, who does it actually benefit?

To answer this question, we must look back to the origin of the plan that has been gestating since Mumbai was still under colonial administration. Facts about the history have been muddled, but people like Robert Stephens, an architect in Mumbai, have worked to uncover them.

There have actually been two iterations of the plan: The Bombay Circular Road conceived by Arthur Crawford in the 1870s, as well as the West Island Freeway conceived by Wilbur Smith in the 1950s. These proposals were not well-received even then, but it’s not a surprise that they are being taken seriously now.

Arthur’s Self-Serving Scheme

In the aptly-titled chapter of Arthur Crawford’s pamphlet for the “Development of New Bombay, “The Woes of the Wealthy” describes how the city’s first Municipal Commissioner conceptualised the “Bombay Circular Road”, the earliest predecessor to the Mumbai Coastal Road.

This sea-side freeway was meant to stretch from Apollo Bunder around Southern Colaba, continuing along the perimeter of Backbay and around Malabar Hill. A vast, strange route right? To make matters worse, this would have meant cutting into Malabar Hill, Cumbala Hill and Worli Hill to create burrows for traffic thoroughfares. The accumulated excavated earth from these burrows would then be used for a series of reclamations of bays and indentations in the city’s western coastline.

Putting aside the environmental and civic damages that would have been caused by this, it just seems largely unnecessary. Crawford himself could not give a reasonable justification for this “bold and costly” project. Back then, the perimeter road would only have predominantly served the city’s horse-carriage-owning European residents, who were just less than one per cent of the total population.

The Municipal Commissioner did however honestly detail a collateral benefit:

He was a member of the elite men’s only Byculla club at the time. There was a huge trench where trash was dumped located to the west of the club, and the South-West Winds would carry the stench to the club. Therefore, with the construction of the Bombay Circular Road, the club would obtain a concession from the government, which would have allowed them to relocate to the one of the better posh localities of the reclamation.

While this never properly saw the light of the day, it seems it was bound to pop-up again.

The Two-Percent

Final Development Plans by the Municipal Corporation of Greater Bombay, sanctioned on 7 February 1967. Although Wilbur Smith's WIF was prepared independent of the Development Plans, the scheme found its way into the sanctioned plans. Courtesy University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Centre.

When the city was anticipating a nearly 100% population boom by 1981, they wanted “to design an adequate and efficient roadway system to meet the nearly 100% population increase anticipated by 1981 in Bombay.” So they decided to approach Wilbur Smith, an American Transportation consultant in the 1970s.

Now no one can doubt the might and prowess of Smith, who along with his consultancy firm has overseen the construction of many transit projects almost all continents save for Antarctica. This team-up should have been a recipe for success. Ultimately that was not the case with the West Island Freeway.

After spending 18 months in the city, setting up manual observation checkpoints, conducting surveys, and interviewing more than 14,000 drivers, the consultants summarised their findings and proposals in a two-volume report titled Bombay’s Traffic and Transportation Study. This included the plan for the West Island Freeway (WIF), which was designed to meet the needs of the two per cent ― wealthy residents of Bombay who could afford a car.

As soon as this plan was put into motion in the 1970s, there was a surge of backlash from the communities that would be displaced by the project and environmental activists. Even the Maharashtra Legislative 44 Assembly had issued a statement saying “The scheme of encircling the old Bombay island with freeways should be shelved to give priority to the provision of a mass rapid transit.”

They had stopped construction in the middle, due to sanctions. as journalists such as Allwyn Fernandes were quoted “Questions about whether such vast sums of money should be spent on providing amenities for a minority of motorists, as against the vast majority of the population requiring better mass transportation, were also raised.”

According to Robert Stephens, the facts consistently show that the scheme for a road along Mumbai's coast has been proposed with the explicit written purpose of benefiting a select few and were never intended to benefit all the city residents.”It was to facilitate the survival of the richest.”

What is troubling now is that the current plan for the Mumbai Coastal Road is just a variation of these schemes, especially the West Island Freeway. There was backlash then, which the government eventually listened to. But the backlash now is mostly muted and this plan can spell disaster in many ways. An increase in pollution, deprived community displacement, a reduction in investment into public transit which the majority of the population is dependent on, and so on.

West Island Freeway 1963 by Wilbur Smith & Associates. Proposed network of Freeways and Expressways, as prepared by Wilbur Smith & Associates in 1963. Courtesy Frances Loeb Library, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University