Navi Mumbai and what lies in between

I remember billboards in the city back in the early 1990s that tried to persuade people to move from congested old Bombay to beautiful New Bombay. New Bombay was supposed to be to Bombay what New Delhi is to Old Delhi.

The new city did have urban planning, prices were low and many companies and government offices were supposed to shift there. We're in 2010 and the only big company to shift base there is the State Bank of India. A building called the Konkan Bhavan which was supposed to house Maharashtra's legislative assembly is a white elephant. The income tax office has also not been moved from the old to the new city.

Navi Mumbai might yet grow in prominence thanks to the fact a new airport is coming up there. I had the misfortune of travelling to an area of Navi Mumbai called Nerul by train. The 39-kilometre train ride from Andheri takes about an hour and twenty minutes and you can see Bombay at it ugliest worst before actually entering New Bombay.

Garbage completely covers the railways tracks and slums are within inches of the moving trains. Since most of these slums comprise of cardboard boxes, most of the communities live on the tracks. It would not be inaccurate to say that children are born there and learn to crawl and walk on railway tracks and those that don't get killed by trains end up living there for the rest of their lives.

I saw with horror the real poverty and squalor of the city. I am pretty sure that most if those people living there are migrants from the rural hinterland. Many of these slums had visible Islamic flags. I am assuming that these people are migrants from Uttar Pradesh or Bihar. Some accuse them of being Bangladeshis

I can't possibly imagine how bad life is for these people in their native places to want to come and live in such filth and danger (trains kill people on tracks daily, with the annual figure being around 3000).

As my train crossed Mankhurd and reached Vashi, the first station on the other side of the creek, I felt like I was in another world altogether. Navi Mumbai looks like a fairly prosperous middle class version of what Indian cities can be. But I would rather not go there by train again, if I had a choice.