Maharashtra elections 2024: Put Mumbai front and centre in Maha politics

In the Maharashtra assembly election results declared on Saturday the Bharatiya Janata Party BJP emerged as the singlelargest political outfit capping an exhaustive and exhausting political campaign that ran for months The question that most Mumbaikars will ask on Sunday however is Will their city get the short shrift againOf the 288 seats in the state assembly 36 or 125 per cent are from Mumbai City and Mumbai Suburban This is significant representation for a city that has more than two crore residents and is one of the most important urban agglomerations anywhere in the world Yet ever since the state was formed in May 1960 the perception among Mumbaikars is that successive chief ministers have either neglected the cityrsquos issues or ignored them altogetherTake affordable housing Over 60 per cent of the cityrsquos population lives in slums Given that the average Mumbaikar cannot afford to buy an apartment within the city limits they are forced to buy or rent property in the larger Mumbai Metropolitan Region where political representation is much lowerMumbairsquos slum redevelopment policy over the last three decades has been ineffective as political leaders have continuously pushed the cutoff date closer to their election years allowing slumlords to expand unchecked Mumbai needs a dedicated housing policy and infrastructure that can accommodate its growing populationBJP supporters celebrate the partyrsquos assembly poll triumph PicShadab KhanThe biggest point of pain for the city is commuting woes The typical Mumbaikar spends up to and sometimes more than four hours to just reach the workplace and back home The suburban railway system though one of the most efficient in the world is at breaking point More than 80 lakh people travel daily in the cityrsquos suburban and Metro services Besides the Metro network lacks effective lastmile connectivity and is of limited use for commuters travelling from outside MumbaiAccording to Shiv Sena UBT leader Aaditya Thackeray the cityrsquos famous BEST bus service is severely underequipped and needs at least 10000 more buses to ferry lakhs of people every single day With new business and residential districts mushrooming enhancing BESTrsquos capacity will be one of the key deliverables of the cityrsquos municipal corporation and the state governmentThe less said about the roads the better With a municipal budget larger than many state governments in India Mumbai should have had some of the best roads in the country However for decades the cityrsquos roads have had only piecemeal improvements with little or no attention given to connectivity and quality concerns The last time an overhaul took place was in the 1990s when new flyovers were built and highways and arterial roads were concretisedEven basic services like water need urgent attention The cityrsquos twocroreplus residents have an aggregate demand of close to 45 billion litres of water a day The seven lakes that supply water to the city have a combined capacity of 395 billion litres a day The demand is expected to reach 7 billion litres a day by 2041One could argue that correlation is not causation but Maharashtrarsquos roster of chief ministers has not seen proportional representation from Mumbai Western Maharashtra Yashwantrao Chavan Vasantdada Patil Sharad Pawar Sushilkumar Shinde Prithviraj Chavan Vidarbha Vasantrao Naik Marotrao Kannamwar Sudhakarrao Naik Devendra Fadnavis Marathwada Shankarrao Chavan Vilasrao Deshmukh Shivajirao Nilangekar Ashok Chavan and Konkan AR Antulay and Narayan Rane have dominated the CMrsquos chairThere have been notable Mumbaikar exceptions such as Manohar Joshi 199599 Babasaheb Bhosle 198283 and Uddhav Thackeray 201922 The incumbent CM Eknath Shinde is from Thane though it is part of the larger Mumbai Metropolitan Region MMRThe other question to ask is whether Mumbai featured at all in the political discourse leading up to the elections Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi had rallies in the city where the Metro network and the Dharavi redevelopment became talking pointsIn an interview to this newspaper Aaditya Thackeray expanded on his partyrsquos vision for the city but the overall election discourse was dictated by BJPrsquos focus on ldquovote jihadrdquo Congressrsquo insistence on the caste census and the Shinde Senarsquos schemes such as Ladki Bahin The largest parties in the election never made Mumbai a talking point The fact that there have been no civic elections in the city for over two years did not find significant position even in the Opposition partiesrsquo campaigningParties bickered over alliances seatsharing and their respective chief minister candidate but did Mumbai matter Hardly By Sunday evening we should have a fair idea of who the next chief minister of Maharashtra will be Can Mumbai then assert itself in state politicsTogether with neighbouring MMR constituents like Thane VasaiVirar KalyanDombivli and Navi Mumbai it can indeed make a significant political impact The electorate especially the middleclass and the working class have an opportunity to unite and push lawmakers to address their specific needs If this does not happen Mumbairsquos cycle of doom will continue and it will forever remain a cash cow for politicians that tend to prioritise land deals over the cityrsquos longterm welfare