ABSTRACT
Mumbai is home to 12 million people, around 20 million if the people of the entire massive metropolis ‘Greater Mumbai’ are included. It is an amalgam of people from all Indian states, religions, identities, and income levels, with pavement dwellers living close to sleek modern towers housing millionaires, all crammed together onto a relatively small area. No surprise that it has been called a ‘maximum city’ (Metha 2004) and a city of extremes, and any government would be hard put to govern such a complex, extremely heterogeneous and potentially divided population and area. The city faces severe mismatches between the supply and demand of essential services and overall infrastructure. Land is so expensive that it has become the key city arena of both contestation and profi t making, spurring dynamics of informality and rent seeking by powerful city groups. This chapter provides the socioeconomic and governance context needed to understand the juxtaposition of poverty, politics and governance in the metropolis. Facts and trends as regards demography, employment and incomes are presented fi rst, followed by a review of city administration, dominated by the Mumbai Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM), better known by its former name BMC or Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation. Its main players such as the municipal commissioner, the powerful standing committee and the BMC council are introduced. Urban decentralisation legislation was implemented from 2000, and I will describe the twisty road towards the formation of the main institutions and actors and assess their overall performance. But the BMC is by no means the only organisation governing the city; powerful state-and central-level agencies and parastatals are assumed to co-govern, with an increasingly large role for the private sector. I will show that, unfortunately, this is a city with too many bosses and too little coordination and effi - ciency, where agencies are politicised and often self-interestedly compete for funds and opportunities.
