Shanghai - Can it be a benchmark for Mumbai?
Posted : October 25, 2004 at 4:53 pm [IST]
I heard Dr. Man Mohan Singh promising to do every thing to make Mumbai the Shanghai of India. I am sure when a prime minister who is economist first and a politician by circumstances, promises certain thing, he must be really sincere about it. And that gives a hope as well as a worry. Hope is because it will mean a great thing for the country, Much of what impresses you about Shanghai today simply didn’t exist in the beginning of the ’90s.Worry because I doubt if it will be possible. Nowhere is the difference between India and China starker than in Shanghai.
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Surprisingly, the city’s metro, its elevated roads, the inner ring road, the pedestrian tunnel under the Huangpu River and the new international airport were all conceived of in the ’90s and have been part of the city’s landscape for some time.
Shanghai also has the world’s fastest train, the ‘maglev’ which levitates above the rails using magnetic fields to reach speeds of 430 kmph. It covers the 30-km distance between the new international airport and the city’s eastern outskirts in just eight minutes.
More impressive is the Pudong area, the new commercial hub across the river from the old city. In the early ’90s, this was a marshland. Last year, the same Pudong alone attracted some $6 billion in foreign direct investment. That’s about one-and-a-half times more than what all of India gets annually. There’s the satellite town of Jiading, close to Formula One’s spanking new circuit. It hosted the Formula One Shanghai Grand Prix last month. Two lakh seats at the circuit might have seemed overtly ambitious for a city and country with little or no previous exposure to F1, but the event was a sell-out.
Representatives of the world’s biggest automakers who were at the circuit were there for an event involving alternate fuel vehicles. The circuit is meant to draw the world’s eyes towards Shanghai, which will be developed into a major ‘auto city’.
Mega investments in infrastructure, including building whole new cities and transport facilities where there may be nobody to use them today, catalyse growth and the best guarantors of their own future viability.
At the event on alternate fuel vehicles, the scale of China’s presence, largely through its academic institutions, also leaves the media - Indian and western - stunned.
It’s evident that the country is aware that if it continues to grow at its current pace oil crisis is inevitable. Unlike India, it seems well on its way to dealing with the crisis before it becomes a calamity.
You are still unlikely to find people who can discuss post-modernism with you in English, but there are enough people around who admit to knowing “a little bit” of the language of international commerce. The fact that they are uniformly helpful, willing to go out of their way to get you the directions you want, is also evident. Is it not very different from that in Mumbai or Chennai?
Are communists listening? I wish Dr. Man Mohan Singh a success in keeping up his promise. His team must at least try hard. Today it is not impossible, if there is political will. But with if a coalition that wins election together but fails to agree about the party that will have its chief minister speaks poorly of the situation at hand and raises the doubt.
- Indra
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