Mumbai's elite lane

Motorway few in city will use leaves poor in gridlock and the sea out of bounds

- Amrit Dhillon Mumbai

Mumbai is known for its graphic inequality, its gleaming highrises where the rich live with panoramic views of the Arabian Sea standing next to windowless hovels perched over drains.

It is home to 90 of India’s billionaires, but also to more than 6 million slum dwellers, about 55% of central Mumbai’s population.

Now Mumbai has anew symbol of the gulf between rich and poor: ahigh-speed, eight-lane motorway on its western coast, which critics say serves only the wealthy despite being built with taxpayers’ money.

The road was intended as a solution to the gridlocked roads of India’s commercial capital. But Mumbaiis a densely populated peninsula, 25 miles long and 6 miles wide, where land is as scarce as snow.

The road had to be built on land reclaimed from the Arabian Sea. An engineering marvel, it connects north and south and is a dream for car owners, who used to average about 5mph through Mumbai’s congestion. At Marine Drive in the south where it starts, cars now dip down into an undersea tunnel for more thana mile and, after making great loops across the shimmering sea where the road is built on stilts, they emerge 6 miles away in Worli in 10 minutes instead of the 45 minutes it took previously.

But an estimated 64% of the Mumbai metropolitan region’s 22.5 million residents travel by overcrowded buses and trains.