I’m not kidding when I say that the streets of Mumbai are paved with gold . Literally in certain areas like Jhaveri Bazar you can find shops selling gold ornaments and I’ve heard that if you scour the gutters there, you may find gold dust or minuscule shards of gold that fly off from lathe machines while while handcrafting jewellery. Of course, this is just hearsay but the fact remains that for years Mumbai has been the beacon of wealth that attracts many hundreds of people each day who come to this city to try and seek their fortune. And many do. Over the years we’ve had textile barons who started out as delivery boys carrying lades before going on to managing the shop and finally owning a textile mill . And in the recent past we have the example of Dhirubhai Ambani who came from Gujarat and left behind a fortune so large that his son is now the richest man in Asia .

It is no wonder then that road building or road digging has been a major obsession with our civic administration. Especially in the month of February when the weather is good and all the citizens are taking a break from the hectic partying of the earlier six months. Rumour has it that the municipality has to meet budget targets and finish the money assigned for civic work before the end of the financial year hence the mad scramble to dig up roads and complete road improvement projects before March ends.

Thus road construction goes on for years and years and years. I remember my girls’ entire middle school years were spent finding new routes to get to school because of the different roads that were dug up each year. Finally, now that they are grown and married, the neighbourhood has been restored to normalcy with concretised roads.

But we have new roads and new projects to cope with increasing traffic.

The Coastal Road & the Mainland link

My city is longitudinal and is made up of seven islands that dot the west coast. Thanks to repeated land reclamations, it has long since ceased to be a conglomeration of islands and has become one land mass called Brihan Mumbai or Greater Bombay stretching from the southern most tip at Colaba to almost the entire island of Salsette right up to Versova in the North.

So naturally, roads are vital to get from one point to the other and our city fathers decided that we should have a road running along the western coast so that people would have a traffic free ride from North (where most of the people lived) to the South (where most of them worked) .

A bit of history here : The Southern end was where the British had their fortification and was where all the commercial and governmental activity was concentrated so after they left, we just occupied the buildings and changed the name to Mumbai. And as time went by, the textile mills were shifted as were the other industries in Mumbai and the urban sprawl expanded to the mainland.

Which brings us back to the two new road connections – the coastal road skirting the west and the trans-harbour link connecting the city to the mainland .

Earlier this year, India’s longest sea bridge was inaugurated as the Atal Bihari Vajpayee Nhava-Sheva Atal Setu. Despite years and years of setubandhasan, I never connected setu with bridges and actually thought Setu was Atal’s name till the penny dropped – SETU is Sanskrit for BRIDGE. Incidentally there are two more Atal Setus in India – one in Goa connecting Panjim and Porvorim on the other side of the Mandovi river while the other Atal Setu is in the HImalayas near Pathankot.

Driving from North to South

Perhaps that is the reason why the longest road in Mumbai is named the Dharmveer Swarajya Rakshak Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj Coastal Road. Eventually when it is finished this partially opened 8-lane, 29.2-km long expressway along Mumbai’s western coastline will connect Marine Lines in the south to Kandivali in the north.

This engineering marvel that our city has been eagerly waiting for the past fifty years would take longer to type into Google Maps than it would to travel on the road! Wanting to share my experience of the thrill of travelling underwater without a swimsuit, I quickly hurried my family into the car for an after-dinner drive on the first day the road was open to the public. We drove down to Worli sea face to find the ramp shut and worse still, unable to  take the U turn at the Coast Guard end. We had no option but to go on the Sea Link, pay the toll, and exit the bridge take a U turn and pay the toll again to return home! We didn’t realise that the road is operational from 8-8 Monday to Friday only.

Luckily, I don’t need the coastal road to get anywhere but it has definitely made a difference to the traffic flow .

I’m now waiting for the whole road to be opened up so that I can go from one end of the city to the other in the much promised 45 minutes!

Till then,

Ciao