Trans harbour sea link – Mumbai

India’s longest sea bridge could transform our future. But urgent corrections are needed if the 22.5-km Trans-Harbour Link can do to Mumbai what the 30-km Dong Hai Bridge has done to Shanghai.

“A sea bridge is iconic. Once made it becomes the identity of the city, more like instant recall. So, it has to be awe-inspiring, …we worked at breakneck speed and completed the Dong Hai Bridge in 3-1/2 years.”

– Andrew Yeoward, Design consultant and technical advisor to the team that built Shanghai’s new lifeline

Stray lapwings and gulls flap through the humid air as the tide rises and the mudflats slowly disappear near the Rubber Jetty in a decrepit corner of Mumbai known as eastern Sewri. There’s no one around but a few ragged boys. On a rare, clear day you can glimpse the high rises of Navi Mumbai, the city that can give India’s commercial capital the space and opportunity to reinvent itself into a truly global megapolis.

There’s only one problem. It takes the average, vexed commuter two hours to reach Navi Mumbai — over rutted roads, sometimes paths of mud. That’s why the state government hopes that within a few months, gigantic pillars built with thousands of truckloads of concrete will begin to rise from the mudflats. The pillars will be the foundation of a potentially iconic 21.75 km six-lane bridge — India’s longest — across the sea, Mumbai’s long-awaited link to Nhava across the eastern bay in Navi Mumbai and beyond to the multi-billion dollar sprawl of condominiums and industries planned across the eastern seaboard.

Metropolitan superstardom

If Mumbai is to transcend its 100-year-old infrastructure and begin the journey to metropolitan superstardom, the construction of the Trans-Harbour Link and its equally ambitious cousin, the Eastern Freeway, must begin now.

For 28-year-old Jagdish Sahu, a software engineer, project names are irrelevant. All he cares about is that his journey from his Ghatkopar home to his office Navi Mumbai will be quick and comfortable. “I have to travel via mudpaths and dirttracks of Govandi to reach my office in Vashi after two hours. By then, I’m exhausted and irritable,” he said.

But four years after these projects start (keep those fingers crossed), it will take Sahu only 30 minutes from his home to Navi Mumbai. All he will have to do is get on to the Eastern Freeway — a 11.9-km high-speed corridor that will connect Prince of Wales Museum in Colaba to Ghatkopar — till Sewri. At Sewri, he will get on to harbour bridge and fly to Navi Mumbai just as the crow flies (in this case flamingos). And if he wants to go to Worli for dinner, he can directly get off the bridge onto an elevated road through Acharya Dhone Marg.

“I will buy a new car. It is worth the toll.” beamed Sahu.

Sahu’s car will be one of the 46,480 passenger cars that will find their way on the harbour bridge by 2011. Almost 20 per cent of the traffic crossing the Thane creek will be diverted to the harbour bridge by then. The Rs 4,500-crore project will not allow you to access not a sleepy Navi Mumbai, which never really became another Mumbai, but a new megapolis with special economic zones, tax free enclaves that are virtually private cities, and a state-of-the art international airport.

Mukesh Ambani’s SEZ

The SEZ sprawls across 4,377 hectares and the largest portion being developed by Mukesh Ambani, the man who hold the strings of our growing economy. It will be the most important and modern industrial zone to be built in the country.

But, as Anil Deshmukh, Minister for the State’s Public Works Department said, “Without the harbour bridge all development in Navi Mumbai is useless. It is the project of the century that will redefine connectivity.”

Let’s translate time into money: Every commuting hour saved is about Rs 100, said Professor S.L Dhingra from the Civil Engineering Department of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. “Each of us will save Rs 300 a day, two ways. And saving time accounts for only one fifth of the money we will save. By 2016, we will save Rs 1000 crore an annum,” he added.

So, using the seabridge will cost you Rs 2.25 per km. That is almost four times than the current travelling cost.

Companies in Navi Mumbai see the bridge as the light at the end of the tunnel. The bridge means greater productivity thus an opportunity to leapfrog their competitors across the world.

“My people are haggard by the time they reach work,” said Swaroop Kumar, head of Glenmark, a pharmaceutical company. “The bridge will actually increase their efficiency and sense of well being. We set shop in Navi Mumbai because its pace of growth faster and more organised than Mumbai, but connectivity is a hindrance.”

Their greater embarrassment lies when they have foreign guests, their numbers growing by the day as India makes its strong global pitch. “While Navi Mumbai is worth showing off, the route and time taken from the airport is appalling. Several even ask us why there is no bridge. They like to wrap up meetings by two in the afternoon because they say they want to reach in time for dinner,” said Kumar.

Across the bay in old Mumbai, the urchins settle for the evening, smoking bedis and chatting. The tide is rising over the mudflats and fishing boats return to the old, battered jetty.

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