Mumbai (Bombay), India

Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay, is an island city located on India's west coast; with a population of 18 million people, it is one of the largest cities in the world. Mumbai is responsible for more than half of India's foreign trade, has become a center for the country's global dealings in financial and producer services, and constitutes 40 percent of the state's annual direct central revenue. Since India's economic liberalization reforms in 1985 and 1991, Mumbai's economy, particularly the southwest area of Nariman Point, has increasingly globalized.

Mumbai occupies a key site in the Indian modern economic and cultural imagination. The city has often been described as inevitably cosmopolitan, given its economic and cultural diversity, drawing Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, Christians, Sikhs, Jains, and others. The city is home to Bollywood, the Hindi film industry, which produces more films than any other film industry in the world, films that combine dancing, simple melodies, and extravagant spectacles with narratives of everyday life. Mumbai has a varied cultural life beyond Bollywood, evidenced, for example, in its large Marathi or Gujarati literary history.

Historically, Mumbai has been a focus for global trade around the Arabian Sea and beyond, owing in large part to its endowment with one of the largest natural harbors in South Asia. Originally a collection of seven fishing islands, Mumbai was established as a Portuguese outpost in the early sixteenth century and was passed to the British crown in 1662 as part of a marriage dowry. From the mid-nineteenth century, it was transformed into a booming industrial city, especially in textiles. The city's first textile mill was established in the 1850s; and when the U.S. Civil War cut off cotton imports from America, Bombay became Britain's principal cotton supplier.

The colonial city was split between a walled fort to the south, well supplied with housing and infrastructures, and a neglected native town. The city's geographical extent advanced through massive programs of land reclamation from the sea. By the 1860s, it had been established as one of the leading ports and manufacturing centers of the British Empire, and south Bombay had assembled much of its famous Bombay Gothic British–Indian architecture, most notably the spectacular train station, Victoria Terminus.

Contemporary Mumbai is the capital of the state of Maharashtra, the state with the highest-ranking per capita income in India; it constitutes 20 percent of the state's GDP. Despite the city's generally impressive economic statistics, there was a drop from 7 percent to 2.4 percent in the city's GDP per annum between 1994 and 2002. Often referred to as India's maximum city, Mumbai is the country's most unequal city. More than half of [Page 531]the city's population lives in informal settlements of varying infrastructure, income, economy, ethnicity, and religion, squeezed into whatever space can be found, from bridges and railways to pavements and shantytowns.

The growth in informal settlements reflects both the spectacular and ongoing rise in real estate prices during the 1990s, driven by the city's economic growth and orchestrated through an often corrupt coalition of the state, builders, developers, and the city's infamous underworld, along with the inadequacy of the state's social housing commitment. Most people in informal settlements lack security of tenure, live in poor-quality housing vulnerable to monsoon rains, suffer from frequent bouts of state or private demolition, lack access to sufficient and clean water and sanitation facilities, and live in highly polluted environments vulnerable to illness and disease. Given that there is often a weak relationship between income and access to basic services and infrastructures in Mumbai's informal settlements, it is unlikely that economic growth itself could be a solution to these issues.

...