Mumbai Meri Jaan, Where’s Your Famed ‘Resilience’ Amid COVID-19?

Dear Mumbai, your resilience is the sum total of the spirit of each one of over 2 cr people whose dreams you hold.

Dear Mumbai,

It is extremely painful to see you in coma for nearly 50 days, and we don’t know for how much longer we’ll have to see you like this. The cost of keeping you immobile for so long is humongous – approximately Rs 25,000 crore – already gone and counting.

You can say that you have never been afflicted with such a disease before. That at least 10,000 of your loved ones are in the grips of COVID-19, and unfortunately, more than 400 of them already gone forever.

There is no denying that the loss to your family, one of the worst for any city in the country, is serious – and you want the remaining ones to stay healthy, and therefore, stay at home. Fair enough. That is the way a family should take care of its members.

Mumbai Contributes Almost 7% to India’s GDP

But you must remember that you are no ordinary city, and that what happens to you impacts many of your brothers and sisters living elsewhere. Let me remind you of your centrality in our lives:

• Among the largest 300 major metropolitan regions of the world, you created more jobs than growing cities like Manila, Jakarta, Wuhan, Istanbul, Dhaka, Abu Dhabi and Jeddah, between 2014 and 2016. You even trumped the established ones like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Barcelona and Shanghai on this count, according to the Brookings Global Metro Monitor 2018.
• Your per capita GDP growth at 6.9 percent in the same period was much higher than a vast majority of all the 300 mega cities of the world. Only a handful of cities – Dublin, San Jose and Hyderabad for instance – did better than you on this parameter, according to the Global Metro Monitor.
• You contribute nearly 7 percent to India’s GDP, and that is a huge burden to carry year after year. The country’s economic recovery, therefore, will depend a great deal on how quickly you get back on your feet.
• While you are known to house big corporates and large multinational companies, just take pride in what a 2014 JP Morgan Chase report observes about you – it says: “a hub for smaller businesses with national and international reach, including in the design, fashion, tourism and jewellery sectors, where more informal networks of entrepreneurs have continually strengthened Mumbai’s brand overseas. The city is a centre of creativity and consumption, with high average income and tax generation by regional standards.” In other words, you provide ‘national and international reach’ to tomorrow’s large corporations.

A Month of Mumbai in Lockdown Means a Loss Of Nearly Rs 16,000 Crores

• The JP Morgan Chase report also says that as many as 21 of India’s top 54 companies have made you their headquarters, which is almost twice as much as your nearest competitor, Delhi. It further says that two of your ports “handle more than a third of India’s foreign trade”, and “firms based in the city as a whole declare nearly 60 percent of the country’s customs duty collections, and 40 percent of income tax to the National Exchequer.” These are staggering numbers and show how crucial you are for corporate India, as well as the government and its revenue generation plans.
• No wonder, it is estimated that a month of you in lockdown means a loss of nearly Rs 16,000 crores. Your annual turnover is estimated to be close to Rs 4 lakh crore. Since 80 percent of your economy is driven by the services sector, experts reckon that a loss of business now cannot be recovered once you are allowed to function the way you always have. A demand gone now is demand gone forever.

You Trusted Your People –And They Kept You Going Despite the Odds

I have reminded you about some of your great strengths. Let me tell you that there are many more. The people, the diversity, the local railway network that packs many times more than what it can accommodate, the concentration of population that can seem inconceivable anywhere else in the world, the monsoon rain that can incapacitate any other Indian city – but you and the ‘maya nagari’ that is your entertainment industry –they add to your strength.

Let me also remind you about some of your trying times in recent years. The 1993 blasts and the communal riots that followed, the devastating floods of 2005 (about which I too have my fair share of personal memories), and the 2008 terrorist attacks on the Taj and Trident hotels, and many more terrorist attacks on your soil in this century alone – these are some of the many events that sought to undermine your existence.

Even so, you picked up your pieces and brushed aside challenges that came your way. Can the coronavirus pandemic change your course? I have no doubt that your famed resilience will counter this phase too.

However, for that to happen, your guardians (city administration, state and central governments) must carefully weigh the benefits of keeping you under lockdown for many more days, against the massive cost that such a move entails.

Mumbai, Perhaps, Needs a More People-Centric Approach

I know there is no easy answer. The pandemic is nothing like what we have seen before. The response, therefore, has to be flexible, and policy response data-dependent. If weeks of very strict lockdown haven’t been able to flatten the curve and contain the virus (as was expected in your case), can we try something else?

A more people-centric approach perhaps?

After all, dear Mumbai, your resilience is the sum total of the fighting spirit of each one of more than 2 crore people whose aspirations you keep fulfilling. And millions of other dreams you promise to take care of in the future. Since you are the custodian of millions of dreams, you need to be handled with the utmost care.

I sincerely hope that you have the strength to show us the way, yet again.

Yours sincerely,
A Skeptic-Turned Admirer of the Acclaimed ‘Mumbai Spirit’

(Mayank Mishra is a senior journalist who writes on Indian economy and politics, and their intersection. He tweets at @Mayankprem. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed in this article are that of the writer’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)