Campaigning for votes in the western province of Maharashtra this month, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India vowed to give such a remarkable facelift to Mumbai, the state capital, that people "should forget talking about Shanghai." Now that the election results are in, and a coalition led by Singh’s Congress Party has retained power in the province, the prime minister must make good his promise, which will take more than a paint job. The consulting firm McKinsey says it would cost $ 44 billion to make Mumbai a world-class city that can rank alongside Shanghai. A revival of Mumbai, the country’s trade and entertainment hub, is more than a matter of image. It’s an economic necessity. The city of 12 million fills two-fifths of the nation’s corporate-tax kitty, yet a third of its people live in slums. Mumbai’s economy has lagged the national average growth rate of about 7 percent since 1998 — a level of underperformance that is impossible to reverse without mending the city’s creaky infrastructure. A choked, potholed Mumbai is symptomatic of a wider urban malaise. It isn’t that a fast-growing economy like India can’t find the resources to invest in its cities, where much of its economic growth is being produced. By 2025, one of (the) two Indians would be living in an urban center, up from one in three now. Morgan Stanley’s chief economist, Stephen Roach, recently undertook a 115-mile, or 184-kilometer, car journey from Mumbai to the industrial city of Pune on a new expressway, which he says "is a huge cut above any of the other motor routes that I had been on in India." Yet, by Chinese standards, the new road merits a "B minus, at best," he says. "If this is progress in closing India’s infrastructure gap, the problem is even worse than I had imagined."
