Mumbai: Traffic
Part of the Cities on Speed series. Produced by Danish Radio. 2011. 60 minutes.
In English.

Study areas: : India, Mumbai/Bombay, urban studies, transportation, politics

This is a realistic film about the serious problem of transportation congestion in Mumbai, one of the world’s most populated cities.  It is humanistic in its respect for the people it features and is also humorous at times about the unique and sometimes conflicting conjunctions that this complex transportation problem inflicts on variously positioned residents.  The film presents many dimensions of the transportation problem through non-scripted portrayals of key actors as they debate plans and implement projects to alleviate traffic congestion in and around the main commercial hub of the city.

The main characters in the film are a bureaucrat of a government public sector transportation department, a citizen activist and her colleagues, and a street vendor and his family.  The film chronicles their lives as they evaluate the planning and construction of the highway links proposed to alleviate vehicle congestion.  The film convincingly shows how a sea bridge and flyover become infrastructure center points around which the city’s citizens converge.  The film also conveys the individual and institutional struggles involved in building large scale infrastructure to meet the burgeoning desires of a large population, while showing the inevitable conflicts and differences of opinion that arise in the process. 

Viewers with background knowledge of India will be familiar with well-known problems in the functioning of an Indian public sector enterprise and new audiences will witness the issues that arise as a project moves through the stages of funding, design planning, and approval, and through the stages of construction and environmental rehabilitation. The film also does a good job of revealing the confused, tedious and sometimes intentionally fraudulent ways in which specific project permits and construction components are cleared and implemented.  The viewer is therefore able to comprehend how public sector projects become tangled up in the complex world of urban organizational and communication difficulties and challenges, all driven by the demands of an increasingly sophisticated populace in an overtaxed and extremely limited land mass.

The main actor in the story, the government bureaucrat and supervisor for the project, allows the camera to follow his trek through everyday life, and in the process he reveals his frustrations with his weighty responsibilities and almost overwhelming resource limitations.  The viewer is also able to understand the views and rationales of the citizen group opposing the public sector projects, and their desires to bring back the peaceful and unpolluted past and create livable spaces in the city center.  Meanwhile the street vendor and his family are scrambling to survive in a highly competitive market of production and consumption while living out their dream of owning a new Tata Nano car. As they creatively construct their own vehicular space in this busy city, the viewer is shown how consumers are driving the process of urban consumption in powerful ways as new entrants to the commuter car culture, caught in an evolving system of highway chaos.

This film is appropriate for high school and college students as an introduction to problems with modern urban transportation infrastructure, consumer culture, and citizen resistance.  It presents a variety of views from different citizen positions to show how complex any set of solutions would be.  The background music adds some humor to these difficult problems, to alleviate the frustrations that inevitably prevail when thinking about these issues.

Kelly D. Alley is Professor of Anthropology at Auburn University. She has worked in the Ganga river basin of India for 20 years, studying interpretations of the sacred river Ganga and problems with river pollution and wastewater management. She has recently focused on hydropower development across the Indian Himalayas.  She is the author of a book and numerous book chapters and articles on religion and ecology, river linking, hydropower development, and environmental law and justice in India. She is now working on water governance problems in the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna mega basin that spans India, Bangladesh, China, Nepal and Bhutan.

Last Updated: August 16, 2013