Managing Urban Challenges and Improving Quality of Life

Improving life in Mumbai

Mumbai, on India’s west coast, combines major economic activity with severe inequalities in living conditions. Managing its urban challenges means more than constructing new buildings: improvements must help people stay healthy, earn a living and live in a safer environment.

These are connected dimensions of quality of life. Reliable sanitation can improve health, while affordable transport can make jobs easier to reach. However, a new home may not improve someone’s overall well-being if moving there means losing their workshop or support network.

Bottom-up and top-down approaches

Bottom-up management begins with residents and community organisations. Local people help identify problems and decide what improvements they need. This can make projects responsive to everyday needs and encourage residents to look after shared facilities. Its limitations include restricted funding, uneven participation and difficulty tackling problems that extend across the whole city.

Top-down management is directed by government or other powerful organisations. It can mobilise substantial investment and coordinate large housing, transport or drainage schemes. However, decision-makers may overlook local needs, and redevelopment can displace residents or disrupt livelihoods.

The distinction concerns who influences decisions, not simply project size. The approaches can also be combined: government can provide finance and infrastructure while residents influence design and maintenance.

Community-managed sanitation: combining the approaches

Mumbai’s Slum Sanitation Programme, launched in 2001 following pilot projects, combines government support with bottom-up community management. The non-governmental organisation SPARC helped develop the community toilet model. Mumbai’s municipal government supported construction, with initial funding from the World Bank, while local community-based organisations (CBOs) took responsibility for maintaining toilet blocks.

Maintenance matters because heavily used toilets need regular cleaning, water and repairs. The programme’s model includes accommodation for a caretaker, making someone available to look after the facilities. Community management became a condition of toilet construction contracts rather than an optional addition.

Field research in Baiganwadi and Shivajinagar, in Mumbai’s Govandi area, found well-maintained toilets where CBOs, NGOs and residents worked together. Residents organised one or two caretakers, sometimes paying 20–30 Indian rupees per family per month towards operation and maintenance. This gives residents an active role in managing a service they use every day and helps sustain the benefits after construction.

However, participation and access are uneven. Some groups locked toilet seats for use by only a few families, restricting access for others. Where toilets lacked a CBO, caretaker or water connection, researchers observed much poorer conditions. Community involvement also cannot remove every obstacle: SSNS, an organisation working with SPARC, received a contract for 320 toilet blocks, but only 213 were constructed because of political issues and other setbacks.

This example shows both the advantage and the limitation of bottom-up management. Local responsibility can improve maintenance, but communities still need dependable public funding, infrastructure and wider government cooperation. Government construction and community management work best as complementary approaches.

Dharavi redevelopment: better housing, but at what cost?

Dharavi is a densely populated informal settlement within Mumbai. It contains homes alongside recycling, leather, textile, pottery and food-processing businesses. Housing and employment are therefore closely connected.

The Dharavi Redevelopment Project illustrates top-down management involving government and private developers. Redevelopment proposals include replacing existing structures with modern apartment buildings supplied with sanitation, water and electricity. Developers would finance construction in exchange for opportunities to develop valuable land commercially.

The intended social benefits include better housing and more reliable services. Improved sanitation could reduce exposure to contaminated wastewater. Planned development could also make more efficient use of scarce urban land.

However, eligibility rules can leave some residents without replacement housing. Moving home-based businesses into apartment blocks could remove the space needed for production or separate workers from customers. Relocation can also weaken established community networks. Better buildings therefore do not automatically mean better quality of life: housing security, livelihoods and social connections matter too.

Compared with community-managed sanitation, redevelopment can coordinate much larger changes to housing and land use. However, it also carries greater risks of disrupting established ways of living and working if residents have little influence over decisions.

Government policies beyond housing

Government has the resources and authority to address problems that individual neighbourhoods cannot solve alone.

Transport investment includes Mumbai Metro, whose first line opened in 2014, and the Mumbai Trans Harbour Link, which opened in 2024 between Mumbai and Navi Mumbai. These projects aim to improve connections and relieve pressure on existing transport. Easier journeys can improve access to work and services, but the benefits depend on whether routes and fares suit the people who need them.

Water and sanitation measures include pipeline replacement and community toilet provision. These address basic social needs and can reduce exposure to waste. The Slum Sanitation Programme demonstrates that their long-term value depends on reliable water supplies, cleaning and maintenance, rather than construction alone. Safe disposal and treatment of sewage are also necessary: a toilet does not solve pollution if its waste still enters a river untreated.

Flood-management measures include widening and cleaning the Mithi River, improving storm drains and pumping stations, and protecting remaining mangroves. Drainage improvements help remove stormwater, while mangroves provide natural flood protection. These measures can protect homes, businesses and health, although removing buildings from floodplains also raises questions about the people displaced.

Government policies therefore affect social quality of life through housing, health and services; economic quality of life through access to jobs and protection of livelihoods; and environmental quality of life through cleaner water and reduced flood risk. An overall judgement should consider the scale of improvement, its durability and its distribution. A policy may benefit the wider city while imposing costs on particular communities.

Using evidence to judge variations in quality of life

Quantitative information helps establish the scale of inequality. Estimates for Mumbai suggest that about 60% of residents live in informal housing occupying only 8% of the city’s land, while the remaining 40% occupy 92%. This indicates a very unequal distribution of residential space, although land shares alone do not measure housing quality.

For Dharavi, estimates of roughly one public toilet for every 500–1,500 people indicate intense pressure on sanitation. The range should be retained: presenting a single precise figure would hide uncertainty and differences within the settlement.

Qualitative information explains what such inequalities mean in daily life. Descriptions of families sharing tiny rooms, dependence on communal standpipes and open drains reveal problems that a city-wide population total cannot show. Descriptions of workshops and strong community networks also reveal assets that a poverty statistic might miss.

A concrete comparison comes from sanitation research across Mumbai’s wards. In that study, 99% of toilet blocks in ward L were classified as not in good condition, compared with 71% in ward D. The 28-percentage-point difference indicates substantial variation, but even the better-performing ward had widespread problems. These are findings from the study, not a current census of all Mumbai toilets.

Field observations help interpret those numbers. In Jarimeri, within ward L, researchers described toilets with broken doors and missing water or lighting, alongside wastewater flowing through drains towards the Mithi River. In parts of Baiganwadi, community involvement supported well-maintained toilets. The comparison shows why counting facilities alone is insufficient: their condition, safety and usability also affect quality of life.

Use both types of evidence together. Heavy toilet sharing, combined with descriptions of open wastewater drains, supports a judgement that sanitation is a serious quality-of-life problem. However, this does not mean every household has identical experiences, or that informal settlements lack economic opportunities.

To judge variation fairly, compare evidence from equivalent places and dates, consider differences within neighbourhoods and use several indicators. Ward averages can conceal local contrasts, while visits to selected settlements cannot represent the whole city. Mumbai’s economic success does not demonstrate that all residents enjoy a high quality of life; equally, poor housing alone does not describe every aspect of residents’ lives.