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Navi Mumbai Evolution
The rapid rate of growth of population, made possible by the increasing industrial and commercial importance of the city, resulted in a fast deterioration in the quality of life for the majority of people living in the city of Bombay. Development inputs could not keep pace with the rapidly growing population, industry, trade and commerce. Besides, there are physical limitations to the growth of a city built on a long and narrow peninsula, which has very few connections with the mainland.
The Government of Maharashtra has been alive to the emerging problems of this metropolis. In 1958, the Government of Bombay appointed a study group under the Chairmanship of Shri S.G. Barve, Secretary to Government, Public Works Department, to consider the problems relating to congestion of traffic, deficiency of open spaces and play fields, shortage of housing and over concentration of industry in the metropolitan and suburban areas of Bombay, and to recommend specific measures to deal with these.
The Barve Group reported in February, 1959. One of its major recommendations was that a rail-cum-road bridge be built across the Thane Creek to connect peninsular Bombay with the mainland as it would accelerate development across the Creek, relieve pressure on the city’s railways and roadways, and draw away industrial and residential concentrations eastward to the mainland. The Group hoped that the eastward development would be orderly and would take place in a planned manner.
The Government of Maharashtra accepted the Barve Group recommendation and also appreciated the reasons why the Bombay Municipal Corporation could not consider the eastward growth in framing its plans. This brought out the need to examine metropolitan problems in regional context and to do this the Government appointed another Committee under the Chairmanship of Prof. D.R. Gadgil, then Director of the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Poona. The Committee was asked “to formulate broad principles of regional planning for the metropolitan regions of Bombay Panvel and Poona and to make recommendations for the establishment of Metropolitan Authorities for preparation and execution of such plans”.
The Gadgil Committee reported in March 1966 and recommended that a Regional Planning Act be passed by the Government to provide for the creation of Regional Planning Boards for notified regions; and that, to start with, such Boards should be set up for the Bombay and Poona regions. The Maharashtra Regional and Town Planning Act was passed in 1966 and brought into force in January, 1967.
The Gadgil Committee made a number of other recommendations which have influenced the planning for New Bombay. Amongst them, one concerns a planned decentralisation of industries with severe restrictions on further industrial growth in the Bombay region.
The other concerns the development of the mainland area as a multi-nucleated settlement, each settlement smaller in size than 2.5 lacs population. These multi-nucleated settlements are called nodes in the plan, where the entire development is proposed as a series of nodes strung out along mass transit area. But the principle remains of individual settlements, self-contained in respect of schools and shopping and other essential services and separated from each other by green spaces.
The Draft Bombay Metropolitan Regional Plan proposed the development of a twin city across the harbour, on the mainland to the east, as a counter-magnet to the office concentration taking place at the southern tip of Bombay. The alternative growth pole was a siphon off the over concentration of jobs and population which further growth would cause in the city and reallocate these on the mainland. In making this recommendation, the Board was influenced by various factors such as the existing industrial sites in the Thana-Belapur area and Taloja, the imminent completion of the Thana Creek Bridge and the proposal of the Bombay Port Trust to establish a new port at Nhava Sheva.
The Board recommended that the new metro-centre, or New Bombay as it is now called, be developed to accommodate a population of 21 lacs. This corresponds very closely to the population level of 20 lacs for New Bombay assumed by us in this Development Plan.
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