Best cities for business

Picture this: BY 2020, Mumbai and its extended suburbs are a dizzying maze of flyovers and expressways that go on and on. Entwined around skyscrapers whose terraces hang hidden in the clouds, the concrete jungle may not be pretty, but it never fails to elicit gasps dripping with awe from the thousands of immigrants who (still) troop into the country’s financial capital every day. Visitors to the megacity can’t help but marvel at the smooth and orderly flow of traffic through the labyrinths of sixand eight-lane roads and ramps that start at Colaba in the south, snake over the Arabian sea, and end some 100 km off Greater Mumbai limits, well into what was a rural, agrarian Konkan pasture only a decade ago.

Mumbai tops again

If the traffic’s moving smoothly, it’s not just because of the countless wide and runway-like roads that meander across the Mumbai landscape, almost like random strokes of a painter’s brush. The traffic’s humming without a glitch also because there isn’t much of it on the road. That’s because few are keen to drive their cars out on these endless tarmacs of immaculately laid-out thoroughfares.

Few are keen to drive because few are willing to shell out a small fortune for petrol and diesel. Crude oil, the commodity whose supply woefully outstrips demand in 2020, has crossed $300 a barrel, and is still rising. Electric trains, buses and even the humble cycle have become the average Mumbaikars’ vehicles of preference.