A row has erupted over the positioning of the International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) at Gandhinagar in Gujarat, after hopes were raised about Mumbai being accorded that prestige. This is bound to stir up the political discourse in Maharashtra, and the first shot was fired by Maratha strongman and Nationalist Congress Party chief and former chief minister Sharad Pawar, through a letter he shot off to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Perceptions are that the PM’s home state grabbed it with undue help from the PM.
The issue came out in the open after the Union Government issued a gazette notification a week ago, fixing the location of the prestigious financial institution in the Gujarat capital. This could have led to mass protests in Maharashtra but for the fact that Mumbai and Pune are in lockdown mode for weeks together and public activities remain banned. The issue however will not die down, and the Shiv Sena-NCP-Congress combine would most likely raise it as a major weapon against the PM himself as also the Central government.
Notably, this project had been pending for many years after the proposal to set it up in Mumbai, the nation’s financial nerve centre, was announced in 2006 by the then prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh. However, nothing moved in that direction for such a long time. Congestion of Mumbai itself stood against the project’s implementation. It was also that, eventually, the plan for its location in Gandhinagar was announced in Parliament in 2017 by then finance minister Arun Jaitley. The erstwhile BJP-Shiv Sena government had then come up with an alternative proposal that the IFSC be located both in Mumbai and Gandhinagar. After a period of silence, the ‘gift’ went solely now to Gandhinagar.
The giant global institution is rumored to generate as high as one hundred thousand jobs within its fold and another one lac outside of it. The huge land requirement for the setting up of the project was obviously a constraint at Mumbai. At the same time, Mumbai’s status as the financial capital of the nation and an important financial center in south Asia region as a whole cannot be ignored. The BJP-Shiv Sena government failed to make the necessary moves to clinch the issue in Mumbai’s favour, and this is also likely to be a reason why the Shiv Sena has not roared over the matter now, and left it to the Maratha leader to make a noise.
Political leadership is repeatedly letting down Mumbai on various counts. The introduction of the Metro Rail system got delayed by decades, with the result that even today, what the huge metropolis boasts of is an intersection linking two central local rail lines by way of a Metro system built by the Ambanis. The bullet train project, initiated shortly after the Modi government took power in Delhi in 2014 with involvement of Japan, is now as good as shelved. The present Shiv Sena-NCP-Congress government is not in a mood to fund the project, though substantial work has already gone into the realization of the project. This was also amid perceptions that the flight of industries from Mumbai to destinations in Gujarat will further speed up if the Bullet train project is completed. Both Sharad Pawar and Uddhav Thackeray could not stomach such a prospect.
Mumbai, that was once the pride of Asia as its principal commercial hub, failed to march ahead or shape up over the past three decades while mega new cities like Shanghai sprang up in the eastern part of the globe. The coming into being of big cities in the Middle East, as in Dubai, also affected the growth dynamics of Mumbai, what was once a major haunt for moneyed sheikhs from the oil rich kingdoms of the desert region. The strength of Mumbai was its once-thriving textiles sector, but much of the mills have been transplanted to Gujarat in recent years because of the high doses of unionism and muscle-flexing by leaders like late Datta Sawant and others. The pharmaceutical industry shifted base to Pune, Himachal Pradesh and Hyderabad. Another pride of Mumbai, the banking sector with a profusion of international banks having been anchored there since the British period, is also an old story because of their eventual shift to New Delhi.
While Maharashtra and Mumbai in specific will have reasons to make a hue and cry over the loss of IFSC, this must also open the eyes and minds of the political leaderships to the need for according more care for the city in pronounced and intensely serious ways.