Mumbai is hailed as the New York of the Subcontinent. The financial capital of India and a city of dreams that never sleeps. Subjective assessment aside, it is also figuratively like its celebrated and glamorous American cousin. It is an island-based city that, like New York, has nowhere to grow but upwards. But unlike America’s Big Apple, Mumbai’s shimmering, sky-scraping façade stands on desiccated land pockmarked by a profound and unjustifiable disregard for urban niceties: fetid chawls, usurped commons, rivers that resemble swamps, and garbage-strewn beaches that fringe a sea soiled by untreated sewage.

It is almost as if its administrators have never been held to account, never been chastised by its people for betraying their trust, and therefore under no moral obligation to serve or perform. This is not entirely perception. Unlike the brutally gladiatorial mayoral contests in New York, televised nationally and fought on issues of policing, housing, transport, and........

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