BMC Budget 2026-27: Lavish Road Spending, Neglected Public Health And Commuters Raise Alarm
· Free Press Journal
If you are a pedestrian or a BEST bus commuter, then the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation thinks little of you. If you own or drive cars, especially on the coastal road, then the civic body believes that it must spend lavishly on you. This much is clear in the fine print of the BMC budget 2026-27 presented on Wednesday.
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The civic budget outlay for the next financial year is pegged at a staggering Rs 80,952 crore—let’s say almost Rs 81,000 crore—substantially higher than last year’s revised estimates of Rs 67,417 crore. In many ways, it is an unsettling budget, and the devil, as always, lies in the details. Details such as the spending on certain projects that the municipal corporation seems driven by an invisible force to undertake or expand at the cost of public funds and Mumbai’s ecology.
Roads over public transport
In this budget, Municipal Commissioner Bhushan Gagrani said that the capital expenditure surpasses revenue expenditure. It sounds reassuring until you unpack the details. Nearly 42 per cent of the capex is reserved for only four projects, namely, the coastal road (north and last leg), Goregaon-Mulund Link Road, ongoing road concretisation, and wastewater treatment facilities. Of these four, the coastal road extension and the GMLR carry a tag of Rs 4,700 crore and Rs 2,650 crore, respectively. This is a total spend of Rs 7,350 crore on extending or constructing two roads that are almost entirely for the use of Mumbaikars using private vehicles.
What else has been allocated a similar sum? The entire public health system of the BMC on which millions of average Mumbaikars depend every day. The health budget is Rs 7,456 crore. This, too, is a mirage because nearly 30 per cent of the budget has been set aside for the redevelopment of the BMC’s 16 peripheral hospitals, which cater to an estimated 70 per cent of civic patient care, and the 16-storey multi-speciality hospital at Kamathipura. The redevelopment push in the civic healthcare system, as healthcare activists repeatedly point out, has meant a stealth or backdoor privatisation of many of its services, if not a handover to private entities.
Healthcare and redevelopment
It is important to remember that Mumbai’s peripheral hospitals—forming the second tier to the three main civic and one government hospital—offer healthcare to more than 5 million outpatients, besides handling nearly 2.5 lakh admissions and over 42,000 surgeries every year, including emergency and accident cases. These are astonishing volumes of patients and surgeries for any municipal healthcare system in the world. What redevelopment will mean for this system, on which millions depend for affordable care, is still unclear, but it cannot be good news.
In the Mumbai subtextual language, ‘redevelopment’ has acquired a treacherously euphemistic meaning that somehow leads to opening public resources to the private sector, which then sees happy profits while the people of Mumbai, through the BMC, are stripped of their ownership or control over these resources. Land is a prime example of this mechanism. Huge parcels of public land across the city—acres and acres of it in Dharavi alone, where the BMC owns over 60 per cent of the land spread—are turned over to private companies and consortiums.
Hospitals and healthcare services have been following the trend more quietly. This is where Kamathipura’s super-speciality hospital makes sense. Kamathipura is set to be one of Mumbai’s largest redevelopment projects, spread across nearly 34 acres. The MHADA-led redevelopment plans to replace nearly 800 dilapidated buildings, some over a hundred years old, with 57-78 storey towers that will house the area’s residents as well as bring in hundreds of new homeowners and businesses.
The stated purpose of all redevelopment is to upscale existing residents or users; the underlying principle is the welfare of the private class. Sometimes, this slips out in official documents, such as the Environmental Impact Assessment of the coastal road. Why has the BMC been unusually persistent in building the coastal road at an eventual total cost of over Rs 35,000 crore, callously riding over all objections and suggestions from people and completely indifferent to the massive ecological impact it will have when 45,675 of 60,000 mangroves are cut only for the Versova-Dahisar belt and tidal waves change along the western coast?
While minimising or ignoring the environmental impact, the EIA honestly stated that the coastal road “will unlock opportunities for development” and “increase the property value of the surrounding areas”. This is a touching concern for the wealth potential of the already wealthy property owners along this belt.
Who benefits, who pays
Now, circle back to the annual budget allocation for the coastal road which, it’s important to remember, is meant for about 10 per cent of all commuters in Mumbai—and offers nothing at all for the 47 per cent who commute daily by foot, the 2 million who use BEST buses every day, or the 7.5 million suburban train commuters. The total spend on this one vanity project that will benefit private property owners, from 2022-23 till the current financial year, has been not less than Rs 15,200 crore, the BMC’s budget documents show.
Add the allocation for 2025-26, and the total is nearly Rs 20,000 crore of public funds spent in five years that hold no benefit for the largest majority of people in Mumbai. The large-scale ecological damage is, of course, not counted in this cost, but it will extract a price from every Mumbaikar in the coming years as the depleted mangroves will worsen flooding. So, who is paying for whom is crystal clear. And this is just one project allocation in the budget.
American author Mercedes Lackey once observed that “…everything written is at least in part fantasy. Except maybe the national budget. That's horror.” We, in Mumbai, are not adequately horrified by what the BMC budget tells us year after year.
Smruti Koppikar, an award-winning senior journalist and urban chronicler, writes extensively on cities, development, gender, and the media. She is the Founder Editor of the award-winning online journal ‘Question of Cities’ and can be reached at [email protected].