A Lifeline That Kills: The Unforgivable Cost Of Mumbai’s Daily Commute

Four Dead, Nine Injured After Falling Off Two Local Trains. That’s how the headlines read. Not unusual, just another Monday in Mumbai. Their bags brushed against each other while hanging off the footboards — clinging, quite literally, to the margins of a system that has failed to accommodate the people who rely on it most. Among the dead was a 34-year-old policeman, a father of a toddler. His death, like the others, was quickly categorised as "unfortunate". But the term is disingenuous. There is nothing accidental about infrastructure that routinely kills its users. 

The Mumbai suburban rail system has claimed more than 51,000 lives in the past two decades. That’s seven people every single day. Yet every time a tragedy like this strikes, we brush it under the dusty rug of “the spirit of Mumbai.” We romanticise this resilience. We call it grit. But let’s call it what it actually is: abandonment. A city shrugging its shoulders at mass death, while offering infrastructural band-aids at best and distraction at worst.

Mumbai’s local is less public transport, and more survival mechanism. It was designed in a different era for a different city. Every day, more than 7.5 million people are crammed into compartments meant for far fewer. Since 1952, the number of passengers on the suburban lines has increased eightfold, while the number of trains has only tripled. What exists today is an overburdened, underfunded system operating at 2.6 times its intended capacity. People fall off trains. People are run over. People die between platforms and tracks. Footboard travel is what’s left when there’s no room inside. And yet, year after year, instead of prioritising this lifeline, we build for cars.

The causes of death are so consistent they have categories: falling from overcrowded coaches, being hit while crossing tracks, and getting caught between platform gaps. These deaths are never random. They are predictable. Infrastructure is not just concrete and steel — it is an inscription of our priorities. Who gets a seat on the train? Who gets a road? Who gets priced out of the metro? These are not logistical questions. They are questions of power.

While Mumbai’s lower and working classes jostle for space in crumbling train compartments, the state has poured over Rs. 13,000 crore into the Coastal Road project — a multi-lane expressway meant exclusively for private vehicles. Only about 9% of Mumbaikars own cars. It’s a stunning monument to who the city is really built for. Urban design continues to reward car owners with flyovers, expressways, and sea links, while denying the majority basic public transport safety.

The politics of visibility is central here. A crammed local train coach filled with garment workers, municipal clerks, and security guards does not carry the same representational weight as a sleek highway dotted with cars. The Coastal Road is visible progress. Mumbai’s trains, meanwhile, operate out of sight and out of mind — until a tragedy forces them briefly into public consciousness.

Infrastructure, as anthropologist Brian Larkin writes, “is a matter of both politics and poetics.” In Mumbai, that poetry is found in the romanticisation of the local. But resilience, when demanded repeatedly from the same communities without reciprocal state support, ceases to be admirable. It becomes exploitation.

What makes the current moment particularly disturbing is not just the scale of the crisis but the normalisation of it. The court filings, the affidavits, the death tolls — these have become routine rituals of state performance. Railway officials cite the challenges of expansion. Urban planners cite waterlogging, encroachments, lack of staggered work hours. And passengers are reminded that they, too, must cooperate for safety — as if survival were a matter of etiquette rather than entitlement.

Meanwhile, interventions promised in the wake of accidents — sliding doors, vestibules, new rakes — are treated as innovations rather than overdue necessities. But piecemeal upgrades cannot correct a fundamentally imbalanced transport ecology. Without a massive reinvestment in trains, buses, ferries, and other collective transport modes, the body count will only grow.

It does not have to be this way. Other cities have shown that large-scale, inclusive public transport is possible. Tokyo, often cited for its overcrowding, has built extensive intermodal systems and enforces strict platform discipline. Bogotá’s bus rapid transit system offers a model of cheap, scalable urban mobility. Even within India, Ahmedabad’s Janmarg BRT and Kochi’s integrated water metro point toward more democratic urban transport design.

Until we reframe the question — from how do we manage Mumbai’s chaos, to who is the city being designed for — we will remain trapped in a cycle of reactive grief. To grieve these deaths is necessary. But to grieve without demanding systemic change is to accept the slow violence as inevitable. The least a city can promise its citizens is that the daily act of getting to work won’t be a constant act of gambling with your life.

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