Mumbai's Eastern Seaboard To Get Structure Taller Than The Burj Khalifa

India excels at making a fuss. And when it comes to pomp and circumstance no one does it better, any Punjabi wedding could tell you that. This affinity for grandeur stretches into all areas of our existence including it seems, our architecture. In the last few months the Mumbai Port Trust (MbPT) has announced its plans to revamp the Eastern seaboard which includes an upgraded Marine Drive, a 40-hectare ecological garden, a private marina and now it seems, a colossus of a structure - that will supposedly overshadow Dubai’s iconic, Burj Khalifa - in honour of the late great Maratha warrior Chhatrapati Shivaji.

The idea was initially expressed on Saturday by Nitin Gadkari, the union minister for shipping, road transport and highways, who knows this may not become a reality but is daring to dream big, “I am not making any announcement but only expressing my wish. I want a huge building to come up in Mumbai.” he says. He views the MbPT as the ‘number one landlords’ thanks to their monopoly over most of the city’s sea-facing properties.

Just to get a sense of scale, the Burj Khalifa with 163 floors stands at 2,722 feet and is currently the tallest structure in the world, and this structure plans to outdo that. Gadkari has already mapped out the floor plan for the proposed building with 30 floors to be reserved for a convention centre, the next 30 for restaurants, 30 to go in hotel rooms and 20 devoted entirely to shopping with additional floors providing the necessary parking space. To ensure that it remains a memorial though, he intends for the top floors to act as an art gallery devoted to depictions of Shivaji Maharaj and his life. As a final flourish he wants to surround the building with musical fountains, lights and crystal clear water. We applaud his subtle taste in decor.

If you were wondering where these crystal clear waters were hiding, it’s actually another part of his master plan to clean up Mumbai’s seas. His vision is to have beaches like in the Andamans and Mauritius and adds proudly “We will do whatever can be done to make sea water clean.” While this is the best news Mumbai’s shores have heard in a while, we are a bit skeptical about what a clean-up of that scale would even look like. For now, we won’t burst his bubble and hope that this means we’ll soon be able to swim in the seas of Mumbai without fear of toxic waste.