Mumbai is often touted as the city of dreams, and its residents are a mixed bag of achievers and strugglers.
With $960 billion worth of total wealth, it is the only Indian name to feature among the world’s top 20 wealthiest cities, according to New World Wealth’s October 2019 report.
Mumbai has the highest number of high net worth individuals (HNWIs), those with assets over $1 million, in the country. It’s where India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, lives. It is “the financial centre of India. It is also home to BSE, the 10th largest stock exchange in the world,” the South Africa-based wealth intelligence firm noted. “Major industries in the city include financial services, real estate, and media.”
However, the picture isn’t all that rosy, if a heat map of the concentration (share of total population) of HNWIs around every location in Mumbai is anything to go by.
The neighbourhoods with significantly high concentrations of HNWIs—(1) Colaba/Cuffe Parade, (2) Churchgate, (3) Malabar Hill, (4) Altamount Road, (5) Breach Candy, (6) Worli Sea Face, (7) Bandra West, (8) Juhu, and (9) Andheri West—are peppered with pockets of less affluence.
“Mumbai’s wealthy neighborhoods are unique compared to the rest of the world in that there are sections of extreme poverty located within the wealthy neighbourhoods,” Steve Bazant, Consultant at Webster Pacific, told Quartz.
Look at Ambani’s 400,000-square-feet, 27-storey house, the world’s second-most expensive home after the Buckingham Palace, for instance. It is situated right next to the Golibar slum in central Mumbai.
As population density in cities increases, the rich and poor are both being squeezed with each other. In a photo series titled “Unequal Scenes,” Johnny Miller uses a drone to capture this dichotomy across urban neighbourhoods around the world, including Mumbai.
All this becomes more digestible when you consider this simple fact: over 41% of Mumbai’s 12.44 million habitants live in slums.