There is a specific kind of architectural cruelty that only the developing world seems capable of perfecting, though the West certainly tries its best to emulate it. It is the art of building paradise directly on top of purgatory, ensuring that the occupants of the former never have to accidentally make eye contact with the denizens of the latter. Mumbai, a city that has long treated economic inequality not as a problem to be solved but as an aesthetic to be curated, has outdone itself. The city’s new high-speed coastal motorway is not merely a road; it is a segregationist masterpiece, a taxpayer-funded escape chute designed exclusively for the sort of people who believe public transport is a disease vector rather than a utility.

Let us appreciate the sheer audacity of the demographics involved here. We are looking at a metropolis where 90 billionaires hold court, likely staring down from high-rises that scrape the smog-choked sky, while six million human beings—roughly 55% of the central population—live in slums. These aren’t the quaint, bohemian 'tiny homes' that Western minimalists fetishize; these are windowless hovels perched precariously over open drains. In a functioning society, infrastructure projects would target the majority. But Mumbai, much like every other major capitalist hub, functions only for the shareholder class. The new eight-lane motorway on the western coast is the physical manifestation of the philosophy that the wealthy should be able to traverse a city without ever actually being *in* the city.

Critics are calling it a symbol of the divide between rich and poor. That is an understatement so profound it borders on malpractice. It is not a symbol; it is a weapon. The road is explicitly designed for private vehicles in a city where car ownership is the ultimate status symbol, effectively barring the 64% of residents who rely on a public transport system so horrific it qualifies as a daily humanitarian crisis. The trains in Mumbai are so overloaded that up to ten passengers die every single day. Let that sink in. Ten people. Every day. If ten people died daily at a bespoke coffee shop in San Francisco, the National Guard would be deployed. In Mumbai, it’s just the cost of doing business, a statistical rounding error in the logistics of moving labor from the hovel to the factory.

And yet, the public purse—filled by the taxes on everything from the salt in a pauper's gruel to the fuel in a billionaire's jet—has been emptied to build a ribbon of concrete that the vast majority of contributors will never touch. This is the great grift of modern governance: the socialization of cost and the privatization of convenience. The planners will tell you this is about 'decongestion.' This is a lie, and they know it. You do not decongest a city by building more capacity for private cars; you induce demand. You encourage every mid-level manager with a line of credit to buy an SUV so they can join the elite in their traffic jams, rather than sweating with the plebeians on the train.

But logic has no place here. The purpose of the coastal road isn’t to solve traffic; its purpose is to create a hermetically sealed corridor where the masters of the universe can glide from South Mumbai to the suburbs without having to endure the visual pollution of poverty. It is about speed, yes, but specifically the speed required to blur the slums into a indistinct grey smear outside the tinted window of a Mercedes. It is infrastructure designed to facilitate dissociation.

The tragedy is not just the road itself, but the inevitability of it. Whether it is the Democrats in the US bulldozing neighborhoods for highways or the kleptocrats of the developing world pouring concrete over wetlands, the playbook is identical. The Right loves the project because it serves capital and creates construction contracts for their cronies. The Left—or what passes for it—wrings its hands about 'inequality' while failing to offer a single viable alternative that doesn't involve bankrupting the state. Both sides ultimately agree on one thing: the poor are unsightly, and if they cannot be removed, they should at least be bypassed.

So, congratulations to Mumbai. You have successfully built a bypass for your conscience. While the commuter trains continue to churn out corpses like a grim industrial meat grinder, the elite can now enjoy a panoramic view of the Arabian Sea, safe in the knowledge that their tax rupees were spent on the only thing that matters: ensuring they never have to smell the people who clean their floors. This isn't development. It's just a very expensive way to say you hate your neighbors.