Executive Summary

In Mumbai our sample covered 3007 households across 103 polling parts. We also conducted focus group discussions with residents and communities, and interviewed key respondents. Slum and informal type housing accounts for nearly sixty-three percent of households in Mumbai. Large numbers – between 70 to 80 percent of Dalits, Adivasis, and Muslims live in slum or informal settlements. No other city has anywhere near the same level of concentration of the above groups in informal housing. 

Residents of Mumbai report relying the most on their elected representatives to provide basic services, more so than in any other city. While a quarter of Mumbai residents rely on their corporators to get things done, they do not necessarily think that the corporators are working for everyone in the community and they only rarely interact with their corporators. Slum and shack dwellers, Muslims and Dalits - are much more likely to think that corporators work for their interest and more so than in any other city.

Mumbai offers contrasting views on citizenship. Residents have strong views on nationalism, second only to Ahmedabad, with a majority saying free speech should not include the right to criticise India. However, Dalits in comparison with Forward and other castes, in larger numbers think right to speech includes the right to criticise India. Mumbai is relatively liberal when it comes to opinions on institutions of marriage: a majority of Mumbaikars think that there should not be any laws against inter-religion or inter-caste marriages, the lowest for the large cities in our study. Voter participation is the lowest in Mumbai among all the cities, for long term residents as well as migrants, yet not entirely exclusionary. While Muslims are marginally less likely to vote than Hindus, OBCs and Dalits are much more likely to vote than forward castes and Adivasis. Class does not have distinct effects on voting.

Both non-voting and civic participation are low in Mumbai. Muslims and OBCs tend to participate more in non-voting activities while class has uneven effects, but generally lower housing residents tend to participate more than higher level housing. Education too matters - respondents with lower levels of education are more likely to participate in non-electoral political activities compared to respondents with higher levels of education.

Mumbai ranks lowest in citizen participation among the surveyed cities. Low levels of citizen participation are reflected in the low scores across all three components of the citizen participation index in stark contrast with other cities where voting dominates, and other components score
relatively lower.

In terms of our aggregate measure of the quality of services (the BSDII index), Mumbai ranks sixth in our seven-city survey, and below Ahmedabad and Hyderabad but above Chennai among cities with populations greater than 5 million. Where one lives in Mumbai is the most evident determinant of the kind of services one gets. Those in informal housing have inadequate sanitation, lower water availability in terms of hours and days, rare garbage collection and more waterlogging during the monsoon. Those who live in the middle class-and-above housing types have dramatically higher levels services. In the aggregate, class is the most significant predictor of the services in Mumbai. However, while informal housing in Mumbai has low service quality, there is significant variation implying reasonably good services
in some informal settlements.

Mumbai reports low levels of city and neighborhood-wide discrimination (higher than only Kochi and Bhavnagar), but respondents see the police, in particular, as a key source of discrimination. Greater proportions of respondents from lower housing as well as Muslims perceive greater police
discrimination.