Atal Setu: How the Trans Harbour Link will transform Mumbai
Arabian Sea tomorrow, Mumbai will get a vital artery which can give a phenomenal boost to business and industry as well as make daily life easier for Mumbaikers.
The Mumbai Trans Harbour Link (MTHL), or Atal Setu, as it will be called now, links Sewri in Mumbai to Nhava-Sheva on the mainland in Mumbai Metropolitan Region, establishing faster connectivity between the island city of Mumbai and the Navi Mumbai on the mainland, and decongesting the perennially choked metropolis as well as opening new vistas of development. Spanning 22 km, with a 16.5 km extension into the sea, Atal Setu will shorten travel time between Mumbai and Navi Mumbai to 20 minutes from two hours.
Atal Setu is the centrepiece of an infrastructure surge in the making in Mumbai. Brokerage firm Jefferies had estimated that the Mumbai metro area, India's financial nerve centre and home to 23.6 million people, would complete $10 billion in projects over the 18 months to end-2024, and an additional $60 billion over the next three to seven years. These projects will synergise with Atal Setu to speed up Mumbai.
Faster connect Mumbai is India’s most vehicle-congested city.
It has more than 2,000 per km of road. It also has the most densely packed intra-city railway corridors which carried more than 8 million people daily in pre-pandemic times. Mumbai’s car population has nearly doubled in the last decade, but the length of its road network lags far behind Delhi and Bangalore.
The city has a road network of roughly 2,000 km, less than a tenth of Delhi’s 29,000-km sprawl. It’s barely even a fifth of Bengaluru’s grid.
In such a scenario, Atal Setu has come as a blessing.
