What kind of city do we want? In those years, actually, the question was: What kind of India do we want?” says Shirish Patel.

A holy trinity — chief architect Charles Correa, architect Pravina Mehta and civil engineer Patel — wrote a piece titled ‘Bombay: Planning and Dreaming’ in the June 1965 volume of Marg magazine. It was a response to BMC’s Development Plan 1964. The trio spoke of a “twin city”, not one that lived for the sake of the megapolis, but an independent parallel entity.

When Patel dreams of Navi Mumbai, however, you are quickly recalled to reality. If you are a resident of Panvel, Kharghar or any part of Navi Mumbai, it is with mixed feelings that you go about your day. The wide roads, the orderly sectors, localities flanked by green hills are only offset by the difficulty of taking the stuffy Harbour Line.

There was a plan that only partially succeeded.

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The idea with shifting the capital to Navi Mumbai, along with affording bungalows for ministers, was to jump-start jobs in the area, so the new city could be more than a dormitory town. That way both the old city and the new could prosper, says Patel.

Five years down the line, in 1975, Patel, who helmed planning at CIDCO as director, along with the other two, hit the eject button. The seat of power squatted in the ‘old’ city, refusing to move. “The government was selling plots in Nariman Point simultaneously. How do you expect Navi Mumbai to grow if this was happening? What is the point of adding jobs to the tip of a city that you had to travel to every day?” says Patel. He then adds, “I am not in this line of work to prettify cities. I have to take overall strategies for planning into account.”

But Patel hazards a guess why the state government held fort in South Mumbai. There was “a real fear” that with moving capitals, Mumbai would become a union territory. As long as the capital was in Mumbai, “no one would dare take it”.

Since the plan to shift centres of power never came through, Navi Mumbai has lost out of its share of iconicity too. Where was the prestige it badly needed, after all, which was to be derived with the tag as state capital?

Today, its landmarks are private malls and structures built by private bodies, but public heritage is absent, save for the municipal corporation building.