The key concern is that citizens are living through all these issues and concerns because the approach to addressing these itself is a very huge concern.

These issues are from a common man's perspective though everyone most often than not knows the root cause for each.

a. Roads - no preventive maintenance; highly unplanned patch work; does not fall under the category of 'development'

b. Water supply - no preventive maintenance; very old pipeline network and new pipelines are dug and run through with no proper blueprint of supply points, distribution and drops;

c. Electricity - there is a huge issue in this area.

With Reliance getting into distribution, there are doubts on the overall approach that this private player has in this area. The customer service response is very curt and most often, not even to the point. The language of communication though most often is English, is very misinterpreted, misrepresented and misunderstood.

The distribution and supply support is upto the mark, as a private player should have, but still, it leaves a lot to improvement in transparency when it comes to their billing.

d. BEST - the Bombay Electricity Supply and Transport fortunately has not been renamed to MEST, but their current state of affairs despite being a service with almost 50 yrs. experience is just enough close to being a mess. The drivers are from the rural hinterland, and though they go through the mandatory training of driving on Mumbai roads, the attitude that these drivers show is nothing close to a professional one.

One can ascribe many a reasons to the lacunae they have in their approach to driving. But at the end of the day, they break more traffic rules than any other vehicle driver. And they are never 'penalised' but left with warnings and this merely encourages the other drivers to drive equally rashly and break traffic signals.

e. Traffic police - Bombay traffic police's traffic management is a mess within itself. There seems to be no approach or attempt even to have a more professional and scientific approach to traffic management (or at least it is not shared in public. Traffic is not managed by the traffic police but most often it is the other way around.

Every driver in this city knows that whenever there is a huge pile up of vehicles on any road, that means the next signal is being controlled manually by a policeman. This moron somehow ensures that with each signal running for 3-4 minutes, there is a huge backlog of vehicles for at least 2 km either way from the signal, esp. at peak traffic times.

This approach is the root cause for traffic pileups though the root cause for this individual's behavior is never questioned by anyone.

I have seen cops in Andhra being very professional and strict; Seems that more North one goes in India, more the indiscipline in the police force itself.

f. Autos - the auto rickshaws are the single cause of several traffic jams in Bombay. Esp. the design of the auto is such that you can pack several of them in a small area - just like fitting triangles to form a circle. The worse part of the auto is the brain behind the handle. These guys are mostly people from the cow belt, with most often than not, brains of cows and buffaloes too.

This should be sufficient to give you a picture of the situation caused by blockheads.

g. Building security - the weakest link of the social safety structure in the city is this building security structure.

Most of these guys are also from the cow belt. A very small percentage of the locals get into this kind of work too.

So once again, you have a whole network of cow belt guys who are not just manning buildings but their relatives and friends and fellow villagers are the ones who are either supplying milk in that same locality, or working as washermen, or delivering flowers, or work as servants. And as we Indians are so open to people from our own community, village, area, language, these guys would be the eyes and ears of all happenings in any building society.

h. Unchecked migration - this is probably the weakest link - a very common problem in all cities

The very fact that the government is slow in it's development plans shows that this problem will never subside.

The impacts of this migration from villages to towns is huge and it impacts all the above areas to a great extent - simply because rural folks tend to create a rural look and feel in the city and that leads to the chaos one is seeing today in India.

Unqualified people, uneducated masses and illiterate population will not work from a logical point of view but will use emotional guides to deal with issues.

The image of a monkey with a scalpel best describes the scenario that exists in India today where the weakest link is neither the monkey nor the scalpel but the cause that brought these two together.