Yet Vidyasagar Setu is not just an example, but also a cautionary tale. Traffic across its elegant eight lanes never met original estimates, because approach roads were problematic. This should give the Sealink’s designers pause — their internal estimates are for 80 per cent of the Causeway’s traffic, which may be an overestimation. Cars might well speed across the 6 km to pile up in an almighty mess at Peddar Road, where locals anxious to safeguard their sky-high property values are stoutly opposed to the construction of a flyover to aid commuting. The question of whether the Sealink properly incentivises public transport is also disputed: Maharashtra’s road corporation and Bombay’s transport utility, BEST, disagree on the tolls that each bus should pay. And two- and three-wheelers aren’t allowed on (nor are pedestrians), raising questions of equity.

All these questions link up to the same burning issue: the stunting of local government and politics in India’s great cities. When one local public utility debates another, when some residents are to be inconvenienced to aid commuters, the issues are local, and should be settled locally, by an active municipal politics and an empowered municipality. Discussing and solving problems at this level leads to solid political backing, which gets projects going: Delhi’s Metro benefited greatly from the fact that it was answering to no state government with divided loyalties. As long as India’s state governments continue to, for their own reasons, resist the devolution of power to local bodies, Sealinks will be but a drop in the ocean of the infrastructure necessary to create cities that rival the best-equipped in the world.