Mumbai: In the last decade, almost every major infrastructure project commissioned in Mumbai—be it the city’s first monorail, the Eastern Freeway, the first underground metro or the coastal road—has borne the hallmark of one IAS officer, Ashwini Bhide.
Bhide has been a driving force behind infrastructure development in Mumbai, having worked on marquee projects under governments of various political affiliations. Earlier this month, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis appointed her as principal secretary to the chief minister, signalling that infrastructure development will remain a top priority for his administration.
A 1995-batch IAS officer, Bhide’s association with Fadnavis is relatively recent. It was only after he became the chief minister in 2014 and made Bhide the head of the Mumbai Metro Rail Corporation (MMRC) in 2015 that the bureaucrat got to work closely with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader.
Together, they made bold and unconventional decisions—often politically contentious—that advanced Mumbai’s first underground metro line, the Colaba-Bandra-SEEPZ Metro (popularly known as Metro 3), with remarkable speed.
These decisions included securing land in advance of formal approvals, leveraging lesser-known municipal regulations to acquire civic plots, organising unique redevelopment projects to rehouse those displaced by the metro, and even invoking disaster management provisions to temporarily obtain critical parcels of land.
Bhide’s work on the metro car shed in Aarey Colony—an ecologically sensitive area—received strong political backing from Fadnavis but placed her at odds with opposition parties, including the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena, then an ally of the BJP.
However, in her future stints, Bhide worked just as closely with the Opposition regime when Thackeray was the chief minister, even coordinating with him on a daily basis during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Speaking to ThePrint, Bhide said, “Metro 3 was built uniquely. MMRC is a board-run company and operates following the principles of corporate governance. There is no direct involvement of any political representative in decision making. However, mature political and dynamic leadership was very much needed to bring a difficult project like Metro 3 to reality.”
She added, “The project had enormous challenges, especially in land acquisition and rehabilitation. They needed unique solutions and exceptional decisions which could be possible because of the support from the government and political leadership.”
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From small-town girl to ‘metro woman’
Born in Sangli, Bhide topped the UPSC exam in 1995 among female candidates. She began her administrative career as assistant collector in Kolhapur, overseeing land revenue management, and later served as CEO of the Nagpur and Sindhudurg zilla parishads.
Her involvement in urban infrastructure began in 2003–2004 when she worked as deputy municipal commissioner in the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC). By 2008, she had joined the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) as joint commissioner, handling significant projects like the Eastern Freeway and Mumbai monorail.
The Eastern Freeway, connecting Ghatkopar in the eastern suburbs to P D’Mello Road in South Mumbai, was a transformative project that eased travel but posed significant challenges. Bhide successfully negotiated with residents to relocate over 5,000 structures—mostly encroachments—and oversaw the construction of India’s first urban road tunnels. She also secured salt pan land to complete a crucial segment of the freeway.
The monorail project, though criticised for low ridership, introduced new technology to India and involved unique challenges.
“She ensured timely completion while focusing on aesthetics. We even collaborated with students from the National Institute of Design to choose vibrant colours for the monorail rakes—royal pink, apple green and ice blue,” a former MMRDA official who had worked with Bhide told ThePrint.
In February 2014, Bhide was transferred to the school education department but returned to urban infrastructure in January 2015, when Fadnavis appointed her managing director of MMRC to spearhead the multi-crore Metro 3 project.
Unconventional decisions and political challenges
Soon after taking charge of MMRC, Bhide had made a presentation on the project to the chief minister and all the senior secretaries of various departments in January 2015, highlighting the multiple hurdles that lie ahead, a state government official said.
“Not a single inch of land required for the project was available then,” the official added.
Most of the land parcels that were needed for the project, about 80 percent of the total requirement, were on a temporary basis, for the duration of construction, since the line was to be fully underground. The MMRC needed land permanently only at certain locations where it had planned station landings.
Bhide proposed obtaining public land on a temporary basis before formal approvals, a suggestion Fadnavis promptly accepted.
This was the first glimpse of the collaborative speedy decision making between Bhide and Fadnavis.
Fadnavis had set up a war room on infrastructure on the seventh floor of Mantralaya. The idea was to have regular meetings with representatives of all departments present to resolve hurdles in key infrastructure projects. In the war room’s early days, the Metro 3 project was among the most prominent of the 23 projects under the war room’s purview.
Bhide would bring problems to the table with potential solutions and Fadnavis would give orders to implement the solutions right away.
The MMRC had a tussle with the BMC to get civic-owned land even for temporary use.
A state government source told ThePrint that it had turned into a political tug of war with the Shiv Sena led by the undivided Thackeray-led Shiv Sena, which by that time had turned into a bitter ally of the BJP, playing the Opposition’s role from the treasury benches.
“We pointed out that as per rules, the municipal commissioner in the larger public interest can, on the directions of the state government, issue directions to allot the land needed. It was a provision that had barely been used, but was convenient. It was also politically convenient for the Fadnavis-led government,” the above-mentioned government official said.
Bhide had asked the state government to invoke a rarely-used municipal provision to secure these plots where the municipal commissioner, in larger public interest, can overrule the BMC’s general body on the directions of the state government.
Similarly, Bhide had suggested that a section of the Land Requisition Act be uniquely used to temporarily get hold of private land, over which two brothers were fighting in court.
“We had first proposed to allow us temporary use of the land till the case is settled and that we will deposit rent or it with the court.
The brothers were not agreeing so we found out a clause in the land requisition act which is mainly used for disaster management. If there is a disaster and some properties need to be requisitioned for relief you can,” an MMRC official who did not wish to be named said.
“We used that clause in this project saying it is a very congested area, and if we didn’t get that land parcel, then with the heavy machinery working there, it might lead to a disastrous situation. The Fadnavis government facilitated it,” he added.
Similarly, multiple slum dwellers had to be relocated from the western suburbs for the project, and as per the detailed project report, the original plan was to rehabilitate them near Bhakti Park in Wadala.
With there being stiff resistance from the slum dwellers to moving to a completely different part of the city, leaving their livelihoods behind, Bhide put together a plan to use certain tenements constructed to rehouse slum dwellers around the airport for the Metro 3 project.
Other than opposition from project-affected people unwilling to move to alternate locations, the Metro 3 project also met with a lot of protests over the alleged environmental damage by the project, especially at Goregaon’s Aarey Colony.
Bhide, who until then was known as a diplomatic, but efficient bureaucrat with good crisis management skills, had to don another hat, that of a public relations manager. She wove a counter narrative online and offline to try and convince people about the environmental benefits of the Metro project to offset the disadvantages of hacking trees.
Her decisive actions at Aarey drew the ire of Shiv Sena leader Aaditya Thackeray, who sought her transfer. When the MVA government came to power in 2019, Uddhav Thackeray removed Bhide from MMRC, sparking a social media campaign under the hashtag #GetAshwiniBhideBack.
Instrumental during the pandemic
In May 2020, amid the Covid-19 crisis, Bhide was appointed additional municipal commissioner of the BMC. She played a pivotal role in creating ward-level Covid war rooms, developing dashboards, managing patients and hospital beds, and setting up isolation centres.
Her efforts required daily coordination with the then chief minister Uddhav Thackeray.
She also worked closely with Aaditya Thackeray, her staunch critic during the Aarey controversy. Together, they would respond to people’s queries and requests on social media, getting them immediate help.
With BMC, Bhide was also in charge of the entire eastern suburbs of Mumbai and the ambitious Mumbai coastal road project, which involved reclamation of land and building an undersea tunnel.
Now, as principal secretary in Fadnavis’s office, Bhide is responsible for coordinating infrastructure-related departments and agencies such as MMRDA, Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA), and Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC).
She will also be in charge of strengthening the CM’s war room, which currently has 86 projects under its purview.
(Edited by Radifah Kabir)
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