Mumbai Needs a Real Mayor

Today, the nearly 20 million residents of Mumbai, India's largest and richest city, will vote to elect a new government -- not for their city but for the western Indian state of Maharashtra. Mumbai's economy is the main reason the state is India's richest: At $90 billion, the city's annual gross domestic product accounts for half of the state's.

Yet Mumbai's municipal corporation, the chief local government body, has an annual budget of just $5 billion. The effects of the shortfall are obvious to the naked eye: choked roads and sewers, crumbling tenements and general decrepitude. By some measures the city -- which is the state capital as well as India's commercial and financial engine -- has more in common with Lagos than London. More than half its population still lives in slums.