The airport is world class - but can the city catch up?

It is scrupulously clean (more than you can say for Heathrow Terminal 3), the design, by Argentina's Steinbranding, is up-to-date and the corridors are flanked with the departure-lounge retail you get everywhere else (with prices to boot: a beer was 450 rupees, about £6).

Is Mumbai, ranked the world's fifth-worst city back in March, finally starting to get its act together, I wondered.

It's not just the airport. In a fortnight, the Bandra-Worli Sea Link, the biggest new infrastructure in 50 years, opens up.

Work has recently begun on the Mumbai Monorail and Mumbai Metro projects. 

But Narendar Nayyar, chairman of Bombay First, which lobbies for better infrastructure, is not so optimistic. What happens after the eight-lane Sea Link, which spans a bay on the city's western seaboard, drops its traffic load at the other end, he asks.

The T-junction that meets it has not been redesigned to cope. The opening day, he fears, will see a traffic snarl as bad as any the bridge was built to bypass.

That it took Bombay First to point out this embarrassingly obvious planning failure is not unusual, he argues.

With 17 different agencies responsible for town planning, co-ordination is too weak and progress too slow to keep pace with the city's growth.

The Sea Link is six years late and six times over budget, and the Metro and Monorail could also be some time coming.

"Our population is growing and our infrastructure is not matching it," he says.

"Most of the transport system has been there since the British left. We are carrying 21st century traffic on 19th-century roads."

Mumbai's new 21st-century airport may also have to wait some time before the city catches up.

* IF you think London's richest man, Lakshmi Mittal, has it bad (his paper fortune shrunk by some $37 billion in the six months to 30 March), feel a little for his brothers, Vinod and Pramod.

They recently had to pledge their entire stakes in their Indian steel company Ispat to restructure its $1.6 billion in debt.

Last week, Vijay Sheth, who owned Indian oil-services giant Great Offshore, was kicked out of the company after similar pledging diluted his stake below 1%. Vinod and Pramod risk the same.

Lakshmi, meanwhile, is still worth almost $20 billion.