We asked 3,614 citizens across Mumbai and the wider metropolitan region how their neighbourhood actually feels: across Well-Being, Inclusive, Sustainable, and Entrepreneurial & Expression lenses, 17 indicators in all. This is what they told us.
Citizens rate their own locality on each indicator from 1 (strongly disagree) to 4 (strongly agree). The Inclusive lens is Mumbai’s strongest; the Sustainable lens is its weakest.
Hope (2.99) is measured separately as an overall signal and is not part of any lens score.
Sense of belonging is the strongest signal in the survey: 3.19 of 4, with 78% of citizens agreeing they feel this is their place. Hope is close behind at 2.99. The story is not “Mumbai is broken”; it is that Mumbai’s people are holding on while its systems fall behind.
Heat liveability is the lowest-scoring indicator at 1.97, with 69% of citizens disagreeing that their locality stays comfortable in summer. The three weakest indicators (heat, climate resilience, waste-water-energy) all belong to the same family: shared infrastructure under climate stress. The full analysis is in the heat brief.
M/East ward (Govandi, Mankhurd, Shivaji Nagar) accounts for 604 responses and scores 1.56, a full point below everywhere else. Excluding it lifts the rest of the city to 2.67. Citywide averages hide this; any serious response has to treat M/East as its own chapter. The ward charts show the gap indicator by indicator.
It scores 2.13, and it has the highest “don’t know” rate of any indicator (20%). That is a double gap: access is thin, and even where help exists, citizens do not know where to look.
Citizens who feel their voice is taken seriously rate their physical systems 2.63; citizens who feel unheard rate the same systems 1.86. We cannot say which causes which, but the two move together, and that is the case for building voice channels alongside infrastructure.
When asked which lens matters most to them, citizens who choose a lens consistently score their own locality lower on that very lens. Priorities in this survey are signals of absence. Read “33% chose Well-Being” as “33% experience Well-Being as the most missing thing where they live.”
Two things follow. The sample is youth-heavy, which makes this a fair picture of how the next generation experiences the city. And the long-tenured majority are witnesses, not newcomers: across the survey, residents of 20+ years score their localities consistently harsher than recent arrivals. They remember when things worked better.
“Roads becoming swimming pool in rainy season… too less green spaces and too hot in summer. Winter doesn’t come, so all the seasons it’s pretty bad here.”
“The friendly people and the convenience of having everything nearby, like shops, transport and daily facilities.”
“I would unite people to solve community problems together.”
What it is: a large citizen pulse and priority-identification exercise. Fellows administered the survey face to face across localities; scores use a 1–4 scale with “don’t know” counted separately as a visibility gap.
What it is not: a representative household sample. Coverage is deep but uneven: about a quarter of all responses come from a handful of fellows working Dharavi and the Govandi belt, which is why M/East findings are reported separately rather than blended into city averages. Fellow and locality effects cannot be fully separated. Findings are most reliable for wards and localities with the largest samples.
Figures on this page are computed from the full 5 July 2026 dataset (3,614 responses) and supersede the 30 May draft (3,388 responses).