The Report of the Committee which was appointed to inquire
into the Back Bay reclamation scheme at Bombay makes instructive but melancholy reading. The reclama- tion which was begun in 1920, when Sir George Lloyd had just become Governor, was designed to give Bombay room for expansion. The city is built upon a com- paratively narrow strip of land, and the sorrows of New York in that respect are in some ways more intense at Bombay because, whereas New York (being based on a rock) can scrape the skies, Bombay lies upon the unstable foundation of marshes. On the advice of Sir George Buchanan, a well-known engineer, an old scheme dating back to 1912 was revised, and he recalculated the cost in the light of changed conditions. He thought that it would be enough to add 10 per cent, to the original estimate. The Government of India added a further 10 per cent, to this estimate in order to be on the safe side, but, even so, the estimate was wildly inaccurate.
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