We asked Mumbai
how it feels to live here.
3,614 of us answered.

How WISE is Mumbai? 2.47 out of 4.

Four lenses, seventeen questions, one city. Our Inclusive lens is the strongest, carried almost entirely by how much people feel they belong. Our Sustainable lens is the weakest, and everything in it is something we share. Hope, measured on its own, stands at 2.99.

You love this city. Genuinely.

Of everything we measured, the strongest signal was not a road or a park. It was attachment: this is my place, and I am not leaving it.

Heat is what we suffer the most.

Summer is the biggest well-being problem in the city, and the most silent one. Close behind it: 1 in 5 of us cannot say whether mental-health help exists nearby.

There is a complaint number for garbage and potholes. There is no complaint number for heat. So it goes unsaid, and unfixed.

Mumbai’s Well-Being score: 2.25 out of 4, from the four questions above.

Belonging is our superpower.

This is the strongest of the four lenses, and it is carried by people, not systems. We feel we belong to Mumbai even where safety and getting around score much lower. That belonging is the city’s biggest untapped resource.

Mumbai’s Inclusive score: 2.85 out of 4, from the four questions above.

Our loudest ask: clean up the city.

This is the weakest of the four lenses. And notice what its questions have in common: garbage, water, floods, green cover. Nobody can fix these alone at home. They are shared problems, and they need shared action.

Mumbai’s Sustainable score: 2.16 out of 4, from the four questions above.

Young people have energy. The city is not listening.

Young people rate their own chances well (2.97 out of 4, among the best answers in the survey). But ask whether anyone in charge listens to them, and the score drops to near the bottom. Plenty of energy, very few ways to be heard.

Mumbai’s Entrepreneurial & Expression score: 2.47 out of 4, from the four questions above.

One Mumbai lives a different story.

M/East ward, Govandi, Mankhurd, Shivaji Nagar, scores a full point below everywhere else, on almost everything. 611 of us live that story. Blending it into a city average would hide it; this report keeps it separate on purpose.

Every ward’s WISE report card.

The thirteen wards where 50 or more citizens answered, scored on each lens. Green is holding up, yellow is strained, red needs the city’s attention. One ward, M/East (Govandi, Mankhurd, Shivaji Nagar), is red on nearly everything: it is not a low scorer, it is a different story, and it needs its own chapter of action.

One thing jumps out: look down the S column. Almost every ward, north or south, does badly on Sustainability. Garbage, water and flood-readiness do not stop at ward borders; they are the whole city’s shared problem.

What we cherish, and what we want fixed.

Two open questions: what do you love about your area, and what would you change? People love their neighbours. People want the garbage gone. Our people are the city’s strength; our shared spaces are its weakness.

And when we asked what you would do with one superpower for the city, most of us said clean it or stop something bad. Far fewer said build, plant or teach. Imagine if our civic dreams also created things.

What this is: 3,614 citizens answered the same 17 questions about their own neighbourhood, face to face with Community Connect fellows, between 17 May and 5 July 2026. Scores run 1 (strongly disagree) to 4 (strongly agree); “don’t know” answers are counted separately. What it is not: a formal representative sample. A quarter of the responses come from Dharavi and the Govandi belt, which is why M/East is read as its own chapter rather than blended into averages. Ward scores include only wards with 50 or more voices. The full set of detailed reports lives on wisecities.in.