Every morning, groups of walkers and even the occasional runner descend on the 364,000 square foot centre in the northern suburb of Malad to exercise before the rest of the city wakes up.
"The walk makes me feel energetic and sets me up for the day," said Ravi Wikar, whose daily constitutional takes him on a circular route past shuttered shops and up and down the switched-off escalators.
Senior citizens
"I walk every morning from 6.30 and do about three kilometres on average," the 37-year-old businessman, dressed in a white baseball cap, white T-shirt, red tracksuit bottoms and running shoes, said. The concept of using a closed shopping centre as a place to exercise doesn't seem strange to the 50 or so regular mall walkers of Malad, most of whom are senior citizens with ailments from arthritis to diabetes.
It's born out of necessity. India's financial and entertainment capital is chronically congested.
Haphazard urban development has seen green spaces covered in concrete for apartment and office blocks, leaving those that remain packed even before dawn.
Roads and pavements are poorly maintained, while daily traffic gridlock combines with extreme heat and humidity to push up smog and pollution levels.
Add rash driving, and exercising outdoors becomes difficult or often impossible.
Calm, quiet and safe
In contrast, the smooth surfaces of the shopping centre aisles and flat, tarmac car park are less stressful on ageing joints than the often rutted, undulating tracks of nearby public parks.
The walkers also say that with lighting and security guards everywhere — anyone walking inside the centre still has to go through a metal detecting arch and be searched — it's also safer.
"It's calm and quiet and there's no fumes from the cars," added retired draftsman Prabhakar Kishambare, 70, who typically does three to four laps around the car park every morning.
For Neera Punj, convenor of the Citizens' Forum for the Protection of Public Spaces or CitiSpace, the emergence of mall-walking sums up the problems facing Mumbai.
CitiSpace says that there are just 940 acres of parks, recreation grounds and gardens for an official population of about 14 million.
The unofficial population is thought to be over 18 million — more than in The Netherlands as a whole.
In comparison, London, with nearly eight million people, has more than 10,000 acres of publicly accessible open space while New York City has some 29,000 acres for about the same number of residents
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