Calcutta (46 page)

Of all Calcutta’s traffic, the public transport vehicles are in the very worst condition. If you stand by the platform gates at the two main railway stations at Howrah and Sealdah during the incoming commuter hours, you see something that makes the rush hours at Waterloo, at Victoria or at any of the other London termini seem no more than rather invigorating exercises in mass movement. The trains of Calcutta come in with their passengers immovable inside the carriages, hanging to the outsides of
carriages
, and squatting upon most of the carriage roofs as well. Some of these commuters have been travelling thus for anything up to a couple of hours and the lucky ones are those on the
outside
; those inside can have become so maddened by the
suffocating
conditions of a compartment whose temperature has risen to 120 degrees or so, that their journey into town has been
punctuated
by a series of claustrophobic knife fights, with the odd corpse left for the station staff to remove at the end of the line. The survivors have then to face a journey by tram or bus, as often as not, and conditions there are scarcely any better.

If you detach yourself from the implications of what you are seeing, one of the more splendidly memorable sights of Calcutta is of any double-decker bus charging down
Chowringhee
with a battered durability that must be both a grief and a pride to British Leyland, who have made it. The bus will be driven madly, for Chowringhee is one of the few places in this city where a man can put his foot hard down on the accelerator, as the bus drivers invariably do in relief from the rest of the frustrating day. Its bodywork will be heavily bashed with
indentations
of gleaming metal pocking the grimy red paintwork. Passengers will be standing hard up against each other on both top and bottom decks, and so many will be packed onto the platform that it will sway and surf only an inch or two above the roadway; half a dozen will have no more than a toehold on the platform’s rim, clasping each other’s shoulders to maintain position, disaster certain if the three men with a grip on the bus
itself should be prised loose. Occasionally the conductor has abandoned his own place in the vehicle and taken a seat on the nearside mudguard alongside his driver, from which position he enters into the spirit of the journey, waving his free arm in a gesture of attack, his money-bag streaming in the wind, uttering cavalry cries of exuberance or insanity. And from the back of this rollicking, swaying, dangerously canting museum piece, comes a long and billowing jet of thick black fumes. More frequently it will be obliged to proceed round the city at a jerking pedestrian pace and the black smoke from its exhaust will be aesthetically balanced by the white plume of steam from its radiator. Quite often, it will subside into immobility because of the totally unscheduled demands that have been made upon it. The Calcutta State Transport Corporation, which runs the double-deck buses, has 600 vehicles at its disposal; every day,
between
150 and 180 of them break down. This is partly because of age – 350 of the buses are a dozen years old or more – but at bottom it is because they are always overloaded, their engines strained far beyond their designed limits. The average load of a Calcutta bus, from the first one in the morning to the last one at night, is eighty-five passengers; if the number of vehicles were almost doubled this would merely bring down the average load to seventy passengers. The average load of a London bus is precisely seventeen people.

The trains are scarcely in a better position. There are 360 of these belonging to the Calcutta Tramways Co. Ltd, still
administered
by a British manager, and between them they carry
three-quarters
of a million passengers a day in circumstances not greatly different from those of the buses. In four months of 1969 there were 930 derailments because tracks had fractured and shifted out of line, or because the rims of tram wheels had worn down so much that the whole vehicle would swerve off into the road. There is never enough money, of course, to provide
anything
like the servicing of equipment that would be vital if even what Calcutta possesses were to be kept in effective condition. An impossible circle has developed in which the transport system is so overloaded that only a proportion of the revenue from fares can be collected, in which there is not enough revenue to help
to reduce the loads. It has been estimated that more than six thousand people come and go through Howrah Station every day without having bought a railway ticket, and no ticket
inspector
on earth could possibly scrutinize everyone among the hordes who bear down on the gates as each train arrives; and conditions aboard the buses are such that it is remarkable when the conductors manage to collect any fares at all. The Tramways deficit was thought to be about Rs 10 million in 1969. The state bus undertaking was so beggared by the end of that year that not only was it running into a monthly deficit of Rs 2 million, but it was fast approaching the stage at which it would not be able to pay its men their wages; it was deeply in debt to the Indian Oil Corporation for fuel and lubricants, and it was going cap in hand to a provincial Government that was itself on the edge of collapse, for enough money to obtain a consignment of spare parts that had been held up at the docks until payment was forthcoming. The Government, for devious political reasons of its own as well as for any proper considerations of consequent hardship, was meanwhile refusing the bus authority permission to increase fares.

Political factors, as we shall see, have played their own
calculating
part in adding to the chaos of Calcutta; they are deep in the middle of those interminable strikes of recent years which amounted, in West Bengal as a whole, to 60 per cent of all the man hours lost by industrial action in 1969 throughout India. They are therefore partly responsible for the decline in traffic from the Port of Calcutta by approximately 30 per cent between 1965 and 1969, by which time it was functioning at only half its potential capacity. They are similarly culpable in the ominous run-down of West Bengal industry as a whole, whose income between 1961 and 1968 grew by only 2.6 per cent against a national average of 3.7 per cent, and where employment in
factories
fell from 840,000 to 817,000 between 1966 and 1968
although
the national average trend showed an increase of 10 per cent. Politics have doubtless even something to answer for in the case of the 3,219 trains which were abruptly brought to a
standstill
in the Calcutta district during February 1969 because
persons
unknown had decided to pull their communication cords.
But even where political action is clearly responsible for some further movement towards the ultimate petrifaction of the city, it is itself merely a response to an intolerable situation which has slowly developed over a long period and which has been generally shaped by other agencies.

The contemporary politics of Calcutta and West Bengal can scarcely be held responsible for conditions at the R. G. Kar
Hospital
, where patients lie on the floor because there are not enough beds, where dogs and goats are sometimes to be seen roaming through the wards, and where a casualty block whose foundation stone was laid in 1963 had still made no further progress towards completion by the end of the decade. They cannot be held
responsible
for a water supply which by 1965 was supplying no more than twenty-eight filtered gallons per head of population each day, whereas in 1931 it had managed to produce 52.3
gallons
for every person in the city. They cannot be held
responsible
for the lack of proper educational facilities which allows only sixty per cent of all children between the ages of six and eleven to attend school. They cannot be held responsible for the hopeless confusion which generally results from such a simple thing as trying to locate a particular address in a given street. Heaven knows how the postmen ever manage to deliver mail to its intended destinations along Lower Chitpore Road, for
example
, which is otherwise known as Rabindra Sarani. For along that frenetic thoroughfare No. 18 is found next door to No. 242, which then gives way to No. 156, which is succeeded by No. 45, which is followed by No. 260 – all on the same side of the road, which proceeds in the same haphazard fashion throughout its entire length.

The truth is that years before Calcutta’s multitude of
Communist
parties began to make their own devastating contribution to this city, the signs of its decline from supremacy were perfectly visible. Between 1951 and 1960 the average daily employment in West Bengal’s registered factories increased by less than 5 per cent; in Maharashtra it grew by 45 per cent and in Gujerat by 13 per cent. The number of scrips quoted on Calcutta Stock
Exchange
between 1947 and 1962 increased by 12½ per cent, while in both Bombay and Madras the increase was about 100 per cent.
West Bengal, moreover, has been consistently starved of materials allocated to the Indian provinces by the Central Government in Delhi. In 1963 it received only 11.5 per cent of its assessed annual requirement of copper, only 7 per cent of its zinc assessment, only 17.5 per cent of its tin requirements, only 2.3 per cent of its lead allocation; both Maharashtra and Gujerat did
substantially
better in each case. Aid from Delhi has become such a nefarious thing that when, at the end of 1969, there was news that Rs 400 millions might be allocated from Central funds for the relief of Calcutta alone under the national Fourth Plan, it was printed as a comparatively short story down the pages of the local newspapers, which had heard so many marvellous rumours of a similar kind so many times before that they
presumably
assumed this one, too, was far too good to come to anything.

On top of financial and other forms of starvation regulated by Delhi, the city still suffers from its deeply traditional aversion to taxing its own wealth intelligently. In the financial year 1963–4, Bombay was levying Rs 54 for every man, woman and child in the city; Calcutta was collecting only Rs 20 that year. Since then, Bombay has been spending an average of Rs 35 millions each year on capital improvements; Calcutta has managed a bare Rs 15 millions. Yet in all the statistics that can be mustered to demonstrate and to measure the predicament of this city, the most telling one is that which shows how growth has diminished, how petrifaction has become an ultimate prospect. In the thirty years between 1931 and 1961, Bombay grew by 218 per cent, Delhi by 424 per cent, Madras by 167 per cent, Bangalore by 288 per cent. In the same period, in spite of the vast numbers still heading for this overburdened stretch of the Hooghly, in spite of the threefold increase of people in Greater Calcutta, the city itself grew only 140 per cent. It was moving towards stasis a decade ago – or something else, just as dreadful. It cannot, in truth, take very much more of anything now.

*

There has been very little to relieve Calcutta’s distress. Whatever good intentions and determined efforts may have come from Delhi, from the Government of West Bengal or from the
Corporation 
over the past few years, there is not much to show for the combination. The most chronic miseries of its people have more often than not been left to the totally inadequate concern of charitable organizations, in which the city is well endowed. Hinduism has spawned a great number of bodies like Siva Sakti Seva Samiti, whose members distribute drinking water in bustees or among the crowds attending festivities, who run schools, who arrange the cremation of corpses belonging to families too poor to purchase the necessary wood. Its various sects maintain a score or so of rest houses for pilgrims to the temples (the Muslims have half a dozen for their own faithful). It has produced the institute for student welfare and accommodation dedicated to Ramakrishna Paramahansa, who was a nineteenth century
Brahmin
given to ecstatic visions, a Franciscan figure whose most notable disciple was the Swami Vivekenanda, that rabble-rouser of the swadeshi days. From time to time secular relief
organizations
have appeared, like Mahanagar Parishad, which was started by an idealistic chartered accountant inspired by the American New Frontier, which for three years manned
dispensaries
and bustee night schools, lobbied officialdom for mechanical necessities of life, and tried to teach poor people some elements of self-help; and which finally died of exhaustion itself. It seems perverse to single out the most alien body of all as an example of what charity has done where government has so far failed; except that Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity have almost certainly been more effective than any other welfare organization in Calcutta, and that this is one of the only two points at which the conscience of the Western rich has been
tapped
to any noticeable degree in an effort to relieve the worst of the poverty.

Mother Teresa had been quietly grafting away in the city long before Malcolm Muggeridge (who once worked here as a
journalist
for
The
Statesman
) introduced her to the television audiences of Britain. She is an Albanian who came to Calcutta in 1928, when she was eighteen and known as Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, to join the Irish Loreto Sisters in their teaching convent off Park Street. By 1950 she had concluded that prayer and
catechism
were simply not enough for any nun to be offering to her
God and her pupils in this bedevilled place and so she started her own order after picking up a woman from the pavement who had been attacked by rats. Twenty years later she commanded what was by then probably the most flourishing religious order in Christendom. At a time when convents and monasteries
throughout
the world were becoming alarmed not only at the small trickle of people coming in to test their vocations but at the increasing flow of religious who were simply abandoning their vows and walking out, the Missionaries of Charity numbered 246 fully professed sisters, 130 novices who had tasted the life and were waiting to take their final vows, 90 postulants who were waiting to commit themselves to the novitiate and another 59 aspiring young women simply waiting to get in when the order could afford to have them – recruiting figures that would turn any Benedictine Abbess or any other missionary superior puce with envy. Apart from the base camp in Calcutta, there were twenty-four branch houses spread across India and another four already established in other countries; and the order has
continued
to expand since then. The twentieth century has seen only one comparable phenomenon, significantly inspired by much the same variety of Christian philosophy, and that was the much earlier foundation and growth of Charles de Foucauld’s Little Brothers and Sisters of Jesus.