Calcutta (48 page)

This was not a document produced by dreamers. It was in the first place an exact measurement of every problem in sight. It calculated to the last half gallon just how much unfiltered water the slum dwellers of Cossipore were getting in 1961 compared with 1931. It was the CMPO plan which produced the famous projection of twelve million people living here by 1986. At the outset it stated that ‘The extreme urgency of the present situation of Calcutta and its region is such … that the search for new ideas and new techniques must be tempered by the need for immediate action. Calcutta cannot wait for a perfect plan.’ So the CMPO produced a strategy to be put into action by stages over two decades, well aware of the fact that towards the end of any twenty-year period in Calcutta a great number of early calculations would be demonstrably unrealistic. Its emphasis from start to finish was on flexibility, making no large
assumptions
about what any government would or would not do, but developing a machinery for application in, the field under any political philosophy. It was rigid only in its selection of early priorities. And, overwhelming as some of the earliest tasks would appear to anybody preparing to tackle them, the planners were confident enough to suggest that with the combined and
concentrated
efforts of Government, private industry and commerce, and of voluntary organizations, a steady progressive
improvement
in the situation can be accomplished, leading to cumulative and dramatic change in the urban environment of Calcutta within a generation.’

The very first priority was to stop things getting even worse than they were when the CMPO was devised. The planners pointed out that it would be completely unrealistic to assume that the bustee dwellers could be rehoused in decent, safe and
sanitary pukka buildings within a decade, except in very limited numbers. Before they could be rehoused, there would have to be space in which to rehouse them, and space is the rarest thing of all in Calcutta. The first step must therefore be reform of
land-use
, beginning with the compulsory purchase of all bustee lands. Once the civic authorities or the government took possession of the bustees, the slum improvement agency would then move in and provide the minimally acceptable requirements in the way of water supply, drainage and lighting. And there the bustee dwellers would remain for quite a while longer, still shockingly over-crowded but at least living in approximately healthy
conditions
for the first time since they were born. The planners proposed that simultaneously the authorities should seize any vacant land that became available and merely furnish it with a network of services; after that, they should allow people to move in and build their own makeshift dwellings as so many of them have had to do ever since they came to the city, without benefit of any services at all. The CMPO plan estimated that if these suggestions were promptly carried out in 1966, half a million people in Calcutta and Howrah would by 1971 be provided with paving, lighting, sewerage, safe water points and communal bathhouses for one sixteenth of what it would cost to mount an orthodox slum clearance programme. Meanwhile, the authorities could spend the bulk of their available funds where they were most needed, in the improvement of the existing water supply for the entire community to a tolerable safety level, in the
beginning
of three new townships to siphon some of the population from the most congested areas, in the conversion of the ghastly service privies to sanitary latrines, in the first steps towards a rapid transit system to prevent Calcutta from choking itself with its own traffic.

Scarcely a brick has been shifted. The bustees remain more or less as they were when the CMPO plan was composed. There was a time in 1962 when it took a thousand men of the National Volunteer Force, together with a hundred five-ton lorries a month to help the regular Corporation cleansing staff remove accumulated garbage from the streets of Calcutta; in November 1970, it took a hundred and sixty five-ton lorries the whole of
one night, from dusk to breakfast, to remove the accumulated garbage from just one stretch of Strand Road by the Old Mint. That is a measurement of progress in Calcutta. At the beginning of 1969 the men of the CMPO were convinced that at last some of their plans might shortly be put into practice. It had just been announced that a new budget had been concocted, producing Rs 800 millions from the combined resources of the Central Government, the West Bengal Government and the local business community, who were prepared to advance one quarter of the total sum at the unprecedented interest rate of a mere five per cent. Nothing ever came of it, partly because the businessmen took fright at the election of a chiefly Communist West Bengal Government and withdrew their offer. There was subsequently much talk of a start being made on the CMPO’s rapid transit plan for a circular railway round the centre of the city. A few months later, it was announced that this plan had been
abandoned
once and for all, and that instead Calcutta was going to have an Underground railway. This idea had been toyed with once before. In 1949 a French firm had investigated the
possibility
and decided that it was impracticable, largely because of Calcutta’s notoriously soggy foundations. Finnish engineers, however, had now advised that an Underground was possible, a contract had been signed with a team of Russian experts to render further assistance and it was promised that soon there would be Underground stations at Kalighat, at Sealdah railway terminus and in Dalhousie Square. Moreover, tenders might soon be called for the construction of another crossing of the Hooghly not far from the Howrah Bridge.

None of this has been in accordance with the priorities of a development plan which produced some credible solutions to an incredible situation. The planners have continued to draft their more detailed steering orders for Calcutta. They have flown to Delhi every few months to lobby the authorities there; they have returned to lobby authorities in the Writers’ Building or in the Raj Bhavan almost every other day. They have devised simplified equipment that peasant workmen might use effectively to rebuild this city, they have demonstrated it to the people in whose hands the rebuilding really lies; and these people have sat in rows in
bleak sheds on blazing days, nodding gravely, murmuring
encouragement
, applauding warmly, departing calmly with fresh sheaves of documents which they will possibly never read.
Nothing
has really changed. No one who has seen what has not been accomplished since the CMPO was created can easily share its most splendidly visionary moments now. ‘The rebirth of
Calcutta
,’ wrote the authors of the plan some years ago, ‘and the emergence of a flourishing new river metropolis demand a heroic effort. But the potential reward is great, for this is a metropolis that can become one of the world’s foremost urban centres.’

A kind of heroic effort, in fact, was just gaining momentum as the plan was being shuffled together. Men who had grown weary of waiting for Calcutta to become merely tolerable were even given an opportunity to accomplish the vision. They
promoted
fear more than anything else.

THE
origins of Communism in India are scarcely more than a quarter of a century behind those of Europe. At least one
commentator
has seen a strike of Bombay textile workers in 1908 as deriving from the doctrines of Karl Marx, though it was not for another decade that the British could be absolutely certain that this pernicious new philosophy had spread to their Indian Empire. The Communist Party of India was founded in
Tashkent
in 1920 by expatriates who had usually struggled on foot across some of the bleakest country on earth to get away from the strictures of British rule. One of the early leaders, Muzzafar Ahmad – ancient, ailing, almost bedbound in Ballygunge, and clearly
en
route
to his place in the great Bengali pantheon – remembers one such group slogging over the Hindu Kush
mountains
to Tirmiz in Soviet Tadzhikistan, where a military band of the Red Army played them aboard a train for Tashkent and its new Indian Military School, which specialized in teaching
political
philosophy and the mechanics of the machine gun. At home that year, the All India Trade Union Congress was founded with a strong and militant left wing, and from then on Communism became a very active ingredient in the turbulence of British India. Within twelve months it had inspired an industrial strike. In 1927 it brought the Bombay textile workers out for eight months. In 1930 it produced a serious riot in Calcutta after a railway strike there. It was seen to be at the bottom of the Meerut conspiracy case, which sent twenty-two men to prison after a long trial. By 1933 the exasperated British had decided to outlaw the CPI and it remained underground until 1942, when its leaders were released from gaol after agreeing to make common cause against fascism.