Calcutta Page 34
Like everything else connected with this city, the situation has deteriorated since then. For a couple of years in the late sixties, indeed, all improvement works came to a standstill because the fifty-five members of the Calcutta Metropolitan Water Supply and Sanitation authority were locked in political combat. And the building of the Farakka barrage, one hundred and sixty miles away North up the Ganga, to divert fresh water into the Hooghly among other things, has been miserably slow since it was first planned in 1954 because of hostility between India and Pakistan – which also has a stake in the Mother of the World. A scheme such as this was contemplated by Sir Arthur Cotton, the great irrigator of Madras, who foresaw grave dangers to the Port of Calcutta in 1858, when the Ganga was on the turn, who could see what a boon a great dam on the river might be; as it will. When the squabbling is done and Farakka is finished, whenever that may be, the intolerable salinity of the Hooghly will be squirted safely downstream beyond the shipping at Garden Reach. Then there will only be sanitation to worry about.
The shipping is having a hard time in the Hooghly these days, and Calcutta as always is suffering on account of both. The same reduced flow of the sacred Ganga that lets the salt water in, also prevents the silt from running out. Millions of tons each year come rolling down from the river sources and none of it now reaches the mouth, as it once did, spreading and helping to create the delta. Instead it lies in the Hooghly and, below Calcutta, has to be expensively dredged every day of the year and even then inadequately. So much now lies in the Hooghly bed that not only have those sixteen sandbanks between city and sea arisen, but the river is generally so shallow that the tidal bores rush upstream every third day, where once they came only two or three times a year; and even in 1947 they were experienced on only seventy days in a twelve-month, which is almost exactly half their present rate. The result is that a vessel proceeding into the Port of Calcutta up 125 miles of river, through the Lord Jim jungle, past the 76 lighted buoys, the 30 unlighted buoys, the 119 lighted shore marks, the three manned lightships and the two which have no crews, the lighthouse and the countless semaphore signals on either bank, will take 24 hours about it; and when it returns to the sea it will take anything between 36 and 44 hours, depending upon its draft and the nerve of the pilot. It will only be able to move downstream at high tide, which comes in so fiercely that the vessel will have to move slowly and it will have to drop anchor between tides in deep water en route at Uluberia, Diamond Harbour, Kalpi or off Sagar. And no ship of ten thousand tons or above can now get anywhere near Calcutta. Even those around the maximum permitted draft must plan their voyages to this part of the world with more meticulous care than any tramping company has ever been trained to, so that they can move in on each spring tide just after each new moon and each full moon. If they miss one of these, then there they are, stuck at anchor just offshore, for over a week at least.
More and more traffic is thus being diverted from the once mighty Port of Calcutta. The sugar exporters now find it more economical to ship their cargoes out of Bombay or, just to the North, from Kandla in Cutch. Oilcake, rice bran, minerals and ores are increasingly being trucked or railed half way to Madras to be put aboard ship at Vishakapatnam, where they have deep water in the harbour, with comparatively placid labour on the wharves into the bargain. Calcutta, this past few years, has been going the way of Patna and Satgaon, which were themselves once mighty ports upstream. If only the city can hang on a little longer, its maritime health may well be restored. For, forty-five miles below the docks at Kidderpore, a new port is being slowly and laboriously constructed at Haldia. It is planned to take vessels of up to forty-five thousand tons and its wharves will be girt about with a complex of industry, including an oil refinery and a fertilizer factory which are to be set up by the Government in Delhi. No one expects it to function for years yet, but when it does, and when the Ganga again pours into the Hooghly along a canal much longer than the Suez Canal, it is possible that a great tide will have turned in the fortunes of Calcutta.
Some people wonder if Calcutta can possibly live to see that day. Their nightmare is that before very long the management of this city will simply stop under the awful weight of humanity pressing its moving parts into the ground. There is a sense in which all the alarming words and images now generally applied to Calcutta, like disintegration, collapse, and breakdown, are somewhat misleading. These are things that could conceivably happen, that are visibly starting to happen, to society here; the possible fate of the urban structure itself is something much more akin to petrifaction, the end of a process similar to mat which transforms once flourishing vegetation into solid coal under extreme pressure. If you look at Calcutta’s transport system today you can see, in the most obvious way, not only how this might happen, but some of the elements that are making it possible to happen. The preposterously sketchy communication lines between the divided halves of this elongated metropolis provide the clearest example of all. Here is a collection of thirty-five municipalities bordering the Hooghly, with over five and a half million people on the East bank and more than a couple of million more on the West. Almost every one of those thirty-five sub-centres of people marks the spot where in the nineteenth century a jute mill was built with a village and then a township swelling around it until the whole became fused into the solid mass of Greater Calcutta, stretching 30-odd miles along the river, from Bansberia in the North to Budge Budge in the South. There are still only two bridges crossing the Hooghly, to pull these two sprawling sides together; and the only one carrying railway lines is the one built forty years ago six miles upstream of the Howrah Bridge, though Howrah has one of the two main railway stations at the foot of its western approach and the other terminus a mile or so in a straight line from its eastern end.
There is no riverside city in the world so badly off for river crossings. London, with a population only half a million or so greater than Calcutta’s, has sixteen bridges over the Thames; New York has sixteen bridges to serve a population approaching eleven millions. There are other cities even better off. Pittsburgh has sixteen bridges for 2,403,000 people, Rome has sixteen for 2,160,000, Frankfurt has eleven for a population of only 671,624. To stand on the Howrah Bridge at any time is to feel that you are in the middle of some colossal refugee movement struggling to make headway against an impending doom; and these refugees are so bewildered by their plight that they are attempting to move in both directions at once. In 1947 it was estimated that 12,000 motor vehicles alone crossed the bridge every day; by 1964 the figure had risen to 34,000; today it will be something over 40,000. On top of the motor traffic there is the traffic in bullock carts, handcarts, tramcars, bicycles and simply the endless stream of people; there are half a million pedestrians pushing and heaving their way over Howrah Bridge every day. Very often everything just locks into a solid jam in which nothing can move for hours. It is now not unknown for the multitudinous traffic of Howrah Bridge to seize up before noon and to stay that way until late in the evening, by which time the police have been called out not only to disentangle everything, but to charge with their lathis and their shields, to put down the riots that have broken out where there is enough room for civil disturbance at each end of the bridge. The traffic in this city is now so overwhelmingly beyond Calcutta’s capacities that even on the widest arterial roads the average peak-hour speeds are down to something between nine and fourteen miles per hour. And even at these crawling rates the number of accidents, particularly fatal accidents, rose by twenty per cent between 1960 and 1965.
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 carr
iages, 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 i
ts 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.