BABY FOOD | CALCUTTA

Calcutta is now staging a comeback from the brink of collapse.
Under the title ‘For a Better Calcutta’, the city authorities are spending
£250 million in a desperate attempt to throw a lifeline around the millions of people
who live and die in the poorest and most crowded city of the face of the earth.

Photo: Camera Press

At the end of the nineteen-sixties, Calcutta came close to fulfilling its part in the prophecy, supposedly uttered by Lenin, that "the road to world revolution lies through Peking, Shanghai, and Calcutta". From the depressed hinterland, from the three thousand slum districts, from the World’s largest university erupted the Naxalite-Macist movement with bottle-bomb and knife to reduce Calcutta to chaos.

In the violence that was surely the inevitable backlash of poverty, more than fifty policemen were killed and 600 injured; landlords, money-lenders, and rival leaders were assassinated; factories and mills were closed down; offices and shops were boarded up; businessmen and their rupees stampeded from the city; and at one period Air-India was operating what was virtually a one-way service away from Dum-Dum Airport.

The elected United Front Government, an uneasy alliance of Communists and other left-wing groups, watched helplessly as a violent combination of committed Naxalites, frustrated slum-dwellers and desperate gangsters brought India’s greatest city and industrial powerhouse to a virtual standstill. Finally Mrs. Gandhi stepped in, dismissed the government, and once again declared President’s rule over West Bengal and its capital, Calcutta.

Then began one of the biggest clean-up operations ever undertaken anywhere in the Third World, as the Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA) launched its £250 million programme "to tackle the problems that have never before been tackled in the history of this city".

Now, despite all the problems, all the bureaucracy, all the inefficiency, all the apathy and ingrained hopelessness of this city, the programme "For a Better Calcutta" is breaking through, is getting results, is spreading hope. It could be Calcutta’s last chance. For it is widely believed in this city that if the new hope is not fulfilled, then the old prophecy will be.

Better sanitation and drainage is the first essential for better public health - and better public health is the first essential "For a Better Calcutta". Geoffrey Moorhouse in his book on the city writes:

"Along the whole thirty-mile length of Greater Calcutta there is not much of even remotely modern sewerage, and modern in this context means anything up to a hundred years old. Instead there is what they call the service privy. This is a small brick shed with a platform above a large earthenware bowl to receive the shit; it is usually fully exposed and unprotected from flies. It is supposed to be emptied daily by Calcutta Corporation, but things do not happen that way in Calcutta. It is sometimes weeks before the Corporation sweepers arrive. Even with the service at its best, the bowl has usually long since overflowed across the surrounding ground. Howrah, with a population of half a million, contains nothing but service privies. Apart from Howrah and the city proper, there are 126,000 of them in

Greater Calcutta. The city itself has another 42,000. Its bustees alone contain 17,000. Unutterably nasty as the service privy is for those who must use it, its implications are much more awful than mere squalor. It represents the beginnings of cholera, of every other gastro-intestinal disease in creation, with smallpox and tuberculosis thrown in as well. For the stinking mess around the bustee’s privy is washed straight into the ponds and tanks of water in which the people clean themselves and their clothes and their cooking utensils."

Now, sanitation is top priority and already more than 130 million rupees have been spent in building 12,500 sanitary latrines, 6,500 septic tanks, and 124,000 metres of sewers.

"Teeming with every sickening bacteria in Calcutta" is how Moorhouse describes the unfiltered water which most Calcuttans have had to use for drinking and cooking, and for washing themselves, their clothes, and their pots and pans.

Not surprisingly, water supply and sanitation facilities have, in the past, undermined the public health of the city and sabotaged its efforts at self-help. Now they share top priority in the C.M.D.A. programme.

The target is 18,700 new water taps for the bustees providing 20 gallons of water per head per day. Worn out pipes are being replaced or encased, 33 deep tube wells have already been sunk, 120,000 metres of water mains and 2,370 water points have been provided.

Over a million souls inhabit the 3,000 slum districts or ‘bustees’ of Calcutta. They are some of the poorest people on earth. Sleeping seven or eight to a mud-floored shack; squatting on either side of open drains that run down the middle of the lanes; milking the landlord’s cows and drying the dung into pats of fuel; buying and selling; fetching and carrying; washing and cooking; coughing and spitting - the bustees are congested mazes of poverty which are the breeding grounds not only for disease and despair but also for anger and violence.

The C.M.D.A. is spending 100 million rupees and employing 10,600 engineers, planners, contractors and workers in its drive to improve life for the people in the bustees. It is not a slum clearance programme. There is no chance of re-housing so many people. Instead the programme is aimed at making the slums more bearable by installing sanitation and sewers, drinking water and street lights, health care and education. The 1 20 rupees per head programme is already benefitting 900,000 bustee dwellers in and around the city. Mobile dispensaries have been moved in to teach hygiene and preventative health as well as to treat the already sick; primary schools are placing increasing emphasis on self-help; 269 nutrition centres are helping over 56,000 bustee children. Now the common cry of ‘Nothing ever gets done’ has changed to a cry of ‘Things aren’t being done fast enough’.

The main roads of Calcutta make any other city in the world seem tame. Horn-blowing taxi-drivers veer between ambling bullock carts and suicidal pedestrians, overcrowded buses shoulder aside sweating rickshaw pullers, battered trains grind slowly along behind sacred Brahmini cows taking a leisurely stroll between the lines. Sometimes it seems as though the whole city will seize up.

Now, over 300 roads are to be mended, a hundred new buses let loose, and almost ten million rupees spent on renovating the trains and renewing the tracks.

Gardens, parks, and playgrounds are all part of the "Better Calcutta" promised by the C.M.D.A. Work is in progress on sixty different sites - re-opening parks, laying lawns and flower beds, floodlighting ornamental pools and lily-ponds, re-furbishing a Burmese Pagoda, creating children’s play-areas with swimming and paddling pools, an outdoor gymnasium and puppet theatre and a toy train service.

"To make the city livable is the first task" says the C.M. DA. "And part of that task is to provide the space for the city’s children to play and grow. In the years to come it is C.M.D.A. ‘s ambition to make Calcutta not merely a better place to live in, but a city beautiful as well."