Calcutta (45 page)

The Indian Government over the past few years has invested enormous sums in its birth control programme, and there are calculating men in Delhi who will assure you that at last it is beginning to have an appreciable effect. There has been an engaging campaign of propaganda throughout the republic to persuade people that two children are respectable but that three are a menace. Elephants have paraded with the message. It has been displayed on the backs of buses. All over the country, the inverted red triangle and its beaming family of four has
symbolized
moderation even to the illiterate; you see this sign in gigantic poster form above the ghats at Benares, and half the trees in Orissa have been placarded with it. All forms of control have been advocated from time to time, so that a commuter with a civic conscience has been able to drop in for a vasectomy at a clinic on Bombay railway station
en
route
to the office, while a pair of newly-weds in Kerala have been liable to receive the nation’s gift parcel of 144 condoms neatly packed among all their other presents. In West Bengal, it is said that 433,000 men were sterilised in a couple of years recently. Yet it is typical of Calcutta’s awful capacity for wasting its resources that, although the red triangle may well be displayed on some of its walls, the symbol’s most noticeable appearance is on the back of the local telephone directory, where it can only engage the attention of those least in need of its message. A gloomy man might well think that even at its most effective the birth control programme, which didn’t start until 1967, has come far too late to save
Calcutta
from itself and its people. The city’s population had
already
trebled between 1921 and 1961 and nothing that a state pledging itself to democracy can do is going to prevent more people arriving, even if they don’t reproduce when they settle here. The lack of homes was bad enough in 1952 for judges to be
tut-tutting when they had to pick their way between the five
hundred
or so employees who by then were permanently living in the corridors and upon the verandahs of the High Court, with their belongings scattered all round that Gothic monument. Even at that stage, two decades ago, they could have hoped for nothing better.

Any one of those five hundred men would presumably have been glad to occupy something in the area which ‘consists of two rows of houses with a street seven yards wide between them; each row consists of what are styled back and front houses – that is, two houses placed back to back. There are no yards or
out-conveniences
; the privies are in the centre of each row, about a yard wide; over them there is part of a sleeping room; there is no ventilation in the bedrooms; each house contains two rooms, viz. a living place and a sleeping room above; each room is about three yards wide and four feet long. In one of these houses there are nine persons belonging to one family and the mother on the eve of her confinement. There are forty-four houses in the two rows … in the centre of which is the common gutter, or more properly sink, into which all sorts of refuse is thrown; it is a foot in depth. Thus there is always a quantity of
putrefying
matter contaminating the air.’

The first sentence betrays the origin of that description, which is far removed from Calcutta. It comes from the pen of William Rayner, medical officer for Heaton Norris, Stockport, and it is part of Edwin Chad wick’s report on the sanitary conditions of the labouring population of Great Britain, which was presented to Parliament in 1842. From start to finish, if it is stripped of purely local terminology like references to ‛back and front houses’, Chadwick’s report can be. read as a document on the living conditions of the labouring population of Calcutta and district in 1970. Consider, for example, Mr Howell on the London parish of St Giles in 1842: ‛… upon passing through the passage of the first house, I found the yard covered with night-soil, from the overflowing of the privy, to the depth of nearly six inches, and bricks were placed to enable the inmates to get across dry-shod; in addition to this, there was an
accumulation
of filth piled up against the walls, of the most objectionable nature; the interior of the house partook something of the same
character, and discovering, upon examination, that the other houses were nearly similar, I found a detailed survey
impracticable
, and was obliged to content myself with making general observations … I am constantly shocked beyond all endurance at the filth and misery in which a large part of our population are permitted to drag on a diseased and miserable existence. I
consider
a large portion, if not the whole, of this accumulation of dirt and filth is caused by the bad and insufficient sewerage of the metropolis.’ All that might have been said with almost perfect accuracy of Howrah today, with its population of half a million and not a sewer between them.

Nor is the menace of the bustees, and the disease that comes from them, a threat only to Calcutta and its people. When
experts
from the World Health Organization were here in 1959, after a particularly bad outbreak of cholera, they discovered that although only just over a quarter of the population lived in bustees, something approaching half the cases of cholera in the city occurred in these slums. When they wrote their report they went on to remark that ‛the Calcutta area still forms the starting point for a long-distance spread of cholera. In the central part of this area (situated along the banks of the Hooghly River and the two canals arising from it) are located the terminals of the two principal railway systems which connect Calcutta with the rest of the country, and it is along their routes that the spread of the infection appears to occur … In India, the region of endemic cholera falls within the State of West Bengal with its nucleus in Greater Calcutta and dominantly in the bustee population, ill provided with even elementary sanitary facilities. The cholera situation has great significance not only to West Bengal and all of India, but to the world at large.’

The Hooghly itself bedevils Calcutta here, almost as much as the city’s primitive sanitation. The WHO report pointed out how alarmingly it had declined over the years as a source of water that was both drinkable and safe. The earliest pumping station at Chandpal Ghat was supplemented forty years later by a larger plant at Palta further upstream. At approximately the same time, the Ganga began its notorious change of current
towards the River Padma and the sea, and a by-product of this was the gradual creation of a sandbank between the mainstream and the River Bhagirathi, which itself flows into the Hooghly. It meant, eventually, that fresh water from the Ganga slopped over the top of the sandbank and downstream towards Calcutta only for the four monsoon months of the year when all the watercourses of Bengal were swollen with rains. It has effectively reduced the Hooghly almost to the condition of a long trench, blocked at one end by the sandbank, open at the other to the sea, with its contents merely sloshing backwards and forwards for two thirds of the year. The result is that sea water is gradually creeping higher and higher up the river. By 1940 the salt content of the water pumped out of the Hooghly at Palta had risen to 380 parts per million of chlorides (the generally acceptable level for drinking water being 250 parts per million). By 1959 it had gone far beyond the tolerable limit for human consumption, to 2,480 parts per million. This was not a consistent level; it
depended
upon the state of tides. But even when they were juggling with tidetables and pumping plant, the engineers at Palta in 1959 were unable to supply Calcutta with water at any time containing less than 800 parts of salt.

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.