Transforming Kokata

Kolkata, once the capital of British India, has some of India's finest remnants of British colonial architecture: from the great open area of the Maidan, and the white edifice of the Victoria Memorial to the Palladian villas. But after decades of under-investment and neglect, the city's grandeur has faded and left Kolkata's infrastructure crumbling away.

The congested and crumbling capital of West Bengal has plans to be transformed into a "second London," complete with a London Eye Ferris wheel. Mamata Banerjee, the new Chief Minister, had made an election pledge to turn the dysfunctional and poverty-stricken Indian metropolis into a world-class city.

The planned makeover marks the first major urban renewal effort in the state by Banerjee, who became known as "the giant killer" after she ended 34 years of uninterrupted Communist rule in West Bengal in May this year.

'Never say no'

"My dream is to beautify the 10-kilometer riverfront of the city of Kolkata on the lines of London," Banerjee said as she laid the foundation stone of her project at the city's Millennium Park, on the banks of the river Hooghly. "Never say no. Let us try for a better tomorrow for our city. The project will be green and environmentally-friendly," she told hundreds of onlookers.

The pilot project, to be completed in six months, will involve the beautification of a one kilometer stretch along the banks of the Ganges River. Later, the project will be extended up to nine more kilometers along the river bank, up to the city's southern fringes, according to various media sources.

A "Kolkata Eye" inspired by the London Eye will be built later to give visitors a bird's eye view of the city and river, Kolkata Mayor Sovan Chatterjee told AFP. "We have plans to transform the riverfront into a heritage cultural zone as part of the project to beautify Kolkata along the lines of London," Chatterjee said. "There will be landscaped paths, places for meditation, food outlets, parks and an art gallery and museum."

Living up to the promise

He said city officials were aiming to complete the work by January 2013. The pavements will be made of herring-bone bricks and lamp posts will be replaced with ones resembling those used during the colonial era. The government has also banned billboards around heritage structures to restore a colonial look to the city center.

Banerjee, known for her feisty rhetoric and Spartan lifestyle, has other ambitious plans for parts of West Bengal, though critics accuse her of making exaggerated promises that can never be fulfilled. Touring the tea-growing northern area of Darjeeling in the run-up to the local election in May, she promised to turn the impoverished region into the "Switzerland of India."

Tapati Guha-Thakurta, a professor of history at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences in Kolkata, told Deutsche Welle that the river has existed without any investment in improving the riverfront for several decades. "Along the river, on one side there is a whole industrial wasteland of closed down mills and on the other side wasteland of old gentry houses. It shows the legacy of the city's 19th century past which has entirely fallen into decay and decline."

Metaphor

Guha-Thakurta told Deutsche Welle she is both skeptical and cynical about the grand plans for Kolkota. "No city can set a model for another city, because every city has its own logic of how it has evolved," she says. "Calcutta has different problems than London."

Guha-Thakurta says that London is more like a loose metaphor for a global city. "It’s not like Banerjee has personally gone to London and looked at its metropolitan development and decided, 'yes this is a good model.' There’s not been any blueprint which has taken a specific area of London and the attempt to implement it here, that I know of."

"To use this model either invites a lot of derision, like 'ha, Calcutta becomes like London'...yeah since when or how?" Guha-Thakurta bemusedly adds, "there is a greater chance of London becoming more like Calcutta because it's so multicultural."

One of the wealthiest cities

Kolkata, a bustling metropolis of nearly five million people, whose name was officially changed from the anglicized Calcutta in 2001, began as a cluster of villages on the eastern bank of the Hooghly River and grew into the capital of the British Raj.

Towards the end of the 19th century, it was one of the world's wealthiest cities, leading to a building spree that left a rich legacy of grand colonial buildings. A huge memorial to Queen Victoria remains a city centerpiece and tourist attraction to this day. The British moved their capital in India from Kolkata to New Delhi in 1911.

Author: Shivani Mathur (AFP)
Editor: Sarah Berning