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KMC, where are you?
Take the KMC headquarters, for example. Posters and graphiti have defaced the walls of this century-old four-storeyed British period building, which stands in the heart of Kolkata overlooking Lindsay Street and the Esplanade.
The wall facing the SN Banerjee Road has hardly any free space. Every inch of it is taken over by posters of pornographic films, screened at the adjacent Regal cinema hall. Mayor Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya, who on many occasions has been quite eloquent on protecting the heritage buildings, now tries to skirt the issue, citing public nuisance and a lack of common sense among the general public. “What can KMC do in this regard? If people do not follow the norms, what can I do?” he demands.
Hawkers - a heritage threat
The fate of one of the heritage buildings in Central Kolkata, the Nina Palace, is by no means different. This building, which houses offices of many government departments, is now fading into oblivion. The presence of hawkers along the footpath has become an ugly extension to the building. He had initiated an eviction drive a year ago to remove the hawkers. He had also disallowed cooking or lighting a stove on the footpath. But a walk along the Nizam Palace presents a different picture altogether.
To this, the mayor, with all seriousness, answers: “I have never seen any hawkers along the footpath of Nizam Palace.” But the mayor might just want to listen to this: one of the officers in the Project Management Unit of KMC, requesting anonymity, hints at the agency’s inability to tackle the situation. “The Nizam Palace authorities had asked for our help in evicting the hawkers from the footpath. But neither the police nor KMC could oust them from there,” he says. The state of the Sovabazar Rajbari is even worse. The KMC is renovating this age-old heritage structure in North Kolkata. But at the same time it is permitting a private garage to function in the vicinity of the building. In spite of repeated complaints from the locals of Sovabazar, the heritage commission is sitting idle.
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