Soon in Calcutta, you may walk in the air!

Soon in Calcutta, you may walk in the air!
Subrata Nagchoudhury

CALCUTTA, JULY 10: Maybe you don't have to badmouth Calcutta anymore. If Transport Minister Subash Chakravarty has his way, this will perhaps be the first city in the world to have a ``mobile walkway'' as long as three kilometres on a street which has the highest volume of pedestrian traffic in the world!

In a scene straight out of a futuristic movie, pedestrains, at least 3 lakh of them, will chart an aerial course, from the Sealdah Railway Station to Dalhousie in the city centre

For Chakrabarty, such fancy ideas aren't new. Four years ago, he was the one who launched Operation Sunshine, a drive to clear the city of its major problem: hawkers. There was some initial success but today, hawkers are back in full strength clogging almost all major streets.

Now in the new millennium, Chakravarty, who has also earned for himself the status of Dissident No 1, has announced that he will ensure an ``unhindered and comfortable'' journey for Calcuttans from the railway station to their offices. Last week, he told the Assembly that by 2002, Calcutta will have the country's ``first elevated mobile footpath.''

Experts are skeptical. Not many such examples exist in the world, some countries do have such a facility, called ``travellators,'' but these exist mainly in airport terminals. And in highly sophisticated docks for heavy cargo and port employees.

But Chakravarty is serious. He wants to try it out in one of Calcutta's streets which has the distinction of carrying the largest volume of pedestrian traffic in the world -- the head count ranging from 200,000 to 300,000 every working day.

In fact, on this 2.2-km stretch of B B Ganguly Street, between Sealdah and Dalhousie Square, pedestrians far outnumber the vehicular traffic during peak hours - from 9 to 11.30 in the morning and from 5 to 7 in the evening.

Most of these pedestrians are those who work in the business district. Add to this the crowd of the city's biggest wholesale market, the crowd of the Baithakhana Bazar, which comes mostly from the suburbs.

Transport Department officials say that earlier there had been plans to dedicate this road exclusively for pedestrian traffic. But this was one of the city's arterial roads and considering Calcutta's shrinking road space, the idea had to be abandoned.

Officials recall that it was during a visit by a Japanese business delegation almost a decade ago that the idea was first floated. The Japanese subsequently got busy with six flyovers criss-crossing Calcutta's busy intersections.

With Chakravarty now reviving the idea, his department approached the Planning Commission and various other financial institutions for support. The Planning Commission agreed to give only ``seed money'' while most other financial institutions didn't share his enthusisasm.

But Chakravarty hasn't given up and has decided to go ahead with the project on a Built-Operate-Transfer (BOT) basis by private parties. A senior official of the West Bengal Transport Infrastructure Development Corporation said that tenders have been invited from private parties who are capable of providing the design, the engineering, finance, operation and manitenence and to run toll counters.

An official of the Urban Transport Engineering section said that tenders have sought competent parties for two assignments: an elevated pedestrian plaza without the ``travellator,'' the investment for which will be about Rs 26 crore. The second is for a ``travellator'' six metres wide and a length of 2.2 km, estimated cost: Rs. 40 crore. One of the two will be implemented depending on the response. According to the transport department's plans, the private organization which will invest the fund will be allowed to levy charges from pedestrians.