Mayor Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya said: “We have discussed the list in the last three meetings. The list will be soon be posted at the KMC website. We are also planning to compile the records of these buildings and publish in the form of a book.”
The committee to scrutinise the buildings consists of eminent historian Barun De, archaeologists Gautam Sengupta, Samir Rakshit, former head of the architecture department, Jadavpur University and scholars Debashis Basu and Indrajit Choudhury, besides officials of the Kolkata chapter of Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH). The project management unit of the KMC photographed the 1,400 heritage buildings spread across the city and displayed them before the committee.
“We are almost at the end of finalising the list. Mostly the age-old government buildings that received a heritage tag in the last century have been enlisted as Grade I buildings. KMC headquarters at S N Banerjee Road and a handful of classical buildings belonging to some of the old zamindars have also found a place in Grade I list,” said G M Kapur, convenor of INTACH.
The second category of the buildings has been divided into two categories- 2 A and 2B. It comprises those buildings that are associated with eminent personalities like Satyajit Ray, Satyen Bose and Jagadish Chandra Bose. The owners of the buildings under 2 A category will not need KMC’s permission to carry out any horizontal construction. In 2 B category, the owners will be allowed to carry on with horizontal and vertical constructions.
The third grade will bear no restrictions from the heritage authority. “The buildings in the third category just need to display a placard bearing the name of the person for which the building has been awarded a heritage tag,” said a source in the Project Management Unit, Anindya Karforma. The house of K C Nag, a 20th century mathematician in North Kolkata, has been identified as a building in this category.