Calcutta: The Worst City In The World

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32352, 18 July 1970, Page 5

Calcutta: The Worst City In The World

(Newsweek Feature Service) Paris is possibly the world’s loveliest city, London the swingingest, New York the wealthiest, Tokyo the busiest. Calcutta’s superlative is not the stuff of tourist brochures. This sprawling, festering metropolis along the Hooghly River, the gateway to north-eastern India and the sixth largest of the world’s urban areas, is beyond much dispute the world’s worst city. America’s urban problems may seem intractable at times. But compared with Calcutta, Los Angeles or Detroit or New York looks like a shining utopia. Slums? Nearly a quarter of Calcutta’s eight million people live in them. Garbage? Small mountains of refuse are rising throughout the city. Sewers, clogged with cow dung, are backing up. When the annual monsoon rains hit the city, Calcutta becomes a sea of excrement.

Disease is rampant, cholera is endemic. And so is unemployment Authorities have long since lost count, but one expert throws up his hands and guesses that three million persons cannot get enough work in Calcutta.

At least 50,000 professional beggars roam the streets. Tens of thousands of Indians sleep on them, no better sheltered than the colonies of rats that serve as mobile zoos to youngsters in the city's central park. On The Brink And meanwhile the city totters on the brink of political collapse. Or perhaps it went over the brink in midMarch when the national government of Mrs Indira Gandhi disbanded the Com-munist-controlled West Bengali state government which ran Calcutta, replaced it with a nationally appointed administration and. in effect, established martial law. The take-over followed a wave of lawlessness that made the United States cities’ rising crime rates seem positively benign. Gangs of political activists were clashing nightly, wielding Molotov cocktails, guns and even spears. Thugs terrorised Calcuttans into staying off the streets after 10 p.m. that is, if they had any place to go. or anything to lose if they staved on the streets. Calcutta’s infirmities, in fact, make a dismal, unrelieved catalogue that reaches into every area of urban existence. Some examples: Transportation: In 53 miles along the Hooghly, there are only two bridges where city traffic can cross the river. The result is incredible traffic jams —an endless crush of buses, trucks, cars, rickshaws and bullock carts — that makes Los Angeles’s freeways look as open as Utah’s salt flats. Calcutta’s trains, moreover, are so consistently late that when one chanced to leave on time recently, irate passengers who miscalculated burned the next train in the station. Housing: Calcutta’s übiquitous slums, or bustees, consist for the most part of sitting - room - only shacks whose ramshackle roofs are barely four feet off the ground. The typical shack contains one and a half rooms and houses eight people. Business: The city is stagnating economically while India generally is moving ahead. Jute, the principal crop of the region, is facing a shrinking market in competition with syn-

thetic fibres. The few extraordinarily wealthy families who control most of Calcutta’s commerce seem to fear the worst. “It simply isn’t worth the risk,” says a member of one such family about investing in Calcutta. “Our money is going to Australia.” Police “Helpless” Under such conditions, Calcutta has grown increasingly unstable politically—and increasingly explosive. The police are little help. They have tended to look the other way from all forms of lawlessness. For instance, when a restaurant owner was attacked on his way home recently and reported the incident to the police, they told him, “Sorry, we are helpless. Go away." In such a setting, the new nationally directed government has been widely welcomed for whatever order and perhaps direction it can bring to the city. Still, no-one is pretending that martial law is any cure at all for Calcut-

ta's woeful problems. Nor has a search for solutions bred much hope among concerned citizens. Some, to be sure, see redemption in the vibrant cultural side of Calcutta's life. Nearly 100 literary journals flourish here. And the University of Calcutta turns out 150,000 graduates yearly. Then, too, some Calcuttans optimistically look 56 miles down-river where the port city of Haldia is under construction. Haldia, they think, may revive Calcutta’s commerce and relieve its population pressure. But Haldia is not going to be finished until the mid-1980s, and many wonder if Calcutta can survive until then. Looking back on the city’s swift and unruly growth from the mere three villages that an English sea captain named Charnock selected as a factory site three centuries ago, many of Calcutta’s mourners are bound to agree with the Kipling ditty: “From the noonday halt of Charnock grew a city. More's the pity. .