Environmental improvement of slums: The Calcutta experience

Abstract

India, strangely, has few metropolitan cities, considering its geographical area and the huge hinterland these cities support. Calcutta, the largest metropolis in India and one of the largest in the world, owes its origin to being the capital of the British colonial government for more than a century until the administration shifted to Delhi in the early part of this century. Calcutta, therefore, represents the positive and negative aspects of the colonial metropolises that litter a large part of the developing world. Due to various reasons brought out in this paper, the city's infrastructure is at its lowest threshold of performance. This, coupled with slums, as old as the city itself, calls for an extremely careful and considered approach to upgrade the quality of life. Selected papers on slum problems of the largest metropolitan cities of India that follow this one bring out various areas of urban contradictions facing present day planners. The Calcutta example is the most novel of these experiments, primarily due to the fact that planners here have considered that slums are not only a reality, they are an inseparable component of the city system. This approach is contrary to many metropolitan cities, where cosmetic improvement takes precedence over absorption and realizes that the pockets of blemishes are a normal texture of the cityscape. The author has in this paper emphasized the need for a human and practical approach to upgrade quality of life in this city which has yielded slow but extremely significant improvement measurable in quantitative terms. (Ed.)