Even as cities worldwide modernise trams, India consigns them to museums

In Calcutta, before it became Kolkata, the electric tram governed the rhythms of my childhood home. Living on a main road bisected by a tramline, the sounds of the day started with the clatter of the first tram at first light merging with the sound of the muezzin’s call from the nearby mosque. At the end of the day, it was possible to set the clock by the time of the last tram of the day thundering by to the nearby depot at 11.30 pm. Through the day, the tinkle of the conductor’s bell and the rattle of the carriages formed a reassuring background riff. Over the years, we never failed to derive amusement from the alarm of first-time visitors who felt the drawing room tremble every time a tram went by.

Yet those who lived near tram lines never considered trams noisy or intrusive. Through the city, especially in the congested north, they were as much part of the city’s daily culture as its quirky humour and work-to-rule principles. Now, with the state government announcing its decision to eliminate tram services, a network that has shrunk rapidly since the nineties, fleeting images come to mind. Of the conductor wielding with practised ease a long bamboo pole stored in the rear carriage to hook back the wheeled loop connecting the tram to the electric line above, a frequent daily occurrence that stalled trams on the tracks; or the terrified expression of men who mistakenly boarded the ladies’ compartment and had to endure till the next stop glares that would make Attila quake; the scuffed wooden fittings of the oldest trams with brass plates declaring that Calcutta Tramways was registered in London; and the clipped accent of the commentator on a surprisingly well-curated tourist tram trip (which the government plans to retain).

Few remember that Calcutta Tramways was listed on the London Stock exchange till the late sixties, after which it was nationalised. It was unclear if the service ever earned the state government revenue; absurdly low fares and the increasingly ramshackle appearance of the tramcars suggest not. Still, the company did retain upscale auditors Lovelock & Lewes at one time. Pramod Bhasin, once chief executive officer of GE Capital, had worked in the Calcutta office and remembers doing the audit for Calcutta Tramways, which involved reconciling hundreds of thousands of ticket stubs with ledger entries. “I think everybody should go through something like that at least once in his life,” he joked. 

In a distracted way, Calcuttans were proud of their trams. Now the prospect of an imminent demise has mobilised the citizenry to protest. Though the objections are focused on urban nostalgia with histories of the service proliferating in the media, the bigger concern should be the link between mass transport solutions and urban pollution. Ironically, a state that was considered forward-thinking has been dismantling its tram network even as more countries are embracing trams as a mass transport solution to urban pollution. Europe, for instance, has tramway systems only a little younger than Calcutta’s. Unlike Calcutta, those cities have regularly upgraded them so that the clunky monsters of yesteryear have metamorphosed into sleek, noiseless wagons running on double connectors so that the dangers of disconnecting from the overhead electric line are eliminated. The old city of Istanbul, for example, adopted trams in the nineties as a means of preserving its monuments from fuel-spewing tourist buses around Sultanahmet Square, where the sound of the first sleek tram whizzing by at dawn and the muezzin’s call provoked much nostalgia. China’s urban administrations started adding trams to their cities from the second decade of the 21st century, displaying a prescient understanding of their potential. In India, electric cars and buses and capital-intensive metro systems are seen as solutions to urban pollution; trams, a knowhow that we have possessed for a century, are being relegated to the museums.