Barun Roy: Rajarhat misses the point

ASIA FILE

It may still be possible to do something about Rajarhat, touted as New Kolkata, before it is too late. This message is for Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, chief minister of West Bengal, and its purpose is to tell him that he still has a choice.

Does he want this project to be a sit-and-draw competition where children produce whatever comes to their mind, or an art camp where serious artists seek to create serious works of art?

If he chooses the first, Rajarhat will evolve as just another middle-class housing colony, perhaps a better looking Salt Lake but nothing more. If he feels happy with it, fine.

If, on the other hand, he chooses the second and really wants Rajarhat to shine as a smart, modern, and superior urban centre that can be a model for the rest of India, then he must re-examine the township's existing land use plans and call in real professionals "" architects, designers, and landscapists "" to help.

He must do this because these plans don't presage a living, modern, and visually exciting city, and it's not a sweat to change them.

Rajarhat still remains a largely blank canvas and the underpainting can be easily worked over to compose a new picture.

Few major cities in the world are so lucky to have big patches of empty land so close to them. Shanghai had Pudong and the Chinese have worked wonders with this once-abandoned farmland.

Pudong today stands as a scintillating symbol of China's modernisation. Rajarhat, similarly, can be West Bengal's, and India's.

But it needs the professional touch. Government bureaucrats can design a good residential ghetto; they can't create a memorable human settlement.

A second look at Rajarhat is also necessary because the recent deregulation of the real estate industry creates a situation totally different from when the project was first conceived and throws open possibilities that weren't there earlier.

There's a real opportunity now to try out fresh ideas and involve new players to transform Rajarhat into a new-age city that could become a benchmark for India's urban transformation. It should not be ignored.

Even otherwise, Rajarhat suffers from conceptual flaws that militate against the idea of a city and need to be corrected. First, it's conceived essentially as an extension of, and not an alternative to, Kolkata.

That will neither solve Kolkata's problems nor help Rajarhat. Second, which follows from the first, it is regarded mainly as a residential development with the stated objective of "enabling the needy and vulnerable sections of the society to acquire a house/ flat of their own at affordable cost."

This approach threatens to turn the place into a jungle of residential towers. Third, because of the residential bias, spaces for other activities in the project area are very limited, and the imbalance is unhealthy.

There's a fourth reason why Rajarhat's plans should be re-examined by professional town planners. The place needs more arteries for its heart to function well.

Much of Kolkata's rot arises from its failure to open up major transport corridors into and out of it when it was still possible to do so. Let's not commit that mistake again.

Rajarhat presents us with a godsend of an opportunity to try out new ideas in mass transportation and use it as a pivot to build a modern network of roads for Greater Kolkata. We could even think of an information super highway extending from Rajarhat and the airport on one end, all the way to Haldia on the other.

Bhattacharjee should look around and learn from examples. Apartment blocks and shopping complexes alone don't make a city.

A city must be a living entity with proper links with its neighbourhoods. Pudong's connections with Shanghai are so close that they form a unified whole.

Putrajaya in Malaysia, conceived as a counterbalance to Kuala Lumpur, is a stunning "future" city that could be mistaken for a vast natural garden, combining quality living with superior urban infrastructure.

Suburban developments around Seoul demonstrate how physical, economic, social, and cultural links can be best integrated within a metropolitan area.

By way of infrastructure, Rajarhat's only achievement so far is a highway that runs through vast stretches of empty land and, strangely, becomes an ordinary two-lane road at the Salt Lake end, twisted in sharp, snaking turns.

Transportation is to be provided by merely extending Kolkata's overstretched bus routes. And only now are some trees proposed to be planted to reduce the barrenness of the place.

"We have identified some vacant areas that offer scope for landscaping," one official recently informed.

Some vacant areas, Mr Bhattacharjee? Is that how your people intend to build a city? Is that what they mean, and you understand, by quality life that Rajarhat is supposed to offer? Junk thinking couldn't get any worse.