Kolkata Improvement Trust
Kolkata Improvement Trust established in 1912 as an agency for planning and development, and continued with vigour until 1947. In 1902-03, some large but isolated road development schemes were suspended by the Government in view of the decision to form a Calcutta Improvement Trust (CIT), now Kolkata Improvement Trust (KIT), with large revenues of its own to carry out a comprehensive program of city development and street improvements, to reclaim the sanitary system in congested areas, and to provide for the rehousing of the displaced population. The Trust ('Calcutta Improvement Trust') was however established in 1912.
The enactment of the 'Calcutta Improvement Act of 1911', coming into force on 2 January 1912, was a measure taken in response to the critical situation revealed by a medical enquiry into the condition of Calcutta in 1896 owing to the outbreak of plague, and the report of the Building Commission appointed in April 1897 to consider changes in the law relating to buildings and streets in Calcutta. The experi'ence gained through the Bombay Improvement Act of 1898 also provided impetus for similar legislation for Calcutta (Kolkata). The object was to provide for the improvement and expansion of Calcutta in an orderly manner by constituting a Board of Trustees empowered to undertake schemes relating to health, defective ventila'tion, communications, conservancy and the provision of building sites.
At the very start, the order of the Trust's operations was carefully spelt out by its first Chairman, Cecil Henry Bompas: to examine the need and scope for construction of roads; to develop suburban areas; to carry out rehousing schemes for the working classes; to prepare schemes for widening the approaches to Cal'cutta; and to acquire open spaces for parks in the suburban municipalities.
EP Richards, previously Engineer of the Madras Corporation, joined the KIT as Chief Engineer in September 1912 and was directed 'to prepare a scheme of main roads of primary importance to Calcutta and suburbs'. It was realized that no single main road could be built 'without considering how it would link up with other roads, at present existing or likely to be constructed in future' and more generally, that the entire question of traffic and transport in Calcutta and its suburbs was a single integrated problem requiring a single mind.
Richards's tenure with the CIT was brief, but yet he produced the first planning document on Cal'cutta, written partly in Calcutta and partly in London between January 1913 and March 1914, and published from England in 1914 under the title Report on the Condition, Improvement and Town Planning of the City of Calcutta and Contiguous Areas' This report is a historic landmark in the planned development of Cal'cutta, having drawn benefits from the European thought concerning town planning emerging in the early twentieth century.
These principles recognized the im'portance of the suburbs and indeed the entire region outside the municipal limits of the city in question. Richards identified the weakness of the KIT in this respect, as it was not created under a Town Planning Act: indeed, the Calcutta Improvement Act of 1911 was based on the English Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1890. Therefore, Richards drafted in his report a Town Planning Act as supplementary to the Calcutta Improvement Act of 1911, which would be sufficient to deal comprehensively with the suburbs and contiguous areas as well as the inner city. He then proceeded to layout the best what he could do under the 1911 Act 'i.e., schemes limited to the 'urban Calcutta' of the time generally bounded by the Circular Road (today's Acharya JC Basu Road and Acharya Praphulla Chandra Road).
The proposals were prefaced by a careful comparison of Calcutta with other major cities of the world. The findings were that Calcutta possessed abnormally low propor'tion of real roads and streets per square mile. Instead of being served by main roads, the city was being served by streets, and streets were irregularly featured by unplanned lanes and alleys.
In the next forty years or so, under the able guidance of a number of illustrious Chief Engineers, KIT carried out more than a hundred schemes of road improvement, area development, slum rehous'ing and relocating, parks and playgrounds, and thereby made a heroic effort at improving conditions within the municipal limits. Although the Trust could not open up any major diagonal road, as suggested by Richards, it extended Park Street, improved Shyambazar Street and created Bhupen Basu Avenue and Prince Anwar Shah Road. Its biggest achievement was the construction of a new north-south arterial road, the Central Avenue (now Chittaranjan Avenue and Jatindra Mohan Avenue). It also built Vivekananda Road and B. K. Pal Avenue in north Calcutta and Dr. Sundari Mohan Avenue in south-east Calcutta. In the field of new area development, it created Southern Avenue along with the Dhakuria Lakes (Rabindra Sarobar) and East Calcutta along with the Beliaghata Lake (Subhash Sarobar), adding a new dimension to planning and development of Calcutta. No less important was the Area Improvement Prog'ramme in Bhabanipur, by which an old residential suburb was upgraded to modern standards of town planning.
The latest achievement of the KIT (or CIT) is the creation of new civic centres at Ultadanga and Dhakuria. As this indicates, the Trust is still alive and functioning. But by the middle of the twentieth century, new political and economic developments had put its operations completely out of gear and out of finance. Its capacity to carry out viable schemes were greatly restricted. It is all the more important' to remember how, through the first half of the century, the KIT gave to Calcutta the best fruits of town planning practice of that age. [Dilip Banerjee]
