Cycle of Life

Last week soon after i updated my blog i got an opportunity — a rare one these days unlike in 2007/08 — to ride my new bike on potholed Kolkata roads. Practically, that day, July 14, bus and taxi owners under the once-omnipotent trade union called transport strike to protest against the hike in diesel price. Diesel, although costlier than petrol, is highly subsidized in India and even a 1-paisa raise in its price affects millions, if not billions!

My ride was not intended to reach my destination as fast as possible but it was more of an exploratory one as i started observing the condition of the road that is also a national highway, people by the side of the road, shopping complexes and bazaars, callous pedestrians suddenly obstructing your course of ride and you press on to your disc brake and s/he goes off without making any noise or saying sorry! What impressed me was a stream of cyclists finding their way amid speeding cars and trucks as the road is 20ft wide at some places! Although not a single accident was reported that day on the 22km stretch i covered but at times, i felt like ramming into a rickshaw-van or even a passer-by.

Another matter of great inconvenience was the condition of the road. While going back home every night i've seen the roads in the City of Joy have been rendered to death zones in the past one month where even a joyride can kill someone. As a cyclist, who doesn't have to pay a single paisa as road tax, i cannot expect roads to be, as Lalu Prasad once said, smooth as Hema Malini's cheeks! But i can hope for a better ride, isn't it? After the rains are over in September, or maybe October, i'm planning to take my bike to office and in a country where you are hardly encouraged like that in the UK and in other developed countries, uneven roads just kill my spirits to enjoy a smooth ride. As our government is all but ready to play spoilsport in allowing people to save greens and live on fossil fuel, i don't find it surprising anymore to be pressed into commuting within the city in vehicles that run only on petrol or diesel.

I mentioned in my last blog that i'm trying to devise a new way in commuting. As i don't have a petrol or diesel-guzzler unlike thousands of my fellow citizens, my carbon footprint is quite low than others. This is high time that India, as a rising economy, should rein in vehicles and industries that emit GHGs and promote green steps like offering more subsidy to electric cars than diesel or installing more solar panels in a tropical country than selling coal blocks to power behemoths. In Bangalore and in other metros that witness traffic snarls during the morning and evening rush hours, many people have now switched to bike-to-work mode than depending just on buses and other rapid transport systems. In Kolkata, why can't we develop a system that will allow conscious people to ride a bike to office?

Unique City

Kolkata is the only city in India where tradition meets post-modern in public transport system. Since my childhood, i've been travelling around the city using innumerable modes of transport system that also includes ferry service! In how many metros in the country has anyone seen commuters making a beeline at ferry counters during rush hours just to avoid snaking snarls on arterial roads?
It may sound funny to take a launch — or even a motor-driven country-boat — for attending office on time but i've seen thousands of  people on the other side of the densely populated city use ferry service (operated either by the Kolkata Port Trust or West Bengal Surface Transport Corporation) only to jump onto an autorickshaw connecting the ferry "ghat" with the nearest railway station or bus-stand. Suppose, you want to come to Esplanade, the heart of the city, from Rishra that is on the other side of the Hooghly. Now, you have plenty of options to cover the 25-odd km. You can take a suburban train on the Howrah-Bandel section — the first passenger train in India in this part was operated on August 15, 1854, on these tracks — to reach terminal station Howrah or you can take a bus that will follow the GT Road. And, there's this ferry service also that will take you to Khardah, on the other side of the Ganga, from where auto-rickshaws take passengers to Khardah railway station for the onward journey to another terminal station, Sealdah, or country's first underground Metro Railway's terminal station Dum Dum to avail an AC train to Esplanade.

This maybe a circuitous route to reach the CBD area but not many people within a 25km radius of Mumbai's or Delhi's nerve-centres can enjoy this kind of multi-level transport systems. Trams still enjoy the patronage of many — a recent debate in Kolkata also supported continuance of the street-car services — even as other major cities, including Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai, stopped the green services almost half-a-century ago. I've also been regularly taking trams to office, especially on Sundays, not because it's a comfortable ride than mostly rickety buses but it may boost revenue of the PSU to survive! Besides giant trams, our office area also witnesses racing auto-rickshaws, slow-moving hand-pulled rickshaws that frequently draw attention of human rights activists, new-age moulded rickshaws that move into the lanes and bylanes off Elliot Road-Ripon Street-RA Kidwai Road, and ubiquitous private minibuses, buses and state govt buses (that too owned by five different PSUs). The new entrant to the fleet of buses are AC Volvo ones that have also got decent support from commuters, especially those work in the IT sector on the eastern part of the city.

But why so much details about Kolkata's public transport system? Not that it has raised enormous curiosity in me how an over-populous city cope with so many different types of vehicles, especially at a time when road space is shrinking everyday due to street-hawkers and unauthorized parking of cars but i'm trying to devise a new way, at least for me, of commuting. Maybe, i won't stop using public transport but in an effort for a greener city, i'm trying to develop a unique community here (details in next blog!).