At the city centre of the mall revolution

If there’s one thing I’m tired of after living in Delhi for 10 years, it’s the mall culture. Malls became THE big thing in New Delhi about 10 years back – we watched the first malls come up, witnessed the mass hysteria that accompanied each ‘launching’, gave in to the inevitable curiosity and checked a few out. It didn’t take us long to realise, though, that there was very little to choose between them – simply put, if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. I remember catching a movie at a Gurgaon mall soon after the mall strip had opened up and pondering over the redundancy of it all – there were about three of those tall, gleaming, glass and chrome buildings, complete with flashing lights, glitzy shop fronts, gleaming Skodas and Toyotas rolling up and then jostling for the few parking spots; two stood side by side, while a third glowered from across the street – why, I thought, would someone choose to build three identical places, each boasting of the same shops and eateries, cheek by jowl? The builder clearly had the right idea, though – each attracted shopaholic, brand-conscious Delhiites like honey does the bee.

Visits to Kolkata were such a relief – no huge eyesores at regular intervals, and it was good old Park Street and Camac Street and Dakshinapan every time I felt the need to shop – and then I discovered City Centre, and fell in love. With the place, that is. It’s a mall like no other – open on all sides, built low and sprawling, it’s the friendliest, most inviting place I’ve ever hung out at. City Centre doesn’t loom large over the horizon, blocking out all sunlight and air for other buildings around; the different blocks housing the shops and eating places are built at a distance from each other, and each opens out to a huge inner courtyard flanked by steps, where you can sit around for as long as you want (provided you don’t mind the ubiquitous cigarette smoke; but ’nuff said on that) – why, oh why, had it not been built when I was in college and we were so hard pressed for friendly, economical places to hang out at? The parking spot’s at ground level, and interspersed with trees that dilute the effect of all that concrete; smoking zones, with huge bins where you can flick ash to your heart’s content carefully demarcated; and several restaurants and coffee shops have open air seating, which are a delight in winter and the monsoon season – you can sit basking in the sunshine or watching the clouds scudding low across the sky, the pretty Salt Lake landscape opening out before you, the skyline punctuated by one of the loveliest sights in Bengal – palm trees. In short, it’s got character. It’s an agoraphobe’s nightmare, but for those of us who love open spaces and fresh (in a manner of speaking, of course!) air, this mall’s a pleasure to visit.

But the best thing about it? The fact that it caters to everyone. And I mean everyone. I remember an ex-colleague of mine in Delhi – she’s from Kolkata too, and yes, a City Centre fan – telling me how her 70-something dad loved the place, and would invariably land up there every evening for a cup of tea. Elderly people need not feel out of place here, as they would in any NCR mall, surrounded by those glitzy brands and yuppie youngsters – there’s always Tea Junction, which caters to the peculiarly Bengali 4 o’clock passion for cha-shingara. Or wander around for an ice-cream at Rollick’s / Kwality Walls / Baskin Robbins / Amul; college kids can sit around talking to their heart’s content; families can come out on chuttis and for picnics; and once you’ve spent uncomfortable hours at Delhi’s cramped PVR theatres, you’ll understand the sheer pleasure of sinking into Inox’s plush red seats and stretching out your legs as far as they can go.

Which is why it was a bit of a let-down to return to Kolkata full-time and find people more interested in the new malls that were coming up – the South City Mall and the more recent Mani Square Mall – it was like re-living Delhi all over again. We did check out Mani Square, primarily for Costa Coffee, our favourite coffee bar in Delhi (which, disappointingly, hadn’t opened yet), and spent a disgruntled hour cooped up in its claustrophobic confines surrounded by the usual brands – once inside, there’s no way of knowing where you are – you could be in Kolkata, or you could be in Gurgaon, Bangalore, any Indian city – at a stretch, you could even imagine yourself in a mall in a different country altogether. The parking space is bewilderingly labyrinthine; the exit virtually impassable. Oh for the wide open spaces of City Centre!

Given this, it was surprising to see City Centre ranked third after South City Mall and Mani Square (bit weird, that, considering half the outlets haven’t opened yet) in a recent T2 survey; but heartening to note that the letters in response to the story were all vehemently in support of good old City Centre. If you hadn’t figured it out already, I’m all for this architecturally, environmentally (as far as can be possible, certainly), people friendly mall, and am busy plugging it wherever I go. Anyone care to join me?

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Kolkata goes up in smoke

I returned to Kolkata late last year after a gap of a decade to find the city – smoking. I mean, literally. Strangely enough, I cannot recall if this was the case ten years ago, when I left the city as a young college student, though common sense tells me there’s no reason for it to have been otherwise. I daresay growing up in the city meant taking a lot of things for granted – things that my absence has rendered all too visible.

As a student, I played my part in courting lung caner and polluting my immediate environment – the first couple of years as an undergraduate went by in a happy, smoke-filled haze as I succumbed to the many temptations Promod-da’s marvellous canteen at Presidency College offered; while I worked hard the final year, there was still ample time for yet more cigarettes and luchi-aloo. Delhi, however, was a different ball game altogether – people out there were much more sensitised to the norms of political correctness, and at the university, you didn’t really need cigarettes to appear cool and intellectual, or appropriately jaded (though a joint did come in handy now and then). By the time I quit smoking my much whittled-down quota of two cigarettes a day, an active campaign against smoking was well underway – you were no longer allowed to smoke in offices, on the roads, or any public space. Restaurants had well-demarcated smoking and non-smoking sections, and most these days prefer to do away with smoking altogether within their premises. The fact that there were fewer people lighting up made imposing these rules that bit easier.

By the time I returned last year, I’d metamorphosed into a militant ex-smoker, married to yet another militant – and proselytizing, to boot – ex-smoker who had by then developed a violent allergy to cigarette smoke. Returning to live in Kolkata was, quite literally, akin to a hard kick in the lungs.

Everywhere we went, there were people smoking – on the streets, in the shops, taxi drivers inside taxis, people walking their dogs or picking up their children, inside restaurants, and horror of horrors, inside doctors’ chambers! Within a month of our being here, my poor husband had begun wearing a permanently hunted look, clutching his inhaler for dear life; I probably resemble one of those over-the-top, all too obvious, secret agents thanks to the sharp looks I cast in all directions, the swift, peremptory way I shove my husband to the right or left, and staccato barks to ‘hold your breath’ – all implying there’s someone smoking within inhaling distance. We love eating out, but going to restaurants here has become something of a problem – a couple of our favourite places in Park Street took us to their ‘non-smoking sections’, which comprised of two tables set very thoughtfully right next to the smoking section. Perhaps they’re trying to make up for your being too cheap to buy your own cigarettes by allowing you to inhale others’ leftover smoke. Ask a waiter to seat you somewhere where there is absolutely NO smoke, and he begins casting desperate glances all around; I did so once when my husband was in the throes of an asthma attack – the waiter, after one terrified look at him, hustled us to another table where, with a relieved smile, said, ‘Here, madam. There is no one smoking here.’ I forbore to mention that there was no one smoking because the tables around us were empty.

The only ‘good’ thing about Kolkata is that a lot of people do move away or stub out their cigarettes when told you’re allergic, unlike the Jat bhais and yuppie Punjabis in Delhi, who would probably shoot you for impinging on their freedom of expression. Of course there is the odd nonchalant babu who tells you unconcernedly ‘Daran, ei cigarette-ta ekhuni dhoralam, eta shesh kore ni’. My husband has a genuine medical problem, which entitles him to sympathy and understanding, but what about me? I didn’t quit polluting my body so that others could do it for me, and surely I have the right to a clean, smoke-free environment? We Calcuttans pride ourselves on our sensitivity and innate ‘decency’, so why are we so insensitive to the needs of our immediate surroundings, and the health of our fellow citizens, including our own children (what I’m most horrified by is the sight of fathers blithely puffing out clouds of carcinogenic smoke right into their little children’s faces). Ever since I returned, Kolkata has been witnessing raging debates around the environment, and the nasty, polluting practices of unconcerned city denizens; perhaps a serious consideration to ban smoking in at least public spaces would not go amiss.

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The ‘nordoma’ culture: Something rotten

The first time I stepped into one of Kolkata’s infamous nordomas, it was to rescue a sinking kitten that had escaped our house in her search of her own version of foie gras. The second time I stepped into a nordoma was during the deluge of 2007, when whole streets had been converted into rivers of offal. The third time round, more recently, the nordoma denied me the pleasure of immersion but nevertheless dirtied the hooves of our car, Oswald—so named by my wife in defiance of prevailing gender norms for baptising automobiles—when, out of the necessity of dodging a rickshawallah, I directed him over a freshly cleaned out nordoma, black and viscous as tar and with a stench to fell the heavens.

Having grown up in North Kolkata, nordomas were a part of my wife’s upbringing ambience—but she didn’t carry the memories of “filth and horrors” (more on the origin of this phrase later) to Delhi, which, being a bone-dry city, lacks the sheer mudness of Kolkata. When she returned to Kolkata a half-year ago, the pong and the mutiny against hygiene implicit in nordomas turned her into a rhypophobe and me into Lady Macbeth, washing my hands over and over again in response to abiding apparitions of nordomas rising up in dripping victory during the approaching rains. Rudyard Kipling famously called Calcutta “the city of dreadful night…by the sewerage rendered fetid, by the sewer made impure”. And, for the purposes of this blog, it is difficult to disagree with him.

This dripping victory, I learn, is also a financial windfall for those contractors who send their workers in to periodically excavate nordomas and the treasures of human indignity that they contain. There is a reason why nordomas in Kolkata haven’t been covered by the ample and immediate supply of concrete slabs: kickbacks. Word has it that the contractors pay out good money not to have the nordomas covered, and that a section of the municipality grows fat on the obligation.

It’s ironic that, speaking on a subject that involves the Left Front government of the day more than any other institution, past or present, one must compare this city that one loves without reserve to the civic devastation that Friedrich Engels wrote of in his The Industrial Revolution: The Slums of Manchester, England, 1844, repeating, as if a litany, the words “filth and horrors” and “refuse and offal” to describe the direness that the industrial revolution had visited upon the workers there. “Everywhere before the doors refuse and offal; that any sort of pavement lay underneath could not be seen but only felt, here and there, with the feet.” And so it went.

It’s no more duplicity than the simplest of economics that turns Kolkata into a fetid chicken stroganoff of sludge and slime in the few months prior to the monsoon and the few months after—which, together, of course, make it most of the year.

Kolkata has a sewerage system of unknown length and convolution. Much of it would debouch into the Hooghly if the way wasn’t blocked by various manner of constructions. The nordomas in what is today the seventh largest city in India and was a century ago the second most populated city in Asia and the British Empire are of British provenance: in 1911, when the capital was shifted to Delhi, much of Calcutta’s sewerage system that we see today in creaky operation had been complete. It was also serving—very feebly, going by the accounts then—a population that was a tiny fraction of what it is today. In 1901, the city had a population of 847,796 in what was called its “strict core area”. In 1900, the city covered an area of 20,547 acres, of which a giant green central park called the Maidan appropriated 1,113 acres. That gigantic promenade today turns into a monsoonal lake every year on year.

So, if truth be told, no one in the benighted and much-insulted Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) knows exactly where the drains, between beginning and ending, take the turns they do, and where they merge with or peel away from each other. The glum fact is that the city’s sewerage network’s original blueprint has been repeatedly papered over by the palimpsest of history. What is known as Old Calcutta (which was the capital of India) encompassed only Sutanuti-Chitpur, Baghbazar, Sobhabazar, Hatkhola, Dharmatala, Bowbazar, Simla, Janbazar, Gobindapur-Hastings, Maidan and Bhowanipur. The New Calcutta (the capital of West Bengal) encloses in the north Sinthi, Cossipore and Gughudanga, in the south Tollygunge, Khidderpore and Behala, in the east Salt Lake, Beliaghata and Topsia and in the west the river Hooghly. Greater Kolkata extends from Baruipur to Bansberia and Kalyani to Budge Budge, an area of 1,480 sq km, give or take, which is 100 sq km less than the area of Greater London. Of this, about 185 sq km falls under the KMC’s jurisdiction. The drainage system halted—and began backing up, for all practical purposes—when New Calcutta attached itself like a succubus to Old Calcutta.

According to Indranath Chakravarti, consultant with Ballardie Thompson & Matthews Pvt Ltd and ex-chief engineer, Water Supply, Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority, in his paper, Water Problems for Kolkata Metropolitan Region: “Old Calcutta has mostly British made Brick Sewers of two types:- Man Entry Cleanable & Non-Man Tide cleanable. The rain water is cleared as follows: Drains > Sewers> Pumping Station > Trunk Sewer > Canals >River OR Wetland. Now the Sewers are on an average 50% silted up and uncleanable as it is not easy to clean them up in a busy city by conventional methods. Hence the KMC is now searching for specialists in such cleaning by modern hi-tech microtunnelling method. The added areas of new Calcutta do not have much of a planned good sewerage system even. The current 19 Drainage Pumping Stations with their 93 Pumps were still inadequate to tackle the situation.”

Stupefied by the challenge the city presented, the state government called in a French firm with expertise in telemetry (telemetry?) in 2001 to map the water needs of the city, both potable and excreted. The strange craft of dousing might have worked better. The firm was supposed to have done its work in 30 months at a cost of Rs. 110 lakhs. Heaven knows what came of it.

What is known is that the exercise was confounded by the uneven and unpredictable silting on the “kata khal” that once functioned both as a ferry and freight service all the way from the Ichamoti river to the Baghbazar ghat of the Ganga and as a catchment for nordomas from Shyambazar, Ultadanga and Salt Late. An absence of dredging from Krishnapur has put paid to this sewerage barf avenue. The Tolly Nullah (once so generous that it was called the Adi-Ganga) is in a worse state because the surface metro line has blocked the water flow.

We Bengalis have a way of romanticising disaster. During the rains, the Ganga’s twin tides drown Bhawanipore, through the Maidan, up to Lansdowne. In addition, if it rains, which it almost always does, the situation calls for an ark that never comes. The city calls the tides by the pretty names of Shanra and Shanri.

But names mean nothing when I waded through the nordoma and felt an alien, utterly unnerving clamp on my submerged shin. It turned out to be the vanguard of a school of plastic riding like translucent men o’ war below the current. The KMC has to handle 2,800 metric tonnes of waste every day, much of it pooling up on streets already rendered sodden by a soldierly barricade of plastic in the nordomas.

The state government’s Plastic Management Committee has banned plastic bags less than 40 microns thick and smaller by 12”X16”. But this rule is almost always followed in its breach. My wife, who is more resolute about a right to a plastic-free life than I can rouse myself to be, has to insist, in virtually every shop we go to, on paper bags. They are reluctantly handed out: plastics, like opinions, are virtually free. Both jam midway when they’re gurgling down the tube. Paper costs money. Ask the purveyors of credit cards.

In Status of Kolkata Megacity Disaster Management System in View of Recent Natural Disasters, the author says: “Absence of sewage disposal system in the unplanned settlements caused pollution to streams and rivers. Absence of efficient solid waste disposal system, in most of the municipal towns, not to speak of the new colonies, resulted in severe environmental damage. Drainage channels were blocked by dumping solid domestic, industrial and cattle waste. Ground water can no more be considered as a safe water source for domestic use, as over extraction has resulted in arsenic contamination of aquifer. Underground sewers get blocked with solid waste (garbage) and obstruct flow of storm water or waste water to pumping stations, and there the pumps cannot be operated for want of insufficient water, while town areas remain inundated.

“Open surface drains are not desilted regularly or adequately. Surface water drainage system functions under gravity, maintenance of proper slope or gradient in the entire network of surface drains, canals and rivers is primary and essential requirement. Hence occasional desilting of some drains, by some municipal administration, in isolation, are not effective.”

All this sounds like a recipe for a very personal disaster: I’ll have to take wading through muck as de rigueur for every coming season of Nor’westers and skies opening their bellies like a thousand Lancaster bombers on a blitz run.

No matter. In Calcutta Poor: Elegies on a City Above Pretense, Frederic C. Thomas, who takes heart from Kipling’s famous description of Calcutta as “above pretense”, writes: “There is no denying, though, that this historic city may be among the most unpleasant environments on the face of the earth: the choking pollution, the clogged drains, the cramped bustees and crumbling mansions, the jumble of carts, the beggars and crippled children, the fetid piles of refuse being picked over by emaciated mothers in soiled saris, flea-bitten pariah dogs, and wildly cawing crows. Scenes like this have made Calcutta into a cliché of squalor and despair. Yet clichés can often be misleading. There are other cities which are bad if not worse. A higher percentage of Bombay’s population lives in slums more horrendous than one finds in Calcutta…” After Job Charnock’s inexplicable decision in 1690 to locate, of an impetuous afternoon, a settlement on a low, swampy area, this is all the hope I need for this city.

Or perhaps I’m floating on a nordoma of delusion.

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Hail the bandhs

The Kolkata Police had requested all vehicle drivers to avoid using the horns for at least one hour in the day on 5th June 2008 to show respect to the environmentalists. The idea was to keep pollution under control. If not the air pollution, at least the noise pollution could be reduced and kept in check. However, the Kolkattans went the whole hog and did not resort to blowing the horns for the whole of 12 hours on 5th June. Not only that, they did not even pollute the air for 12 hours – they just did not take out their vehicles. All because of the bandh called by the CPM to condemn the increase in cost of petro products like petrol, diesel and cooking gas. Kolkattans are determined to earn bonus points for being environment friendly because there will be a second bandh tomorrow, this time the credit will go to the Trinamool Congress. These will be followed by the weekend when the number of vehicles on the roads is usually less in number. Hail the bandhs.

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Grand revival plan for Chinatown legacy

Deserted by 70 per cent of its inhabitants and left to rot by the civic authorities, the city’s decrepit Chinese quarter is suddenly getting the attention denied to it for four decades.

The Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC) on Monday announced plans to preserve “200-odd years of Chinese heritage”, its slumber broken by a Metro report on the realty threat to the building that houses the now-defunct fine-dining address, Nanking, and a shrine. Read more »

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Kolkata, ‘amar’ Kolkata

Everything has its firsts and this is my first blog.
Well its about Kolkata and our love for this great city.
But is it true? Do we love Kolkata? I have my doubts. What are we doing to keep it clean? We still see garbage hurled from the balconies of apartments. We still throw things from running bus or car, don’t we? We still don’t make complain when someone in our locality dump all the garbage in a public place when he gets his house repaired. We accept everything with a smiling face.
Its time we really try to understand the depth of our love for Kolkata, it’s time we take responsibility to keep it lovable.
Don’t treat this blog as blame game, think about the ways we can make things better, it will be nice if we can make it a movement, a real start, a platform to those looking for opportunity to give back something to their place they live in.

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Search for my Kolkata – Part - II

The time was just after twelve – the stall owners were opening their counters. It was off season because there were no imminent festivals, hence most of them were slow on their feet but their eyes were continuously wandering over the faces of all those who passed by – if they felt that the person was a prospective customer, they would immediately put on their most charming smile and welcome you with open arms. If you so much as expressed curiosity over any item, you would have committed yourself to purchasing the item – depending on your bargaining powers, you could emerge victorious or be a victim of leg pulling. I remembered that there used to be a permanent hawker’s corner in the vicinity of Hatibagan – it was called Subhas Corner. It was still there but was hidden behind hundreds of other stalls that have literally taken over the footpaths – pedestrians are compelled to walk on the roads avoiding the rush of four and three wheeler vehicles. The cinema halls were like ghosts – only a couple of them still survived the onslaught of multiplexes. The Post office and the Town School held their sway and even the Shambazar tram depot appeared to be the same with its rusty gates and passengers eagerly waiting for the next tram to roll out – it was nice to see that this wonderful pollution free vehicle had its share of patrons. I walked up to the five point crossing - in the middle of the central island was the horse mounted figure of Netaji Subhas Bose. As I took the left turn, I saw a medical store that had been there in the late fifties also. I grinned to myself – yes, these were the relics which held the attraction of Kolkata so that we continued to return to the roots. I walked down Bhupen Bose Avenue – I once lived on a house on this road and saw that it was there, only it was not maintained as it used to be. It must have changed hands. The original owner had two daughters who must have been married away and, the new owner must be harboring thoughts of erecting a multi storied building in its place. Right next to it was the central office of BSNL and, the station of the Metro rail. A few feet further on, I was delighted to see an old book shop – my father purchased a whole lot of books from this shop to build up his private library. The books were classics penned by great Bengali authors like Bankim Chandra, Sarat Chandra, Nripen Krishna Chattopadhaya, Rabindra Nath Tagore, Banaful etcetera. The sign board of the shop was as it used to be; only, there were huge locks on the vertical wooden bars that concealed the main door. The shop is probably under litigation.

I sighed and boarded a mini bus to go to Dalhousie Square, the central location where most of the offices are located. Bengalis are fondly called ‘babu’s and love white collar jobs – hence, it does not come as a surprise that the majority of office goers in the fifty plus bracket belong to this noble profession. They are pen pushers in various capacities. They could be in the Secretariat or in the High Court or the Lalbazar or in one of the hundreds of private offices that conduct export-import business. They arrive to office munching paan and argue over topics that have no relevance to either their work or their lives, they agitate over whatever suits them and join the slogan mongerers without understanding why they are doing what they do. They are an integral part of Bengali culture and this is all the more evident at the roadside food stalls during lunch break that extends from half past eleven to nearly half past two. These make shift shops offer a wide variety of food stuffs to suit the pocket as well as titillate the taste buds. There are the typical Bengali menus of bhaat-dal-tarkari-machher jhol or the South Indian idli-dosa or the Mughlai Biryani or the North Indian Chana Bhatura or the English type of bread-butter-omlette. And, there are those who specialize in only sweets or fresh cut fruits. None of the stall owners ever land up on the losing side!

I walked through this maze of humanity and crossed the Great Eastern Hotel and the Governor’s house – there were no queue of cars or of any political leaders. I turned towards Esplanade and entered the famous Aminia’s for a cup of their delicious special tea. I was disappointed. The waiter replied with a wry grin – we do not serve tea anymore. However, Nizam’s continue to have rolls on their menu – it was refreshing. By the time I descended underground to take the metro, I was tired but had the good fortune of making mental notes of the Kolkata I knew and comparing them with her new identity – yes, there were changes. A city that has to accommodate hundreds of thousands of persons from around the country and not just from neighboring states, has to be resourceful enough to maintain its identity.

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Inert monitors of pollution push city to a gasp

Automobile emission, the primary reason behind air pollution in Calcutta, is on the rise. Here’s the low-down on the role of the green watchdogs the environment department and the pollution control board (PCB), a statutory body under the department in tackling the menace…

What are the responsibilities of the PCB and the environment department?

The PCB, created under the Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1974, is responsible for implementing 12 major acts and rules related to the environment, with control of pollution from the industrial sector being the major objective.

The environment department is mainly concerned with policy formulation and monitoring.

Read more »

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Foul fumes bind Red cities

Permissible level of PM10 (fine particulate matter): 50 micrograms per cubic metre of air

Beijing PM10 value: 106 micrograms

Calcutta PM10 value: 153 micrograms

Conclusion: World record holder Haile Gebrselassie has opted out of the marathon and decided to run the 10,000 metres in Beijing on pollution grounds, but he would think thrice before putting on his running shoes in Calcutta.

Marathon man Gebrselassie announced on Monday that he could not risk running 42 km through the foul air of Beijing for fear of aggravating his asthmatic condition. He would, instead, run the 10,000 metres in the Olympics.

While the two communist capitals are bound by foul fumes, the key pollution count in Calcutta is far higher than that in Beijing. Calcutta’s PM10 value — particulate matter less or equal to 10 microns, and, therefore, the particulate matter that easily enters the respiratory tract — is 153 against Beijing’s 106, according to a World Bank report published in 2006.

“It is not advisable for an asthma patient to run through the polluted roads of Calcutta. The vehicular pollution is bound to aggravate the asthmatic condition and cause an acute breathing problem,” said cadio-thoracic specialist Plabon Mukhopadhyay.

But try telling that to Subhas Chakraborty. The transport minister on Monday stood up in the Assembly and declared that Calcutta is “the least polluted among the five metro cities” and vehicular emission contributes to “around 30 per cent” of the city’s air pollution.

Check your figures, Mr Chakraborty. In the World Bank report of 2006, Calcutta (153 micrograms) was second only to Delhi (187 micrograms) among metros in terms of air pollution. Mumbai was a distant third, at 79 micrograms, with Chennai the cleanest at 46 micrograms.

Data from the Central Pollution Control Board confirm that Calcutta is only marginally less than Delhi in terms of particulate pollution.

As for the minister’s second claim, a high court-appointed expert committee in 2000 blamed vehicular emission for 50 per cent of the city’s overall pollution.

“Today, vehicular pollution accounts for at least 60 per cent of the city’s foul air,” said environment activist Subhas Dutta.

Jayanta Basu, The Telegraph

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