Are Kolkata's Metro Plans Assaulting Its Lungs?

Kolkata’s Metro has always boasted of firsts. The first Metro system in the country (started in 1984), the first to go underwater (under the river Hooghly in 2020), and perhaps the first to have stations named after poets, actors and singers rather than destinations. And soon it may well be the first Metro in the country to put the lungs of a city at risk for the sake of questionable benefits.

This latest chapter of the Kolkata Metro saga opens in September, 2023, with the announcement that 700 trees on Kolkata’s Maidan would be “transplanted” as part of the proposed Joka-Esplanade corridor. City-based environmental action group, PUBLIC (People United for Better Living in Calcutta) immediately moved a petition in the Calcutta high court. [Editor's note: The writers are its founders]. 

PUBLIC challenged the threat to the 700 trees on four counts:

1. That the trees were being removed not for the Metro but for the construction of stations on the Maidan – stations that were unnecessary because duplicate metro stations in the same vicinity already existed.
2. That the 700 trees were crucial to the city’s climate resilience, located as they were on the 1200-acre Maidan in the centre of the city, known as the lungs of Kolkata.
3. That “transplanting” was being used to wiggle out of the statutory mandates laid down by applicable state law and to dodge permissions from local authorities.
4. That transplanting was a process requiring skills and resources that the project proponents showed no evidence of possessing and that the transplanted trees, particularly the older and larger ones, would be unlikely to survive.

Arguing before the Supreme Court about the environmental consequences of the proposed “transplantation” of almost 1000 trees, senior advocate Jaideep Gupta stressed that the Maidan contains some of the city’s oldest and most significant trees and that it is a key ecological asset, contributing to the mitigation of air pollution, regulation of urban temperatures, and preservation of biodiversity. Kolkata’s average temperature had risen by over 2.6°C since 1950, and this underscored the urgent need to preserve existing green spaces that function as “heat regulators.” Removing such a vast number of mature trees would critically undermine Kolkata’s capacity to cope with climate-related challenges, especially in light of the city’s worsening air quality and urban heat island effect.

The Supreme Court agreed, stating that “...[I]n order to allay the apprehension of the appellants, it will be appropriate that the Central Empowered Committee (under the Ministry of Environment, Forest & Climate Change) examines the issue.” All felling and transplantation were forbidden until the CEC came to a conclusion.

The CEC’s ruling, delivered at the end of March this, was masterful. 

First, it assigned a key supervisory role to the state’s forest department so that approval of the site (whether for transplantation or compensatory plantation) and the practices adopted would have to be obtained from that department. 

Second, the CEC split the proposed “transplantation” into two phases, requiring proper maintenance and monitoring for the five-year period of phase one so that an 80%. survival rate could be achieved. The second phase has been made conditional upon this survival rate in phase one. In case of mortality, replacement plantations will have to be carried out in a time-bound manner.

Third, critically, the CEC has insisted that planting take place on the Maidan rather than 10 km away in Joka, as originally proposed by the applicant. This despite the Metro’s rather lame excuse that the defence authorities (as the custodians of the Maidan) were not giving permission for additional planting on the Maidan.

Curiouser and curiouser gets the story. 

In the middle of March, while the CEC was still deliberating the matter, the Railways Ministry announced an extension of the corridor from Esplanade – the original point of termination – to Eden Gardens, the destination for the ever-teeming cricket and football-crazy Kolkatans. The additional stop would cost an additional Rs 1,000 crores and take the total project cost to Rs 10,360 crores. In a city where the existing tram network is under threat of dismantlement, and where the cost of revitalising has been small-changed at Rs 70 crores (seventy only, in words!), questions are being asked in the ever-happening adda sessions. 

Is the Ministry of Railways under instructions to prepare Rail Vikas Nigam Limited (RVNL, the project implementing unit of the Ministry) for privatisation? Is the reason for stations at Victoria Memorial and Eden Gardens footfall rather than service?

Is the RVNL taking us all for a ride? 

Bonani Kakkar is founder-president of People United for Better Living in Kolkata (PUBLIC). Pradeep Kakkar is founder-member of PUBLIC.

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