[Reader-list] Ranabir Samaddar: Rajarhat, the Urban Dystopia

Wed Aug 3 19:15:41 IST 2011

original to: http://transitlabour.asia/blogs/dystopia

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Rajarhat, the Urban Dystopia
by Ranabir Samaddar July 29, 2011

Kolkata has changed quite a lot in the last few decades. It wants to
become Delhi. It must catch up with the flash and glitz found elsewhere.
It too must have its high-tech township and must embody a new mode of
circulation of money, information, human resources, and power. It does not
think that its old organic character is worth retaining. If discarding the
old organic character is the necessary sacrifice to make in order to
develop, let that be. If road space increases while the space for human
interaction decreases, that price Kolkata must pay. Likewise parallel
journals have lost their edge, parallel theatre has lost audience, the
river line earlier dotted with old storehouses has changed, and tram cars
carry only the distant memories of a city criss-crossed with tramlines and
streetcars. Old urban resources have wasted in a state of neglect. In this
change of guards, something new is happening. As a product of this
developmental imagination Rajarhat is coming up beyond Kolkata.

Where is Rajarhat? If you enter the city from the airport side, after few
kilometres, near Koikhali, you take the left turn, and then you will
traverse the newly laid road that cuts through miles and miles of waste
land, here and there marked with a shiny mall or few glass buildings, high
rises built by new developers, and sign boards announcing the coming up of
an office, or an e-firm, or a conference centre  all that Kolkata
apparently did not have. This is a notified area, named after the deceased
venerable leader of Bengal  the Jyoti Basu Nagar. After you have covered
about fifteen miles in this way, you will bypass Salt Lake and reach the
artery that will re-connect you with Kolkata. Possibly you will be
relieved for you have not seen in the thirty minutes or so you were going
in a car or the speeding bus ferrying you from the airport to the city any
pond, any water body, any village, any school, any farmer, any farming
land, any herd of cattle. All these are gone. Land has been taken over to
meet the deficit of Kolkata. But from the city side that is from the west,
Rajarhat is beyond Kolkata, with few buses to connect, only one road to
lead to, and as a person of Kolkata you have no reason to go beyond unless
you are a BPO employee, or an employee in a mall, or a construction worker
(in that case you of course stay there), or have relatives who have bought
houses there. When the night falls, then of course there is nothing for
you. Only syndicates dealing with money, land, building material, waste
disposal business, and firearms, are the denizens of the new city at
night, the city beyond Kolkata.

Rajarhat, described by L.S.S. OMalley in the District Gazetteer of 24
Parganas as a land with vast water bodies and marked by salty marshes and
the river Bidyadhari straddling between the sea and the city, had 55
mauzas under it; 25 of them were notified for acquisition by the HIDCO in
1998 under the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 (Article 1 clause 4) and West
Bengal Land (Requisition and Acquisition Act, 1948) amounting to 3075
hectares of arable land. In the process HIDCO destroyed 15 lakh trees and
plants, and dispossessed 1 lakh 31 thousand people of their livelihoods.
Some of the important and prosperous centres of cultivation, grain trade,
and settlements acquired are: Tarulia, Salua, Hatiara, Atghara, Koikhali,
Tegharia, Mahishgate, Mahisbathan, Ghuni, Baligari, Jatragachi,
Patharghata, Muhammadpur, and Jagadishpur. Of the total 55 mauzas 15
mauzas constituted a municipality, and the rest 40 mauzas were governed by
6 panchayats. According to District census Reports by the 2001 census
Rajarhat panchayat area had a population of 145,381; the Rajarhat-Gopalpur
municipality had a population of 271,811. With the total population of
Rajarhat being 417,192, the density of population in the village and
municipal area per square kilometre has been respectively 1994 and 7773.
The voter strength is 2 lakh 35 thousand. Rajarhat panchayat area has 1
panchayat samity, 6 gram sabhas, and 99 gram sansads. The total number of
mauzas is 39, inhabited villages 38, and number of households 61,893.
The total number of households in the Rajarhat Gopalpur municipality is
59,225. The total population had shown massive increase in the area  in
1991 it was 286,056; in 2001 it became 417192. And, one more significant
set of demographics: Muslims and Dalits constitute two substantial groups
within this population combining into a huge majority. In the panchayat
area out of a total population of 145,381 Muslims are 60,108 in number and
Dalits are 52233. In the municipal area out of a total population of
271,811 Muslims are 39,916 in number and Dalits are 50,634.

According to one report of the Fisheries Department, about 17,000 people
depended for their employment on recycling of waste and recovery system
(through fish cultivation and vegetable growing in the wetlands). The same
report notes the continuous conversion of agricultural land to
non-agricultural use in the preceding two decades, therefore decline in
the average size of marginal land holdings, middle scale fisheries
becoming unprofitable due to soaring prices of land, declining flow of
sewage-laden water to the fisheries, poor storage facilities for fishermen
and agriculturalists, and near absence of institutional credit to the
farmers and fishermen. The report also thought that constructing a new
town was not an answer to the problems of the area. What were needed were
steps such as clearing of existing canals through dredging, sewerage
treatment tax system, keeping canal sides free of settlements, and
declaring the wetlands a no development zone.

The report found the poverty situation in the wetlands below the national
average, and thus consumption pattern in Rajarhat highly skewed in favour
of food consumption (as much as 70 per cent of the total consumption
expenditure on food, while healthcare expenditure 0.9 per cent). On the
basis of samples (two mouzas, Ghuni and Jatragachi, and 68 households
surveyed) it found as already mentioned continuous conversion for the last
two decades of agricultural land to non-agricultural use, the figure of
consequent occupation shift was 47 per cent. In comparison to other
wetland areas, in Rajarhat it found a larger share of population depending
on non-agricultural activities. Its table 5.5 showed: Of the 68 households
sampled and surveyed, 20 were owner-cultivator households, 2 were
sharecropper households, 11 agricultural labour, owner fishermen 0, share
fishermen 0, bhery labourer 2, trade related to picsiculture 1, trade
related to agriculture 0, and others 32. The report does not elaborate,
who are these others, the largest chunk in the occupational profile?
Rickshaw pullers, cart drivers, loaders, bus conductors, helpers, people
thriving on the commons, who else? In what way are they related to local
economy?

In short the Report describes an area with fragile environment and
extremely low-cost subsistence economy, by logic providing highly
subsidised inputs to the metropolis of Kolkata, like fresh air, low-cost
fish and vegetables. Therefore the Report tells us of sizeable number of
people holding the opinion that with the new town coming up waste
recycling system would break down, water logging in suburbs would
increase, economic rehabilitation of the dispossessed and deprived of
livelihood would be difficult, social unrest would grow, bio-diversity
would be lost, and the city would be deprived of fish, vegetables and
other agricultural products. The challenge was as the Report put it: The
New Town agenda was in line with what had been going on the past two
decades all along the east of the city (both north and south), vast amount
of wetland had been captured, filled in, and handed over to land dealers
and promoters. New Town would aggravate the situation massively. Will the
compensatory measures be able to compensate for the loss? Was this the way
to break the poverty cycle? Would this not ruin the situation further? Who
would gain and who would lose?

The project of the New Town is a commentary on post-colonial capitalism,
the return of primitive accumulation, on the way space plays a critical
role in transformation, and the receding of the colonial city in the
history of accumulation with the accompanying emergence of the new town.
In short Rajarhat is a saga of space, capital, and people in the vortex of
globalised time.

Equally significant in this context is another set of figures that should
remind us what was described in the previous paragraphs. In
Rajarhat-Gopalpur municipality according to Census report the total number
of workers in 2001 was 94,001; of them the number of main workers was
88,458, the number of marginal workers 5542. Cultivators were 580 in
number, and agricultural wage labour 326, and household industry workers
1583 (rest are thus other workers  main and marginal both). In Rajarhat
panchayat area, the corresponding figures were main workers 38,362,
marginal workers 5556, cultivators 4261, agricultural labour 7217, and
household industry workers 2519. Yet typically with all these, Rajarhat is
like other parts of the district of North 24 Parganas, which has 68.46 per
cent of its total land as cultivable area. But these are Gods numbers now
caught at the centre of controversy over land acquisition in Rajarhat.

Rajarhat is not connected with Kolkata in any sense; it is connected with
Sector 5 of the Salt Lake area, while being connected on another side with
another notified area, the empire of BRADA (Bhangar Rajarhat Area
Development Authority). Flanked by North 24 Parganas, the estuary region
of Bhangar and Haroa in the South 24 Parganas, and Basanti, its real trade
(daily, petty, and small) connection in terms of men, cash, vegetable
market, etc. is with Baguihati, an unkempt dirty bazaar, bus stop and
terminus, banking centre, eating place, cycle rickshaws, narrow lanes,
hordes of day labourers waiting to be hired, and various kinds of sundry
stalls  all rolled into one. The farmers, fishermen, vegetable growers
and sellers, boatmen, and agricultural labour now robbed of livelihood 
all roam around these marginal places, if they are not already serving the
new comers of Rajarhat with domestic labour, transportation, vegetable
supply, or serving tea and sundry Tiffin food. But those who work in the
New Town (as the Jyoti Basu Nagar is called), in those malls, e-firms,
hotels, other companies, or live in those high rises, have few reasons to
visit Kolkata or these dirty marginal places. This new inner city supposed
to produce urban wealth today is at once exterior to the city proper. It
looks like a wasteland, combining virtual production with new types of
consumption, symbolised by the mall, the City Centre of the North, or the
giant building material depot. Interior to late twentieth century and
early twenty first century mode of wealth production and therefore
exterior to traditional wealth pattern of a city, Rajarhat represents
simultaneously the virtuality of capital and reality of the primitive mode
of accumulation  a utopia to financiers and speculators and a dystopia
for urban imagination.

Architects are excited over Rajarhat New Town, like long idle military
commanders getting excited over the prospect of waging a war, or an idle
doctor finding finally a patient, or a manufacturer of weapons finally
getting chance to display his/her weaponry. So the plan began with
designing sectors and action areas. They were then busy in designing
placements of traffic intersections, bus stands, new transport system, new
markets, new malls, and remember all in their greenest form. Remember also
in this context that Rajarhat, as the planners say, will soon become with
the help of US technology the first zero-energy town in the country.
Realtors follow architects dreams, at times the other way round.
Therefore even though there are very few essential infrastructural
facilities in the area (and we cannot expect architects becoming excited
over the presence or absence of those facilities, which they will leave
happily to town planners and municipal engineers), schools in New Town and
BRADA areas must have more space, more designed buildings, and more
amenities. Since the cost of developing land is relatively high in a new
town, schools become business. These schools (for instance Delhi Public
School) must be ideal schools with huge open spaces, different
playgrounds and halls, community grounds, etc., with of course different
priorities for different types of schools  nursery, primary, and higher
secondary. There will be educational zones  with additional space for
peak office hours and parking facility. There will be designated places
for vocational and training institutions. There will be hardly any scope
of a university there, as the architect declares, the traditional
concept of university/college in a bigger land is hardly viable without
government subsidy. But with other kinds of skill-oriented units, urban
areas will become engines of the development of rural hinterlands.
Effective planning on a regional scale will provide appropriate
preference and promotion of industries and commercial activities.
Generation of jobs will attract people from the rural surroundings for
livelihood. In Kolkata, an architect declared, Several New Townships are
being developed. This is creating a major development impetus in the
region. Namely New Town, Rajarhat has already been started its
development. This will create enormous employment opportunities, which
obviously would be a benefit for the rural surroundings and villages. The
change of the livelihood from the primary sector to the secondary and
tertiary sectors is getting very fast. In the near future the profile of
the Kolkata Metropolitan Area obviously will change due to the development
of those New Towns. The economic activities will be well decentralized if
the development goes as per intention. The urban architect has to think
also of the faster circulation of men, money, services, and commodities.
So, HIDCO is now acquiring smart buses.

The point is: Is Rajarhat then the private game of capital, its own
business to shape the world in its contemporary image, while the public
character of the city becomes irrelevant in the history of urban
imagination today? We may ask, is this difference between Kolkata and
Rajarhat, their opposition, a structural one? Rajarhat will be what
Kolkata is not? Or is it a matter of urban style only? Maybe, we can still
consider Rajarhat as part of Kolkata and not beyond Kolkata. But in that
case we must be ready to integrate the structural opposition between the
utopia of a city and the dystopia of a wasteland within a narrative and
explanatory framework that must go beyond a binary opposition. I have
already said that Rajarhat suggests the unity of the most virtual form of
capital accumulation and the primitive form. Eviction, threat, coercion,
murder, gun running, and presence of bands of coolies from Murshidabad and
Malda  these combine with shiny glass buildings, e-firms in the special
economic zone, new health care facility built by the Tatas, new banks,
gradual spread of ATM centres and this combination suggests the already
happening breakdown of an integrated circuit of money, power, and capital
into various segmented circuits; and it will be worth looking into the
ways in which these local circuits of power feed into a bigger grid of
capital. But merely stating this is not enough, the statement represents a
problem or some problems. Let me mention here three problems.

Problem number one: If by the wild play of the architects, planners, and
moneybags a space is destroyed and a new space comes up, how to apprehend
that change and its long term consequences? How shall we study not simply
the product (the new city), but the production, the process, the practice
of producing a city, with all the hazards of contemporariness?

Problem number two: If the opposition between public and private,
primitive and virtual, representation and void, city and periphery breaks
down, what will be the new forms of collective action? After all, these
binary oppositions had genuine social and historical context. Will they
die down? Or will the contexts survive? In any case what will be the new
public space, which was till now essential for public mobilisations and
public actions?

Problem number three: What will be the authentic nature of the private in
this new public society? The private pleasures that shape our consumption
patterns, encourage new commodification, and new ways of arranging the
space? If they cannot be separated out as independent elements in the
designed place called Rajarhat, and the model it develops, where
consumption will take place side by side of production, will there be any
authentic private, except the new centres of public assemblage for
private consumption and pleasure?

In short Rajarhat beyond Kolkata disrupts the earlier pattern of the
mutually constitutive relationship between space of accumulation of
capital and the urbanity of democratic citizenship. In the immediate
exclusion of one from the other, we may witness a new kind of realism in
politics, possibly not desirable to our urban tastes. The spatial
programme of the new town and by implication of the evolving new entity
called Kolkata-New Town will demand new specifications about public action
marking the new relation between capital and citizenship. It will take
time to fill the empty fields of Rajarhat (a huge area of about 3100
hectares of land) in a planned way with houses, roads, streets, schools,
people, office units, green industries, shops and malls, water pipes,
lanes, power and cable lines, etc, for much will depend on developers,
land shirks, estate owners, software giants like WIPRO, INFOSYS, TATA
Consultancy, etc., and the general state of the economy. The government
stands penniless. The HIDCO has hardly any capital. All it has is the land
looted from the local villagers, and now it has to sell them to private
players to make the dream of public-private partnership successful. With
no integral infrastructure of urban services in Rajarhat, the empty fields
there (since 1998) represent in this scenario the death of agriculture
with its subsidiary activities as a substantive occupation in Bengal, its
murder by capital, savage commodification of land, and the resurgence of
private property in city  private roads, private power generation
equipment, private pleasure houses, private sources of drinking water,
private schools, private villas, private housing estates with private
guards, and the most private of all, private production units in the SEZs
in Rajarhat-Sector V of Salt Lake. What will be the politics of
anti-capital in this new spatial system of capital?

Where is then Rajarhat? The Rajarhat I am speaking of here is at once a
real place  a block of territory, a municipality, a new town in the
process of emergence, a scenario of destroyed farmlands  Rajarhat is also
a trapped land, a ghost for urban planners, dream for many more such
planners, and a collective name of an ensemble of places. Rajarhat is a
surface, which is made of miles of wasteland, a destroyed top level of
earth. This surface is made of filled-in ponds, other water bodies,
pilfered and acquired what was previously tilled land, vegetable gardens
and farms, wetlands, small villages and hamlets. But Rajarhat is also the
depth of several relations figured in space. In contrast with the
sentimental image of space evoked by the philosopher Gaston Bachelard in
the phrase and account, the poetics of space, we must situate the politics
of space, which will mould several subjectivities in a particular way.
This particular way is variational as opposed to the constitutive way of
the city.