Smita Khator

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Debashish
Mondal looked vacantly at the broken walls of his home. All that remained of
the house he was born in 35 years ago was broken bricks, chunks of cement and a
shattered roof

On November
11, the colony he lived in, under Tallah bridge in north Kolkata, home to around
60 families, was reduced to rubble. The local municipal authorities and personnel from
the Public Works Department (PWD), along with a posse of cops, came around 10:30
that morning. They had brought along labourers for the demolition, and two days
later also called in bulldozers for some of the cement structures. It took around
a week to obliterate the basti. Two half-demolished houses are still
standing, while the daily wage labourers continue (in December) to level the
ground, clearing the debris.  

Tallah bridge is located on BT Road’s Nazrul Pally lane. The basti’s
inhabitants estimate that their colony – built on land that belongs to the PWD
– was more than 70 years old. 

“It was [like] a bolt of lightning!” says Debashish, an
ambulance driver who earns Rs. 9,000 a month. He had borrowed around Rs. 1.5 lakhs
from local moneylenders and friends to build a pucca house in place of the
thatched shelter where his father was born. His grandparents had come to
Kolkata several decades ago from Daudpur village
in Sandeshkhali II block
of North 24 Parganas district – part of the Sundarbans – in search of work.

The house Debashish built has been demolished. Much of his high-interest loan remains.

Trouble began for the residents of
the Tallah colony on September 24, when the PWD and municipal corporation authorities informed them verbally that the bridge had to
be repaired. They would have to leave with a few belongings, and could return
when the repairs were complete. On the evening of September 25, the 60 families
were moved to two nearby transit camps – one on railway land, the other near a
canal on land owned by the state irrigation department.

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Around 10 other families remain in
an extension of the Tallah basti, on the opposite side the narrow road, awaiting
relocation. <a></a>Among these 10 families is Parul
Karan’s. She is a former domestic worker, now around 70 years old. She points
to the bridge and says, “This was originally made of wood. Many years ago a
double-decker bus fell from there. When the wooden bridge was converted to
concrete, nobody was evicted.” Parul is a widow and a diabetic; her daughter supports
her with her income as a domestic worker.

Karan’s family too came to Kolkata around 50 years
ago, she recalls, from Daudpur village. “It was not easy to survive in the mud and water among snakes and frogs
in the Sundarbans. When we came from the village, this place was full of shrubs
and weeds, frequented by goondas and bodmash,” she says. “We had to return home by
afternoon right after work at the babu’s place.”  

The transit camps that Parul’s neighbours have moved to are long bamboo
structures covered with black tarpaulin sheets, erected by the municipal
corporation. Each structure is divided into rooms of 100 square feet each. Electricity
is available only from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m. During the day, due to the black tarpaulin,
it is dark inside the rooms. The camp in the railway yard is in a low-lying area that got flooded during a cyclonic storm, Bulbul, on November 9.
 

“The day the storm came, this place got completely
water-logged," says 10-year-old Shreya Mondal, who studies in Class 5 in a
nearby government school. She and a few children of the basti were playing in the field
adjacent to the railway yard when I visited the camp. “There was knee-deep
water in our rooms. With much difficulty, we could save our books. We had lost
so many of our toys, skipping ropes and dolls during the demolition…”

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People in both the camps continue
to use the toilet block (still standing) that they had built at the bridge basti.
The residents of the transit camp near the canal – located further from Tallah
bridge than the railway yard camp, are  compelled to use a public pay and use toilet, which closes by 8 p.m.
Thereafter, they have to walk to the toilet in the demolished basti
area – and the women complain it is unsafe to do that at night. 

Near the canal, I met 32-year-old Neelam Mehta. Her husband, who came to Kolkata from a
village in Jamui district of
Bihar, is a street vendor selling sattu (gram flour). Neelam is a domestic
worker. “Where will we go?” she asks. “We are surviving somehow. We have been
here for many years. I want my daughter to have a better future. I don’t want
her to work at people’s homes. My son is also studying. Tell me, how can we
survive in this situation?” 

She says they have been promised that a toilet will be
built near the canal camp. Till then, she and many others have to spend Rs. 2 for every visit
to the public toilet. “How can we afford to pay for toilets? Where will women
and young girls go at night? Who will take the responsibility if something
happens?” she asks

Her 15-year-old daughter, Neha, is studying right
beside her mother, sitting on the floor of their transit camp room. "It’s
very difficult to study like this,” she says. “There is no electricity during the entire
day. How will we complete our studies?"

On the way to the shelter is a Goddess Durga temple. The
evening prayers here are offered by 80-year-old Dhiren Mondal, who is now
staying in a room in the railway yard transit camp. “I have lived here for more than 50 years,” he
says. “I am from the Sandeshkhali region of the Sundarbans. We had to leave
everything to find work here. Our village had been swallowed by the river." Pulling loaded handcarts by the day, Mondal raised three children in a house
made of bamboo in the Tallah basti, which the family eventually converted into a concrete structure.

“The [municipal] councillor asked if we had taken his
permission to build our homes!” he says. I told him that we have been staying
here for the over 50 years, how could he ask us to leave all this without a
proper alternative? How could he evict people like this? Tell me, where should
we go?”

When the
cops came on the evening of September 25 and asked the residents to start
moving, alleges 22-year-old Tumpa Mondal, "They began bad-mouthing my
mother-in-law, they pulled my brother-in-law by his collar to the camp. When I
went to stop them, I was pushed and shoved. I am pregnant, but they did not
care. They pulled women by their hair. There was not a single female cop. They were using abusive language."

(However, in an interview with this reporter, the officer in charge,
Ayan Goswami, of the Chitpur
police station, around 2.5 kilometres from the Tallah basti, denied any rough handling or coercion. He said he was
sympathetic about the families, but eviction was unavoidable because the bridge
had been declared dangerous by qualified architects. The basti dwellers, he said, would have been the first casualties of any portion of the bridge collapsing.)

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The local
councillor, Tarun Saha, of the Trinamool Congress, told me on the phone,
"They are encroachers. They have no legal right to stay there.
They used to live in shanties. We provided water and sanitation on humanitarian
grounds [for the Tallah basti]. Eventually, they converted the
shanties to pucca
houses.” The bridge, he adds, is in a
dangerous condition. “It needs urgent reconstruction. There could be
casualties if not repaired. They had to be moved.”

The government, Saha says, is yet
to decide about the permanent rehabilitation of the Tallah families. “As of now, we are letting them stay in the temporary shelters. In future there might be
arrangements to cover the shelters with tin roofs. But we will not allow any
concrete structure,” he says. “They have
houses elsewhere,” he adds, referring to their villages and, in some instances, land some families have managed to purchase in fringe areas. “They have encroached on this place for the sake of
their work. They have been here for a very long time. They kept on bringing
their families. Many of them are well off now.”

“Poor people have always stayed on sarkari land, otherwise where will we stay?" asks Lakhhi Das, 23, a homemaker,  whose husband works as an office assistant. Along with their two daughters, they too were shunted out from the Tallah basti . "We are poor. We earn with our labour," Lakhhi adds. "I am facing all the difficulties only for my daughters.”

The demolished basti’s residents want a written assurance
from the councillor that after the bridge is repaired, they will be allowed to
return. No such assurance has been given
so far.

There have been small acts of resistance – on
September 25, when they had to leave their homes, the Tallah colony residents
blocked the bridge for around an hour at 10 p.m. On November 11, they took out a morcha.
On November 18, they held a public meeting to voice their demands. Coming together
as the Basteevasi Shramjivi Adhikar Raksha Committee, they are lobbying for
toilets and regular electricity, and planning to build a community kitchen that
would bring down costs for each family.

On November 25, Raja Hazra, a street vendor, whose family was also evicted,
filed a petition in the Kolkata High Court on behalf of the evicted slum
families. Their main demand is proper rehabilitation  – a permanent place to live from where they won't be evicted, not too far from their demolished basti (which was close to their workplaces and schools), and basic services like electricity, water and sanitation.Back in the transit camp, Sulekha Mondal has lit a mud
oven. It is 2:30 in the afternoon, she has just returned from work at the
nearby houses – she will go back to those houses to work again in the evening. Stirring brinjal, potatoes and cauliflower in the pan, she says,
"The councillor told us to go back to the village! Four generations ago,
we left Daudpur. Now we are being told to return? Everyone knows the conditions
in the Sundarbans. Whatever little people had got devastated during [cyclone] Aila.
We are not hurting anybody. We also want the bridge to be repaired. But the
government must rehabilitate us.” The reporter would like to thank Soumya, Raya and Aurko for their help.

Bridge over troubled squatters

കുടിയിറക്കപ്പെട്ടവരുടെ പാലം

ಸೂರು ಕಸಿದುಕೊಂಡ ಸೇತುವೆ

ਪੁਲ ਨਾਲ਼ ਲਟਕੀਆਂ ਜ਼ਿੰਦਾਂ

ভাঙা পড়ল সেতুর ছায়া, আবার ভিটেহারা টালার বস্তিবাসীরা

अशांत झुग्गियों के ऊपर पुल

بحران زدہ جھگیوں کے اوپر پل

বিপদগ্ৰস্ত আৱাসীৰ মূৰৰ ওপৰেৰে এখন দলং

பாலத்தின் கீழ் இருக்கும் பிரச்சனைக்குரிய கட்டுமானங்கள்

पडत्या पुलाखालचं जमीनदोस्त जगणं

ଜବରଦଖଲ ଉପରେ ପୋଲ ନିର୍ମାଣର ସମସ୍ୟା

Kolkata

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Bridge over troubled squatters

A month after the decades-old Tallah basti in north Kolkata was demolished to make way for bridge repairs, the families who were shunted out to transit sheds continue to seek fair rehabilitation

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