Only frogs are expected to stay calm about not knowing whether a piece of territory is land or water. In the absence of such amphibious qualities, it is natural that promoters and ordinary citizens would get perturbed about a deadlock of this kind. So dogs, guns, lathis, guards, a minister and the mayor were all on the spot when some residents of a housing complex in the city protested against what they deemed to be the filling up of a water body by a real-estate group. The residents thought that what they had lived with for years was definitely a pond, while the developers were equally sure that the official papers on which they based their project clearly stated that it was a piece of land. The civilized way of settling such a dispute would be to look at the civic records. Instead, what the residents got was the officiousness of a minister in charge of transport, whose interventions led to the unleashing of physical aggression, injury and then a number of arrests. A stop-work notice was issued by the Calcutta Municipal Corporation, and rapidly the matter went beyond the jurisdiction of the mayor and municipality. The developers have now moved court, forcing the judiciary, yet again, to expend its time and resources on a matter of classification that ought to be settled by the civic authorities.

It turns out now that the CMC records have thrown up at least two different kinds of documents in which the plot has been identified in contradictory ways. Amidst such confusion, the CMC had called for an inquiry, the result of which has now been subordinated to the court’s awaited verdict. At a time when development is both rapid and immensely lucrative, a bureaucracy whose elaborate confusions can only be resolved in court cannot be good, in any way, for the city and its citizens. They will come in the way of necessary improvements, and will also give endless opportunities to a wide range of stakeholders — from promoters to politicians — to play around with these ambiguities to their dubious advantage. Such wrangles not only foster the use of violence and the abuse of power (especially of the party-political kind), but also encumber the courts with disputes and petitions that they could well do without. For a state thrilled with the promises of information technology, ascertaining the difference between a pond and a piece of dry land should be a simple, quick and peaceful matter.