Salt Lake may not have a master plan, but it sure has a master planner.

Sanjib Chakraborty, a resident of the township, had recently invoked the Right to Information Act for a look at the master plan of the township. But municipality officials made it clear that they had no such plan with them and so, Chakraborty’s request was turned down.

The civic officials now have a chance to make it up — by getting Chakraborty to meet the man behind New Calcutta: Salt Lake Township.

Dobrivoje Toskovic, the Yugoslav architect-planner who had drawn up the original master plan for Salt Lake during Bidhan Roy’s regime, is set to revisit a township that he will have trouble recognising.

The 81-year-old, now scientific adviser at the Institute for Architecture and Town Planning in Serbia, will be jointly hosted by the Bengal chapter of the Indian Institute of Architects (IIA) and think-tank body Centre for Built Environment (CBE).

Toskovic will be put up in a Salt Lake hotel and taken around “his” township, which has seen dramatic — often disastrous — departures from the original plan.

Toskovic was head architect and town planner in the waterways enterprise Ivan Milutinovic of Belgrade, which won the global tender for dredging the Hooghly in the 1950s. “The silt and sediment from the river were used to fill up Salt Lake and chief minister Bidhan Roy requested the firm to do a master plan for the township,” recalls CBE president Santosh Ghosh.

The Yugoslav firm agreed and the master plan for New Calcutta: Salt Lake Township was prepared by Toskovic. Experts now feel the irrigation department had erred by making large-scale changes to Toskovic’s town plan.

“For instance, he had proposed that only 13 per cent would comprise plotted housing, with the rest being used for group housing and public facilities, which appears practical,” says Ghosh.

Had the Toskovic topography been followed, Salt Lake could have avoided the “absurdly high” 23 per cent road cover and the enormous infrastructure costs that go with it, points out architect and urban designer Partha Ranjan Das.

There was also merit in Toskovic’s proposal to house the government offices closer to the Bypass, and not around Central Park. “He had obviously foreseen how busy the Bypass would become, and planned the main spine of Salt Lake as a commercial corridor, instead of holding cooperative housing. He will be pained when he sees the haphazard development,” warns Das.

Toskovic had also designed an elaborate road network and traffic flow pattern with a combination of tramcars, trolley-buses and auto-buses. This took into consideration transportation speed and capacity, cost, travelling comfort and safety.

The municipality, which does not have the master plan, was also clueless about the visit of its master planner. “Nobody has told me about his visit. But it’s wonderful news. I know he did the original planning for Salt Lake. I will personally show him around the township,” Salt Lake municipality chairman Biswajiban Majumdar tells Metro.

Toskovic will read a paper (probably on how he perceived the master plan for the township) at the IIA convention in town on April 19 and deliver a public lecture at a CBE forum on April 22.