Victor Banerjee and his younger daughter Keya enjoy a tram ride along the Maidan in the midst of scouting the city for some of its popular street food delicacies. The father-daughter duo — staunch supporters of the streetcar for reasons green and more — will appear as city anchors in a documentary film made by Siddharth Kak’s Surabhi Force for the National Geographic channel. Picture by Amit Datta

Is the tram on revival track?

The boost in passenger footfall following the crackdown on old, polluting vehicles may suggest so but experts are not convinced.

People in the know point out that the rise in fortune for trams — the daily earning has shot up by around Rs 1 lakh since the crackdown started — has been forced by circumstances rather than being the outcome of well-considered policies of the government.

“There is no hope of revival for the tram, one of the most environment-friendly modes of public transport, in the absence of encouraging policy initiatives by the government,” said tram crusader Debashis Bhattacharya, who is also a scientist at the Indian Institute of Chemical Biology.

The managing director of the Calcutta Tramways Company, Pradip Kumar Chattopadhyay, said the daily revenue of trams was up from Rs 2.6 lakh to Rs 3.38 lakh since the court-ordered phaseout took effect on August 1.

“This, despite the fact that half the total track stretch is closed because of one reason or another and only 105 of the 250-odd trams roll out every day,” said a senior CTC official who did not want to be named. “If the entire length of the tracks could be made operational, the income would be that much more.”

Green activists, however, see the revival as shortlived — the footfall will come down again once all old commercial vehicles are replaced by new ones, they argue — and blame the slow death of the tramways on the government.

“The problem is with the government’s attitude, which will never let the tramways rejuvenate,” said Bhattacharya.

The CTC, he pointed out, got more than Rs 100 crore from World Bank in the mid-80s to breathe life into the dying tramways. “Around 200 steel-bodied trams were bought with the money. But once the fund was exhausted in the late 80s, the transport department decided to run buses under the CTC banner. Huge chunks of land at various tram depots across the city were converted into bus terminuses, old but working trams scrapped and services on profitable routes such as the Howrah bridge, high court and Chowringhee discontinued,” Bhattacharya said.

The government’s thinking is apparent even in one of its policy papers. A master plan of the CMDA states that of the projected 322 lakh commuters in the city in 2025, more than 70 per cent will travel by buses, taxis and autos while only 10 lakh will take trams and Light Railway Transit (a modern version of trams being planned for the city).

Autorickshaws alone will ferry 31 lakh commuters, more than three times the trams.

Highlighting the government’s “systematic attempt” to cripple the tram service, Bhattacharya said that even three decades ago the CTC had 475 trams of which close to 90 per cent would roll out daily catering to 40 per cent of the city’s commuters. Now, barely 100 trams are operational on a given day serving less than 2 per cent of the commuters.

There is no dearth of suggestions from individuals to turn around the tramways but what’s lacking is the government’s commitment to act on them, said a transport department official.

“The CTC has a huge potential because of its extremely good coverage and the network should be linked to the Metro Railway as a grid system,” John Whitelegg, a transport expert from Liverpool University, had stated a few years ago while studying the city’s transport mode.

A recent study by a young German researcher working with a city-based NGO blames the government’s policy to pamper buses at the cost of trams for the financial non-viability of the green mode of transport.

“Since the 90s, the state government has been doing everything possible, from dereserving tracks to winding up routes, to force tramways to court a natural death,” said an activist.

CTC chairman Rajdeo Goala said: “We are trying to restart operations on stretches that are now closed but I can’t give you a deadline for resumption of service.”