Barasat may aspire to be like Calcutta but it has no jobs, as this queue of hundreds, waiting in the afternoon sun for forms for primary school teachers’ posts, shows. Picture by Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya

If you fall asleep, somehow, at 8B bus stand in Jadavpur and wake up in Barasat’s Dak Bungalow More, you might not know the difference till you start rubbing your eyes.

Barasat is very much like Calcutta, but not quite. It’s the big city’s little brother, and proud to be so.

Located just 13km from Calcutta, Barasat is the district headquarters of North 24-Parganas. An astoundingly huge proportion of its residents work, study, shop, visit a doctor or entertain themselves in Calcutta. Some virtually wake up, catch a bus to the city and return to Barasat to sleep.

They return to a place that is aspiring to be Calcutta. Tall multi-coloured buildings flank the road as one enters the town, the ground floors displaying branded retail stores.

A Pantaloons outlet is coming up, jewellery showrooms have already arrived. Huge hoardings and their iron scaffoldings lacerate the skyline. Ads for Benarasi saris are everywhere. The fruit vendor sells “imported” pears (nashpati), each piece nestled in a soft netted envelope, just as in Lake Market or Park Circus.

Buses, cars and taxis jostle for road space with pedestrians. But cycle-rickshaws are missing. The open van-rickshaws are bursting with students, office-goers, housewives and shoppers, some of them with earphones plugged in, although the passengers may also include the occasional farmer. Trekkers (called “takers”) carrying up to 40 people are common on the national highways that run through Barasat.

Barasat is the bridge between Calcutta and the paddy fields. And it can’t stop gushing about the Haritala overbridge that connects NH34 (Jessore Road) and NH35 (Krishnagar Road). It came up in late 2008, an antidote to the congested level crossing at Gate No. 12. Today, cars can zip through without having to make way for train after train on the Sealdah North line.

The Vidyasagar Krirangan (stadium), built in 2002, also makes Barasat proud. The town’s sports lovers seem hardly able to believe that they now host Mohun Bagan and East Bengal on their home ground. The floodlights have been installed by Kapil Dev’s company.

The town, with its municipal area of 31sqkm, is much bigger, and in some ways better, than it was 10 years ago. The 2001 census put the population near 2.5 lakh but the number has been growing fast. A 1,000sqft flat that cost Rs 2.5 lakh a decade ago now comes at Rs 15 lakh. The suburb is now seeking its own suburbs.

The roads are better (though some are narrow and dirty), so is connectivity with Calcutta; there are sodium lights on the roadside, satisfactory water supply, a couple of mini flyovers, kindergartens, private schools affiliated to the CBSE — and of course the overbridge.

There’s one stark difference with the city, though. Jobs.

A good 400 people are standing in a snaking queue for the distribution of forms for primary school teachers’ jobs at 8am. At noon, the queue is just as long. Some had been waiting since 2am. Many are overqualified for a job where the requirement is clearing the Class X board exam.

Amitava Pal is 40 and unemployed. He used to run a small jewellery business in Barasat but it went bust. He says he will grab any job in Calcutta.

Standing a few steps behind is 32-year-old Gokul Saha, who travels to Calcutta every day to work at an HLL office in Picnic Garden. The security of a government job attracts Gokul.

Could they have been standing in line for 10 years?

There are several women in the queue, a significant number of them Muslim —new entrants to the job market.

“It’s the big-city effect and it is slowly changing the demographics of the area,” says Ardhendu Biswas, headmaster of Amdanga High School, 11km out of Barasat town.

He says more Muslim girls than boys are completing school and college. The boys often drop out to take up a job. Even as he speaks, the fan stops whirring in his office at Amdanga Karunamoyee Math, where he is secretary.

Electricity is as elusive as a secure job. One of the major peeves of Barasat residents is load-shedding. Almost every household depends on an inverter.

“When there are blackouts, sometimes for four hours at a stretch, the inverter starts groaning and gives up,” complains P.K. Dutta, a former manager of Barasat railway station.

Barasat needs jobs, healthcare, electricity, storage facilities. Last season there was a bumper carrot crop in the adjoining rural belt, but with just one cold storage in Sadhanpur, farmers and traders were unable to reap the benefits.

These are issues that can be addressed not by the municipality but by Writers’ Buildings. Mamata Banerjee knows that. As elsewhere in the state, she is treating the May 30 elections in Barasat — once the stronghold of the Forward Bloc’s Chitta Basu where Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar won by 1.21 lakh votes in the 2009 national polls — as a dry run for the big fight for the Assembly.

Didi’s portrait dominates the posters while the candidate is mentioned almost as an afterthought.