Six dustbins, and hundreds of commuters dodging deftly past them.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in Kolkata to inaugurate swanky new metro stations but what he will not see are those six dustbins that greet commuters at the Shahid Khudiram metro station of the blue line in Patuli, a key junction at the southern end of Kolkata.
These six dustbins have been stationed to collect rainwater seeping through the roof of the Khudiram metro – the name given by former railway minister and current Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee after freedom fighter Khudiram Bose, who had no connection to the area – near the ticket counter.
Right now, Khudiram is a terminal station key to those who commute from the southern fringes of the City of Joy. The station started operations in 2010, a year after the East-West metro was inaugurated.
The CPM and the Trinamool both claim they kicked off the East-West metro line around 2009 (Trinamool claim hinging on Mamata being the railway minister at the time), connecting Kolkata airport to the IT hub of Sector V, the central business district of BBD Bagh and terminating at Howrah railway station.
On Friday, Modi will again inaugurate the East-West metro. He will flag off the services between the crucial Sealdah station to Esplanade stretch, via Bowbazar. This 2.45-kilometre stretch will join and finally the wait of over a decade will end for lakhs of commuters.
A highlight of the delay has been the political blame game among the CPM, Congress, TMC and the BJP-led central government.
The victims were hundreds of Bowbazar residents who were uprooted from their homes and had to stay at hotels because the metro boring work led to cracks in their homes.
Over 200 residents of Bowbazar in north Kolkata, on Friday staged a sit-in alleging neglect by the authorities.
Prime Minister Modi will also not get to see the traffic snarls that plague lakhs of people who travel every day to Salt Lake Sector V to earn their livelihood.
The prime minister will flag off the metro services on the Noapara-Jai Hind Airport, Sealdah-Esplanade (green line), and Beliaghata-Hemanta Mukhopadhyay (orange line) routes.
“This will make commuting to the airport and the IT hub more convenient,” wrote Modi on X Thursday.
The Telegraph Online had earlier reported that the journey to and from Kolkata’s IT hub isn’t measured in kilometres, but in hours. The Chingrighata crossing — the exit route for thousands of office-goers from Sector V — turns into a bottleneck every evening.
After Friday, the metro will take people to Beliaghata, from where the IT hub is about 6.6 km away, and the bottleneck of Chingrighata is about 2 km away.
Modi may not even know that the road from Beliaghata to Jaihind Bimanbandar station (orange line) goes via a dozen-odd stations that will take a few more years to be constructed. In the green line, half a dozen more stations are yet to be constructed.
Modi will also not see that Kavi Subhas, a terminus station that connects the blue line and the orange, is closed indefinitely because the station shut after cracks appeared in the platform pillars.
In the blue line, Khudiram is now the terminal station. That is where the six dustbins to collect rainwater enjoy pride of place.
While Mamata and Modi – and also the erstwhile ruling CPM, which is on an overdrive posting pictures of their leaders inaugurating metro stations to show that Kolkata’s lifeline is actually their doing – are jostling for credit for the new metro lines that will undoubtedly ease commuting in the city, there are no takers for responsibility for the dustbins collecting rainwater at Khudiram station.
Perhaps Sting sang it best – On and on the rain will say/How fragile we are…