Work on the boring pump at Bilkanda II in Khardah cannot proceed because the owner of the land said he had not been paid. Picture by Amit Datta

Sept. 30: If it took a blood-soaked war to change the mind of Ashoka the Great who shunned violence ever since, a stint as an MLA has brought to Amit Mitra his Kalinga moment.

The Bengal finance minister, who has taken off his self-imposed English news-channel gag after the UPA cleared FDI in retail, had this month told an anchorperson of NDTV: “Don’t sit in your ivory tower in Delhi. Come along and see…. Take off for two days, come to my constituency.”

To CNN-IBN, the minister had said: “I live in a constituency with poor people. I, as a middle-class person, did not know earlier that 75,000 people do not get drinking water. There are no roads, there is no drainage.”

The backdrop of the discussion was FDI in retail, for which Mitra had batted when he was Ficci secretary-general, and the minister was describing how the deprivation in Khardah, his Assembly constituency in North 24-Parganas, changed his mind.

“If you had been sitting on my seat in my constituency, I guarantee you that your position would have been rethought based on the poverty that you see,” Mitra said.

Uninvited, The Telegraph took a trip last week to the constituency, around 20km from the heart of Calcutta, to find out how Khardah became the US-educated Mitra’s Kalinga and made him change his mind.

This reporter tried to contact Mitra on Sunday for his response to what some voters of his constituency had to say but was told by an aide that he was preoccupied with an emergency. However, the version of local officials of Mitra’s party, the Trinamul Congress, has been included.

The situation report follows:

Mitra is right. There is no doubt that Khardah, a semi-urban town that also has villages on its fringes, faces a host of everyday problems.

It is also true that Mitra cannot be blamed for the problems as most of them existed during the tenure of Asim Dasgupta, his predecessor in Khardah for nearly 24 years and in the state finance ministry for many years.

However, several residents of Khardah said that they were not yet aware of what significant steps the new MLA had taken in the past year to solve the problems in the constituency that he is flagging on television channels.

Last-mile hurdles that suggest lack of administrative zeal and political push appear to be standing between an almost-complete piped water system and the people.

Several political functionaries, cutting across party lines, confirmed that many people in panchayats like Bilkanda I and II, Bandipur and Patulia do not get piped water, although money has been spent on a project.

Around 70,000 people in two adjacent panchayats —Bilkanda I and II — are not getting piped water mainly because of a minor issue that Mitra can solve immediately.

During the last few years of Left Front rule, Rs 8 crore was spent on building two 1,250-cubic-metre-capacity water reservoirs, laying pipelines and installing boring pumps to draw underground water.

In Bilkanda II gram panchayat, the authorities have not paid Rs 4 lakh to a landloser, on whose plot a boring pump is supposed to come up. That is why piped water is not flowing even though the reservoir has been built and the other boring pump (which feeds water to the tank) is ready.

In the adjacent Bilkanda I panchayat, villagers want the asbestos pipelines to be replaced with PVC pipes. The legitimate demand has been accepted but not fulfilled yet. The new PVC pipes arrived recently but are yet to be laid.

“I have spoken to our MLA and he has promised to take action,” said Sukur Ali, Trinamul’s block president in Khardah. According to Ali, he has to face questions from villagers about the completion of the project.

“The government has not paid me Rs 4 lakh, which is due for over two years. I can’t allow the installation of the boring pump unless I am paid,” said Shanti Ranjan Roy, the owner of the land at Bilkanda II. Ali said the administration had not been aware of the non-payment till recently.

Several residents said they want to apprise Mitra of their problems but they haven’t been able to spot him in the area since he defeated Dasgupta in the Assembly polls.

“I gave my land for the water project so that my wife need not carry buckets and pots for more than 1km. But it is stuck for years. The minister has never visited our village and there’s no way we could tell him about our plight,” said Ezarul Rehman, a villager.

Khodeja Biwi, whose husband Nazrul Rehman is a mason earning about Rs 4,000 per month, said she had to walk more than 1km to the adjacent Khardah municipal area and stand in queue before the “time tap” (from which water is available only during specific hours) for more than an hour.

Urban Khardah gets piped water. But one of its biggest problems is unemployment.

In the run-up to the Assembly polls last year, Mitra, who has wide contacts among industrialists, had repeatedly referred to how militant trade unionism and lack of initiative by the Left Front government had resulted in closure of industrial units in and around Khardah. The list included companies like Hindusthan Heavy Chemicals, Hindusthan Wire, Calcutta Silk and Calcutta Steel.

“At his street-corner meetings, Mitra used to talk about his close bonding with the industrialists and how he would try his best to reopen them. But there has not been any improvement in the last 15 months,” said a Trinamul leader who did not wish to be named.

According to him, the owners of Madhava Textiles, which employed around 74 people, issued a notice suspending work two months ago and the local Trinamul leadership did little to engage the owners in a dialogue.

Some residents still recall that one of Mitra’s pre-poll promises was to reopen Hindusthan Heavy Chemicals, which closed down two years ago, leaving 350-odd people jobless.

“We went to the MLA two months after the new government came to power. He had promised that his first task after winning would be to reopen the factory. When we met him, he merely said he was trying,” said Pradip Kumar Das, 43, a worker.

“Since then, we have heard nothing from the minister,” said Das, who used to earn Rs 8,500 per month as an employee of the company.

Local Trinamul leaders said that Mitra had held five to six meetings with the management of Hindusthan Heavy Chemicals while Sougata Roy, MP, Dum Dum, was in touch with the Madhava owners to find a solution.

In the absence of any outcome to these efforts, Das, a college dropout, has to depend on odd jobs to sustain his family because of lack of employment opportunities in the area.

“There is only one development taking place in the Khardah Assembly area and that is real estate development, most of which is illegal as basic norms of floor-area ratio are getting violated. In violation of the fire safety norms, the municipality is allowing highrises in narrow lanes,” said a Trinamul insider.

According to civic officials, the real estate price has shot up from Rs 1,600 per square feet to between Rs 2,100 and Rs 2,300 in the past 15 months or so.

Demand for commercial space has also gone up in the area as several private and public sector banks have opened branches or set up ATM counters and new shops have come up.

An explosion in commercial activity may satisfy the economist in Mitra as these are indications of the existence of a market. The fledgling politician may however find it difficult to cherish the success of market principles, which have pushed out small retailers from prime locations in Station Road.

“The city is now expanding on the northern fringes and that’s why all these activities can be seen in Khardah. But the question is, what are the authorities doing to improve the quality of life of the people? The authorities cannot even widen the road that links Khardah station with BT Road, but they are giving permission to construct high-rises. This is not sustainable,” said a retired Calcutta University professor, blaming the municipality for unplanned development.