Calcutta, Nov. 26: The city has a long association with the Garibaranda or the portico where the cars ? or the phaeton in the old times ? rolled to a stop before the occupants disembarked and walked into houses that smacked of British colonial taste.

To a Calcuttan, Garibaranda is part of the city?s landscape and nostalgia. The colonnade would come in for repeated mention in the works of Rabindranath Tagore and his contemporaries.

Some of these Garibarandas ? that are more like awnings ? that jut out on the pavements. Calcuttans have long associated garibarandas (porticos) with pomp and pelf, but if mayor Subrata Mukherjee has his way, there won?t be many left in the city.

Mukherjee has decided to get rid of the scores of Garibarandas in the city in order to augment the road infrastructure. The mayor?s decision is likely to raise the hackles of owners of hoses with portico.

Mukherjee recently said Calcutta has the least amount of roadspace among Indian cities and the traffic load on them has grown tenfold over the past 40 years. And one of the ways of augmenting the road infrastructure is getting rid of the hundreds of porticos in the city, he added.

The mayor said the existing roadspace can be increased by nearly 20 per cent by trimming the pavements and on some of major arteries, like Sarat Bose Road, SP Mukherjee Road, Bidhan Sarani and APC Road, several balconies overlooking the pavements have been the main stumbling block in trimming the kerbs.

According to a Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC) building department estimate, about 4,000 balconies jut over the pavement from 350,000 buildings in the city proper. The balconies comprise about 1.14 per cent of the space occupied by the buildings.