Come Tuesday, and visitors to the Victoria Memorial will not have to fork out the high court-stipulated entry fee of Rs 4. Picture by Amit Datta

Visitors to the Victoria Memorial Hall grounds will, at least for the time being, not have to pay the stipulated entry fee of Rs 4 from February 1, as previously fixed by a division bench of Calcutta High Court.

The Memorial authorities are not ready to implement the new system for lack of necessary infrastructure. According to sources, the ticket-punching machines required to issue the special entry permits have not yet arrived.

Environmental activists are fuming over the delay. According to them, the only way to prevent pollution from getting out of hand, leading to the gradual disintegration of the marble monument, is to immediately restrict visitor entry.

Green activist Subhas Dutta, who is also a petitioner in the Victoria Memorial Hall case pending with the high court, visited the heritage compound on Monday and met the curator. Later, he said the Victoria Memorial Hall authorities had not bothered to carry out the order of the court.

?I am very disheartened to find that none of the measures prescribed by the high court have been followed or implemented. They have not bothered to take any steps to introduce the entry fee. And that, even after the high court appointed an expert committee that had recommended the implementation of the order as early as possible,? Dutta said.

Stressing that the necessary groundwork should have been completed by September 2004, Dutta said he had no idea why the monument authorities were so reluctant to implement the order. He found this baffling, since the monument authorities had earlier demanded that the proposed entry fee be raised to Rs 5.

Earlier, while the case was being heard, the Memorial authorities themselves had suggested that the movement of people inside the compound be restricted. They had asserted that the only way to achieve this was to introduce a nominal entry fee that every person, apart from the employees, entering the premises would have to pay.

Thereafter, the court had appointed a 13-member expert committee to suggest ideas to save the heritage monument and compound from pollution. The state government, however, has consistently opposed the move to introduce an entry fee. Curator C.R. Panda denied comment.