Technopolis building in Sector V

Kanchan Das’s family lives in one room with a shared toilet in Keshtopur. It is in the basement of an unpainted two-storey building. Kanchan works as an ayah and her husband is a mason’s helper. One of her three daughters, who was studying in Class VII, had to give up school when she was stopped from taking her annual exam after she contracted jaundice. But most of Kanchan’s neighbours are distinctly global.

Six young people live on the ground floor of the house. They are all students of a large hotel management institute in Salt Lake’s Sector V. One of them, Sushma Gupta, is a petite 20-something in a trendy top and trousers. She is sitting on her narrow bed in a shabby passage that leads to two shabby unpainted rooms, inhabited by four other collegemates. All are from outside Bengal — four girls, two boys. Sushma, who is from Nalanda, Bihar, speaks only Hindi and English. Sushma shares her bed, her home in the city, with another collegemate. There are too many mosquitoes.

The six pay a rent of Rs 6,000 together. Sushma got the address of this house from a collegemate, who is now in Scotland for further studies. As she speaks, one of her other collegemates flits by. She is another attractive, trendy person, from a north-eastern state, wearing a stringy top coupled with a short dress, an image undreamt of even five years ago in the neighbourhood.

Keshtopur, the hinterland of Salt Lake that stretches between the Keshtopur canal and the VIP Road, the place from where domestic helps and labourers come to work in Salt Lake, is a bizarre mix today. Lying under the tall shadows of Sector V and Rajarhat, of “development”, Keshtopur is full of young people from outside Bengal who are here either to study at the institutes teaching professional courses or work at the call centres or IT offices. The story of Keshtopur, under the jurisdiction of Rajarhat municipality, is the story of many places along the VIP Road, except perhaps the ironies seem the sharpest here.

In neighbouring Nayapatti too. Overlooked by Technopolis, the giant IT office with a globe hanging midway through its length, the Mandals are a large family of brothers, all gas-vendors. Sukanya, the daughter of one of the brothers, a student of Class XII in Murarimohanpukur Government Sponsored High School in Ultadanga — good schools are not Nayapatti or Keshtopur’s strength — lives in a one-room tenement with her parents. She thinks too many changes are sweeping through the neighbourhood. Her married elder sister, who is visiting, agrees.

“The boys from the locality often comment on the way the girls from outside dress,” says Sukanya, a pretty, smiling girl. “But boys and girls here are also copying their styles,” she says. “Actually, some boys resent the fact that others from Jaipur, Hyderabad or Orissa are working here, when they don’t have jobs,” she adds. “But they should understand that these people are reaping the benefits of education, which Nayapatti doesn’t have.”

New buildings stand alongside old houses in Keshtopur. Pictures by Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya

The conversation then turns to having fun. Sukanya’s cousin Iman, who has short cropped hair, sports an ear stud in his right ear and wants to study “hardware networking” after he finishes his BCom course at Gurudas College, says nightclubs are on the rise in the locality. Not only the call centre workers, but Keshtopur boys too go to one started by a well-known restaurant in Sector V.

“It has a bar,” he says. “Another restaurant has also turned into a bar.” At this point his mother becomes agitated and demands an end to the conversation.

A forest of buildings

But the most spectacular “development” in Keshtopur now, though, is its buildings that seem to be coming up every second. The buildings grow like weeds — sometimes two buildings seem to spring from only one wall. Many of them are allegedly illegal constructions.

The Calcutta Municipal Corporation annually approves of construction on 2,500 square metres, which translates into Rs 5,000 crore of business. It is estimated that the places along VIP Road generated as much money in construction.

The real estate boom had hit Keshtopur when it did many other places: in the Eighties and Nineties. Before that Keshtopur had hardly been noticed. It was certainly not an aspirational place, definitely not after Independence, when refugees from East Bengal settled here as the neighbours of the tradespeople and farmers, the Naskars and the Mandals, from West Bengal. Keshtopur and its adjoining areas were wetlands, vast stretches of land and waterbodies for fish-farming and agriculture.

“When Salt Lake came up, the waterbodies began to be filled up,” remembers Sukhen Chakraborty, councillor of Rajarhat municipality’s ward 26, and a Keshtopur resident. Keshtopur stretches over seven wards under the municipality: 26, 27, 31, 32, 33, 34 and 35. Parts of wards 34 and 35 still belong to the panchayat area.

From the Eighties, the time when the construction began, livelihoods began to change too. People from the villages and the districts began to come here in search of a living. They became the domestic workers and labourers in Salt Lake and other areas. From being a village, the interiors of Keshtopur began to turn into slums. The empty plots saw big houses coming up. The ponds, the trees, the silence vanished. The reign of the “promoters” started.

“Many old residents left Keshtopur then, selling off their land,” says Chakraborty. After Sector V and Rajarhat, building activity is rampant enough to make those who care worried about the place’s future. For despite its IT employees, Keshtopur is a place of open drains, little sanitation, little road space. Power cuts are extensive. The CESC distribution network doesn’t reach into every part of Keshtopur; there are few transformers.

Dipankar Sinha, director general (town planning), Calcutta Municipal Corporation, says such growth is inevitable in a city like Calcutta. He says it is the coming together of many trends.

“Till the Seventies, there would be a huge daily influx from the hinterland into Calcutta. Dum Dum, Sealdah rail stations would be flooded everyday,” he says.

Now this rush of daily male labourers into the city has been replaced by thousands of women working as ayahs, many of whom report to the proliferating ayah centres in Keshtopur.

From the Eighties and Nineties the nature of economic activity had changed, which had coincided with several other changes. “Banks started to offer huge housing loans. Those who were suppliers of materials became builders. Socially, too, there was a requirement for houses as big families were breaking up into smaller units,” says Sinha. The new units wanted more space.

The fringes of the city became the hubs of the new business activity — building — which generated a lot of employment. Keshtopur was one such place. “When converted into apartment blocks, the spatial development was negative,” says Sinha. Hence the lack of civic amenities.

So the rents remain low. This keeps the place affordable for some, says Sinha. At the same time, these places have to remain the way they are to keep places like Sector V and Rajarhat functioning, he adds.

There will be no let-up in the building activity, till the place is absolutely saturated. Those involved in construction now will be jobless. The urban sprawl will spread the way it will. Calcutta has hardly been able to plan its development.

For the time being, bariwallas, those who own houses, are the happiest lot in Keshtopur. Just owning a few rooms and renting them out to call centre employees or students from outside the city or state is the best business. They pay a few hundred more easily.

“Family is a dirty word,” says Jharna Das, who works as a maid in Salt Lake. She lives with her husband, two sons and her mother in a small room in Keshtopur and shares the toilet with several other families. “No one wants to rent out rooms to families. They want call-centre employees,” she grumbles.

And Kanchan Das’s daughter is planning to go back to school, she says. “In the meantime, I am reading Hindi and English. I am picking up these languages from these new people. I am not interested in Bengali,” she declares.

(Some names have been changed on request.)