The flawed map

Calcutta, March 20: Next time you visit Delhi from Calcutta, take a dip in the Bay of Bengal and catch a train to Pakistan, if you follow a map publicised by the Eastern Railway today.

An Eastern Railway advertisement in newspapers on the Maharajas’ Express — flagged off tonight by Mamata Banerjee — flings Calcutta into the bay and places the Indian capital in Pakistan.

Two more Indian cities the railway ministry’s ad has left swimming in the sea are Gaya and Bandhavgarh. They should rightly have been in Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, respectively.

An embarrassed railway ministry has blacklisted the advertisement agency, Adunique 76, that designed and released the map, and is considering legal action against it.

“The minister has sought a clarification from railway officials and they have sent an explanation,” a senior official said from Delhi.

Officials of Eastern Railway claimed that they had approved the correct version of the ad, with the cities marked in the proper places on the Indian map.

They alleged that later the agency changed the map’s design without informing the railways.

The officials said the agency had enlarged the point size of the city names but had not correspondingly increased the size of the India map. “This led to cities like Calcutta, Delhi and Gaya popping out of the map,” an official said.

“Adunique 76 has committed a grave mistake. In the advertisement approved by Eastern Railway, the cities were marked in the correct places,” said Samir Goswami, chief public relations officer, Eastern Railway.

However, the agency’s officials claimed that they had informed railway officials about the changes in the map.

“The railway officials had given their verbal approval to the changed design before it was released. As last-minute changes have been approved verbally over the years, we went ahead with it,” an Adunique 76 official said.

But Goswami said “no such verbal approval had been given”.

Railway officials said the advertising agency, set up in 1976, has been empanelled with Eastern Railway for more than 15 years.