‘Song of the Road’… A Brief History of the City’s Roads (1700s ~ 1900s): Part Two

Council House Street

The peace and prosperity following the Battle of Plassey induced people from the surrounding areas to settle in Calcutta. Kutcha roads in the new localities inhabited by the natives were full of cesspools. Wealthier natives constructed roads leading to their houses in the town, or, suburbs. It is, however, interesting to note that most of the highways from Calcutta to the suburbs were constructed during the days of the Zamindar.

Steps were also taken to construct bridges over Dullendaw, Manickchurn, Gopalnagar, Dum Dum, Barasat and Beliaghata Canal in 1766.

The Justices of the Peace for Calcutta relieved the Zamindar of his municipal duties in 1794 and were authorised to levy a 5 per cent surcharge on property tax for appointing scavengers, cleansing, repairing and watching the streets. They also took steps to metal the Circular Road in 1799. The limited resources placed at the disposal of the Justices did not permit them to take up large-scale development works like construction of new roads, bridges etc; in the town.

The East India Company was always unwilling to part with their revenues for municipal improvements.  Funds had to be raised from the public for development works.   Lotteries came to the aid of the community from 1784 in the creation of public assets. It was the appointment of Wellesley’s ‘Town Improvement Committee’, later known as the ‘Lottery Committee’ (1804) that took up the initiative to improve the public thoroughfares of the city. Calcutta owes some of its best roads to the labours of the Lottery Committee (1825~1836). The roads include: Wood Street, Wellesley Street, Wellington Street, College Street and Cornwallis Street; Strand Road from Prinsep Ghat to Hatkhola; Amherst Street; Hare Street; Waterloo Street; Elliot Road; Short Street; and Colotolla~Mirzapur Street.

A group of streets that commemorated the various titles of Lord Hastings and his wife, were also the work of the Lottery Committee and were designed to afford access to the Panchkhotee, or, Five Mansions. Thus credit goes to the Lottery Committee for reconstructing chaotic Calcutta into some orderly shape of a modem town.

Circular Garden Reach Road that was called “Strand New Road to Garden Reach” was constructed in 1828, with contributions from 58 persons. As public opinion in England condemned the method of raising funds by lotteries for improvement of the town of Calcutta, the Directors of the East India Company in 1836 ordered their closure.

Lord Auckland (1836-1842) appointed the ‘Fever Hospital Committee’ to carry on the work of the Lottery Committee. But the new Committee was more concerned with community health than with roads. The Committee reported that the streets in the native part of the town were narrow and haphazard without any free circulation of air. They were always covered with filth, dust, mud or offal that were rarely cleaned by the scavengers leading to pestiferous air.

It was as the result of this Report that Bustees were cleared by the Justices of Peace between 1854 and 1876 for the construction of Halliday Street, Free School Street, and an extension from Corporation Street to Dharamtollah Street, Clive Row Extension, Beadon Street, Beadon Square, Grey Street, Allen Square, Outram Street, Grant Street and the Victoria Terrace.

Construction of new roads and maintenance of the existing ones were within the exclusive jurisdiction of the Municipal Corporation of Calcutta from 1876 to 1911. The Corporation mostly cleared or improved the Bustees to build roads in the town. The Calcutta Improvement Act of 1911, created a board of trustees charged with the duty of “opening up congested areas, laying out or altering streets, providing open spaces for ventilation or recreation”.

The Calcutta Improvement Trust opened up a north-south and an east-west corridor (Central Avenue and Rashbehari Avenue) and many other roads in the city.

The completion of the underground drainage and water supply schemes resulted in the construction of the Suburban High Level Sewer Road and the conversion of many open drains or ditches into narrow lanes. The implementation of the Canal Area (between Circular Canal and Upper Circular Road) Drainage Scheme in 1907 resulted in the construction of 11,596 feet of roads, 60 feet in width and 13,970 feet of new roads, 40 feet in width, in addition to the widening of the existing ones.

It took another 40-odd years before further development works of new roads in the city were planned.

concluded

On The Drain Front… A Brief History of the City’s Sewerage & Drainage System (1700s ~ 1950s)

In the initial years of the city’s growth, the merchants of the East India Company were not much interested in providing improved civic amenities to the citizens. Some of money the Company collected by imposing taxes, duties and licenses in Calcutta between 1690-1723 by virtue of the zamindari rights they had acquired over the villages of Sutanuti, Kolkata and Govindpur in 1698 was put to develop the settlements’ civic structure.

The civic services rendered by the Zamindar mainly consisted of: water supply, drainage, cleansing of streets and street lighting. The development activities undertaken by the Zamindar included: cutting down the jungles in the town, bridging the watercourses, surveying the lands and other such affairs. The provision of ‘civic amenities’ in the city was brought under the Municipal Administration in 1727.

Calcutta had its natural drainage through the Khal (creek) that originated from the Salt Lakes in the east and joined the Hooghly River just below the Prinsep Ghat, after meandering through Beliaghata, Sealdah, Creek Row, Dharamtollah and Government Place North. The great cyclone of 1737 rendered this creek useless as a watercourse for navigation.

Small surface drains had existed in the city since 1695 when a trench was dug round the Sutanuti factory. A deeper trench was constructed in 1710 to separate the British settlement from the indigenous settlement and keep the former dry and wholesome. The ditch ran from Lalbazaar probably to Baboo Ghat. It was protected with drawbridges and a guardhouse — as it basically served the defense rather than drainage purposes.

In 1742 the Maratha Ditch was constructed initially from Baghbazar to Park Street and then extended to Alipore.  This was mainly for the defense against the Maratha raids but it served also as the grand drainage outlet for the whole city until 1801 when it was filled up.

But the state of affairs changed for the better on June 16, 1803. In a meeting of the “Town Improvement Committee” chaired by Lord Wellesley, the then Governor General of Bengal, a historic initiative was undertaken.

It was at Wellesley’s behest that the “Town Reforms Committee” was formed for improvement of the town. Since the construction of the public drains and watercourses of the Town was extremely defective, he assigned great importance to the improvements of its drainage.

This led to the appointment of a Committee in 1804 to look into the matter. This Improvement Committee, later called the Lottery Committee, undertook extensive development work for Calcutta by constructing roads and filling up filthy tanks in the town and excavating new ones. Beliaghata Canal was the Lottery Committee’s permanent contribution to the city’s drainage system.

It is reported that during the early nineteenth century, the drains in the northern part of the town were unpaved and filthy. Coolies were employed regularly to clean these drains manually that would overflow on to the streets after a light rainfall as these drains had no outlet.

As a result, various proposals came up between 1835-1855 for the construction of a new drainage system in the ‘Town’:

•      The Committee opted for an underground drainage system

•      Captain Prinsep of the Bengal Engineers preferred a surface drainage system to carry off the water with sinks and ash-pits for every house, to be cleansed by manually. He strongly opposed to any scheme of underground drainage in Calcutta

•      Mr Blechynden, proposed to drain the northern portion of the town, in which no large drains had yet been made, either towards the river or to the east by a large underground tunnel running from the Hooghly down Nimtala and Manicktollah streets to the Circular Canal. The tunnel was to be flushed by the admission of the Hooghly water

•     Captain Thomson provided for an elaborate system of large underground drains or sewers that he proposed to flush partly by river water and partly by means of a reservoir to be formed at the western end of the Entally Canal

•      Captain E Forbes proposed to construct a large masonry aqueduct from the river Hooghly at old Chitpur Bridge to the Old Park Street cemetery and link it with the Salt Lakes by a wide-open canal nearly parallel with Entally canal. The canal was to be connected by sluice gates with the river and lake, so that water might be admitted or excluded from both these sources. On either side of the canal masonry sewer or covered drain was to be constructed and linked with a system of subsidiary drains discharging into these two main sewers all the filth and surface drainage of the city

•      William Clark proposed a “water-carriage system” for the town. The original report was submitted to the Municipal Commissioners in 1855, and adopted in 1857 with some modifications and was sanctioned in 1859. Clark’s scheme was a ‘combined sewage-cum drainage system’. It carried off both rainfall and sewage from the Hooghly to the Salt Lakes from where the sewage was to be pumped out. The total town area that was covered under Clark’s Scheme amounted to 4730 acres

Clark’s Scheme comprised of five main sewers with their branches, accessories and outfall works. Three of the main sewers stretched from the Hooghly to the Circular Road along the Nimtala Ghat Street, Colootola Stree and Dharamtollah Street. There were two main intercepting sewers:

•      One from the north, starting from Hooghly at Sova Bazaar Street running eastward to Circular Road and continuing along Upper Circular Road to a level at Dharamtollah junction. It intercepted the three main sewers already mentioned. Between this Circular Road sewer and the Circular Road canal, he provided four storm-water overflows of much larger capacity than the sewers 

•   The other intercepting sewer started from Tolly’s Nullah near Zeerut Bridge, and following Lower Circular Road to Dharamtollah junction. It discharged together with the sewer from the north and the Dharamtollah sewer through a main outfall to Palmer’s Bridge Pumping station in Entally, and thence into the Beliaghata Canal

to be continued