Yesterday I went on a bike ride to a friend's workplace about 15 kilometres from the city limits east of Science city. A relatively newly built road in a much better condition than most of the other city roads in Calcutta, it starts from below the bridge over the dirty canal at Dhapa. My friend Sudip works at a leather designing and training institute originally set up by UNIDO about 12 years ago. Now they have moved to their brand new double-storied campus equipped with "state-of-the-art" leather designing and manufacturing machines (German Adler, Italian Atom, ...) which my friend showed off to me gleefully like a child given unlimited access to a wonderland.
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Earlier Ms. Kumar, the head of the Institute under whose leadership Freya has come so far where other such projects have closed down, showed me around the facility. From the terrace we could look at the vast expanse of plots where some leather manufacturing companies have already started operations whereas others are at various stages of construction. Had it not been for the recent economic downturn, she said, this place would have been full of operational leather processing and production units by now. We were looking at the Bantala Leather Park, an area specially earmarked as one of Calcutta's first special economic zones exclusively reserved for it's long flourishing leather export industry.
On our way through gateway no.1, the first thing that greeted me was the unmistakable smell of tanneries, the smell we were so used to around the Tangra and Dhapa region when driving past them on the way to Salt Lake or the airport until mid-nineties. Wait a minute? This SEZ (special economic zone) was supposed to be "clean" and "environment friendly" ... that was the point of it, after all.
A little down the road inside the SEZ, a canal filled with water no doubt made toxic by the clearly visible floating waste from new tanneries came into view. Sudip remarked that the waste treatment plant set up by the SEZ authorities was not functional and already people were beginning to show some concern. Not far away a brand new building dominated the north-eastern horizon. A tech company, Mahindratech, here in the a leather SEZ! I think techies will need to get used to the smell too unless that treatment plant starts operating properly soon.
A milestone we came across on the road about a few kilometres from Calcutta said the village of Basanti was 83 kilometres down the road. Basanti is the one of the "gateways" to Sunderbans where tourists often travel to in hopes of seeing the famous Royal Bengal Tiger, or at least a crocodile or two. The well-maintained road is just a two lane stretch lined with lamp posts on one side which mostly don't work in the evening. I couldn't help but compare our very own SEZ with those I visited in Tianjin or in the outskirts of Suzhou and Wuxi in China. It's hard to call our infrastructure anything but an excuse for real development. In China, even in Vietnam, road space is at least four times of what we have here in our version of SEZ. And at night road lighting and traffic signals do work.
This road, I wouldn't want to travel everyday: the way the public and private buses rushed past us, I think it would be a miracle if one did not meet with at least one accident or a few close shaves every other day. Sudip's phone rang once during the trip and he stopped to take the call, a little irritated having to take off his helmet and fish out the phone from his bag. Can't blame the wife though calling to find out if we had reached safely. Just before that we had encountered a Calcutta tramways road hog of a bus driver deliberately running us out of the asphalted road area as it sped in the opposite direction.
In broad daylight, a stretch of the road had all the lamp-posts fitted with high powered sodium vapour lights left on. Sudip thought it was inefficiency and callousness. Someone leaves the street lights on every morning for the rest of the day, but in the evening, every other lamp does not work. I have a better explanation. The lights are left on during the day time deliberately.
The reason? Power consumption levels are being deliberately recorded as two or three times higher than what it should be. No doubt later, that excess power can be sold off illegally every month through illegal connections. Yet another brilliant scheme by some bureaucrats and their staff on ground in the power department.
That however does not explain the non-functional units at night. Maybe, just may be they are being reported as non-functional deliberately so replacement quotas are also higher than real figures in the official records. No prizes for guessing where the "non-functional" equipment will end up later, and who will be slightly richer from taxpayers' money.
Back in office, I got a mail from Greenpeace: activists roughened up by goons in Orissa. They want people to phone Mr. Ratan Tata and ask him why such an incident happened in a port owned by the industrialist. A port whose operations are dangerous and life-threatening for the last few surviving Oliver Ridley turtles found in the Orissa coastline. For a moment I was tempted to try my luck at phoning Mr. Tata himself and asking him if he cares at all. Then again this is the same man who wanted to set up the now infamous "cheapest-car-in-the-world" Nano production unit in Singur, a village almost about the same distance from Calcutta as Bantala.
Opposition to land acquisition from farmers made it impossible ultimately. But only after much politics of propaganda and misinformation besides the killing of many people including a sixteen year old girl, Tapashi who was horribly raped and set on fire. West Bengal earned yet another "D" in investment-friendliness. And Ratan Tata went west to Narendra Modi's Gujarat to set up the Nano plant saying goodbye to our "Marxist" government and joining hands with the most extreme right-wing leader of them all. Goons, they said, goons who beat you up and leave you to die if you dare to take on the establishment.
I was wondering about how the government had acquired the land at Bantala? This also seemed to be fertile agricultural land. What happened here? My mother told me about a girl who worked as domestic help in one of our relatives house came from that area. Their family got money for their land, even a concrete one-room house in their village. Some family members even got jobs in the SEZ.
The Leather park's polluted water will now make it's way south to the marshy Sunberbans and no one knows what effect it will have on the ecosystem there. This much is certain, it will not be for the better. Sudip told me about workers from villages in Sunderbans who come to work at the leather complex. He got this one from one of them he had given a lift to the park gates on his bike one day: Two workers had not shown up for work that morning. They were attacked and killed, probably eaten alive by a man-eating tiger which strayed near their village. Forest department officials shot the man-eater with enough tranquillizer darts that it would not ever wake up again. Normally the Royal Bengal tiger is not a man-eater. Only when it is wounded or sick, does it turn to easy (really slow-moving) prey: human beings. I really hope the toxic water does not pollute the tigers' habitat and make the last few surviving members of the species too weak to hunt their natural prey.
