Fish and travel are the two passions of Bengal, and MamataBanerjee isn’t handling either of them too well.
Nothing shows the crisis of callowness in her governmentthan how it is handling the public transport mess in the state ” especially thefare-to-distance part of it (which is middle school math, given that all youhave to do is measure the distance between the two shortest bussing points ”mapID1, x1, y1, z1 and mapID2, x2, y2, z2 ” and attach a cost function to itand calculate fare according to multiples of the distance between the bussingpoints; or just get three men to play leapfrog with a measuring tape). West Bengalis the only state in the country where more than 80 percent of the publictransport system of more than 37,000 buses is owned and run by privateers.
Most of these buses narrow and set so abnormally high thattheir centre of gravity is about three feet off the road, have diesel enginesthat have been repeatedly reconditioned to an inch of their lives. They run onevery fossil fuel but coal (and not for lack of trying).
And, in Kolkata, they are responsible ” along withautorickshaws and frenetic over-construction of high-rises that will echo withan average 18 percent occupancy for years ” for ramping up the particulatematter (PM10) load to 300.40 micrograms/cubic metre. A month after MamataBanerjee came to power in May 2011 the PM10 load had been 90 µg/cubic metre. Itbegan its climb immediately after, with the Reds being run out of the transportsector by the Trinamool Congress.
Through the month of July 2012, it vacillated between 172.89and 220.12 µg/cu m. Now, with winter hardly here, it has already settled (orhasn’t) at thrice Delhi’s particulate matter load, which itself is higher thanthe ‘permissible’ 100 µg/cu m (‘permissible’ here meaning “you won’t get offeasy, but you won’t die soon”).
With the best-laid schemes for public transport stillbornbecause the West Bengal government was as flat broke the day Mamata Banerjeetook over as it is today, Banerjee let loose those of her constituents: therattletrap transport cartel that was moved and shaken, in part, by Banerjee’sincumbent transport minister Madan Mitra. And his arithmetic has proven to beas derelict as the private buses in West Bengal that are, once again,threatening to go on strike.
This time, the cause of the public transport bandh, at leastin Kolkata, isn’t that Mitra is refusing to raise the ticket rates of the6,500-odd private buses seconded to the Calcutta state transport corporation.It’s because he is planning to roll back a fare hike instituted just over amonth ago ” a hike so steep that it stopped 4.8 million bus commuters in theirtracks.
