Pradip Saha / CSE

WEST Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee signed a much-hyped deal with the Salim Group of Indonesia for investments up to Rs 20,000 crore in infrastructure development on July 31. Billed the “New Kolkata International Development Project," the deal includes expressways, bridges, special economic zones, industrial hubs and health and knowledge cities. One of the deal’s components — a proposed 85-km, four-lane expressway from Barasat, headquarters of North 24-Parganas district, to Raichak in South 24-Parganas — has Kolkata environmentalists worried.

The Eastern Link Highway, as it is to be called, will be connected to the Haldia port by a bridge over the Hooghly river.

Ten “mini-townships” comprising clusters of commercial complexes with resorts, shops, motels, food courts and gas stations, are proposed along the route. Bhattacharjee hopes the road, which will require the acquisition of roughly 1,000 hectares (ha), will be completed in two years.

The highway was initially proposed in 2004 as a 60-km “outer ring road” for the city and a “highway backbone” for Bengal, providing an unbroken link between the north and the south. State leaders see the road as an immediate requirement, given the city’s recent phenomenal growth along its eastern fringes. The plan was to start the highway from the Barasat Bypass, run it past Rajarhat township and behind the Calcutta Leather Complex and have it meet the National Highway 117 at Shirakhol. From there, it would branch off, with one fork leading to Raichak and the other terminating at Falta.

Not mapped
Government officials say the actual route of the highway hasn’t been mapped yet, but ecologists familiar with the geography of the area say it’s unlikely such a road can be built without cutting through the East Calcutta Wetlands — supposedly a protected Ramsar site (the Ramsar list contains all internationally significant wetlands) — and disrupting its fragile ecosystem. They also fear the road which will pass through much undeveloped open land, will spur rampant unplanned growth along its route, as has been seen along the vip Road in north Kolkata, and the southern half of the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass. They’re therefore demanding the state make the proposed highway route public before finalising the project.

“I’d like them to show me how they are going to map the road without flouting the Ramsar convention,” says Dhrubajyoti Ghosh, former chief environment officer of the state who was instrumental in getting 12,500 ha of the wetland area listed as an internationally protected site in 2002. Ghosh was also joint director of the state planning board in 1985 when the wetlands area was mapped. “If the road indeed goes through the wetlands as we are suspecting, then God alone can save the wetlands,” he said.

The highway could, in the long run, raise a stink in Kolkata. Literally. If the wetlands’ ecological balance is affected, the city would lose its natural, and only, sewage treatment plant.

The Kolkata Municipal Corporation (kmc) area generates roughly 600 million litres of sewage and wastewater everyday and more than 2,500 tonnes of garbage. The wastewater flows through underground sewers to pumping stations in the eastern fringe of the city, and is then pumped into open channels. kmc’s responsibility ends with taking the wastewater to the outfall channels and dumping the solid waste at designated sites in the wetlands. Thereafter, some 254 sewage-fed fisheries, agricultural and solid waste farms in the wastelands take over.

Unique system
The wastelands comprise a large number of water bodies spread across the districts of North and South 24-Parganas.