Below Squalor, Calcutta Glories in Shiny Subway

Deep beneath the cruel and fetid streets of Calcutta is another world, where none of this city’s countless miseries can be found--no legless beggars tugging at trousers or saris, no steaming garbage, no crumbling, haunting vestiges of abandoned empire.

The new Calcutta subway system--the Calcutta Metro Railway--glistens. Its walkways are spotless. Escalators hum efficiently, uninterrupted by Calcutta’s chronic power failures. Hidden speakers broadcast Indian classical music and the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore, the late Indian Nobel laureate.

“Elegant ticket counters, smartly dressed and courteous station staff, light music in the air and breeze coming through ducts in the ceiling--it makes one wonder whether one is in Calcutta or in some foreign city,” a Metro Railway official said.

Crowded on Holidays

Indeed. Since it began operating here two years ago, the $1-billion, half-finished Calcutta subway has roused a long-dormant sense of civic pride among Calcuttans. Officials report that the system is often as crowded on holidays, when families come to ride just for fun, as it is during the workweek. In a city that has been so down for so many years, the subway is a rare up.

And Calcuttans are fiercely protective of their new subway. Passengers who drop ticket stubs on the station floor are reprimanded by fellow passengers and shamed into depositing the stubs in trash containers. Smoking is not permitted, nor is chewing pan , the betel-filled leaf concoction that is responsible for indelible red spittle stains in most other Indian public buildings.

Smartly outfitted subway police patrol the marble and mosaic-tiled stations, looking for transgressors. But for the most part, Calcuttans police themselves.

“This is one of the first things we have had to be proud of in years,” said Rabindra Chatterjee, 50, assistant manager of a shipping company who commutes daily on the Metro. “This is ours. We feel that we cannot hurt it or let others hurt it. It is our duty to keep it clean.”

Such concern would be remarkable in any city. American and European subway systems have never been famous for their high standards of cleanliness.

No Crime or Vandalism

But in Calcutta, a city where more than 300,000 people sleep on the sidewalks, where less than 30% of the 10 million residents have flush toilets and indoor plumbing, where the rats are nearly as big as the 200,000 stray dogs, it is a revolution in manners.

The Metro’s public relations director, P.N. Battacharyya, said that in the subway’s two years there has been not one crime, not one reported act of vandalism, not one smudge of graffiti.

In fact, subway officials see their new wonder--10 miles of track two stories below the mayhem of Calcutta’s streets--as a potential new start for the city. Their attitude is like that of people in a science fiction novel who have been forced underground by some holocaust. Boosters see the subway as the foundation of a new city, a new culture, built under the ruins of the old.

“We call it Metro culture,” Gauri Shanker, the Metro’s general manager, said. “What is underground today will have to come above ground in the form of cultural change.”

New Cleanliness Standard

Shanker said there are already plenty of signs of change brought by the subway.

For one thing, he said, the subway has set a new standard for cleanliness. “People see it as the same as going to church or temple,” he said.

Also, commuting businessmen and clerks can now dress in finer clothes and not worry about getting crumpled on buses, he said. And the intensive noise of trains moving through the tunnels drowns out conversation. Shanker sees this as a virtue, since “Indians talk too much in groups.”

Of course, the cultural advantages of the subway might be debated, especially the elimination of conversation. Calcutta has a rich literary tradition, and even lowly clerks are as likely to be discussing existential philosophy or English poetry as the weather.

However, there is no argument that the subway is a big hit.

Even during rush-hour periods, it is much more orderly than the chaotic public transport in the streets above. City buses are half the price of the subway--50 paisa (4 cents) compared to 1 rupee (8 cents). But on some days as many as one-fourth of the city trams, buses and double-decker buses are out of order. Passengers are literally draped on the sides of the remaining buses as they course the polluted streets.

Officials are hoping that this congestion will be relieved when the rest of the subway project is completed in 1990 and begins carrying an estimated 1.7 million commuters every day. The system’s popularity extends even beyond Calcutta.

‘Strange for Indians’

“I have come over 1,000 miles to see this,” said Sushil Kumar Saxena, 38, a government tax official who lives in northern India, in the state of Uttar Pradesh.

Saxena recently brought his wife and two children, all dressed in their finest clothes, down to the Tolly Gunj Station to see the new subway.

“This is the lone train like it in India,” Saxena said. “To see this is something very, very strange for Indians.”

At another station, at the opposite end of the completed track, three Muslim women from Bihar state, each with an infant nestled under the folds of her sari, had also come to gawk. Their husbands have jobs pulling handcarts in the city, one of the lowest forms of employment available. But the three women decided, as a lark, to spend the 1 rupee it takes to enter the station.

Daylong Ride

All afternoon they delighted in riding the Indian-built trains from station to station, and riding the escalators, something they had never seen before.

Certainly the Calcutta subway has had its share of problems, particularly in the construction phase. Already horrendous traffic was made impossible by the excavation. The city’s silty soil and high water table caused special problems. Workers who came into the city to build the subway took up residence on the sidewalks, adding to Calcutta’s homeless problem. In 1984, a monsoon flood poured into the stations, causing extensive damage and spreading fear among potential riders.

Worst of all is the cost. Estimated in 1972 at $250 million, it has risen to more than $1 billion. It is a high price for a poor nation like India, and urban planners such as M.N. Buch of Bhopal complain that the money could have been better spent.

“I think the Calcutta underground railway system is one of the costliest fiascoes in urban history,” he said, arguing that the money could more usefully have been spent on improving Calcutta’s services and encouraging the development of more business or shopping areas away from the city’s core.

However, he added:

“Having said this much, I must also state that every single citizen of Calcutta whom I met, ranging from a street hawker to a millionaire businessman, was immensely proud of the underground railway system.”