Look what we’ve done to our city: Dalhousie street furniture stolen, mauled
Telegraph | 4 January 2025
A city with a glorious past is now in decay.
A short walk around what used to be Calcutta’s most spectacular pocket, Dalhousie Square, reveals a sad story of neglect, lawlessness and lack of love for the rich legacy the city inherited.
Cast iron railings along pavements have been stolen, wooden planks have been yanked off benches, streetlights are missing and, in some places, the pedestals on which the lights stood have been ripped off.
The stolen street furniture — lights, fencing and seats for example — are unique to Dalhousie Square and cannot be found elsewhere in Calcutta.
They were put up between 2006 and 2008 to resemble how the place looked in the late 19th century, said a former official of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC). The civic body executed the project.
The blue-and-white paint is a more recent addition that many did not approve of but the colour scheme has become secondary now because the objects themselves are disappearing.
Calcutta’s mayor Firhad Hakim called the vanishing job work of “petty thieves” but many disagreed.
How could dividers on almost an entire road be stolen by petty thieves less than 500m from the city’s police headquarters, they asked.
An officer of Kolkata Police said they had received only one complaint from the KMC for the theft of street furniture from Dalhousie. The stolen materials were recovered, the officer added.
A walk through Dalhousie Square and up to Raj Bhavan to its south on Friday presented a grim picture of the place. The dividers, streetlights and pavements in the area were designed to give an idea of how it looked in its prime.
The dividers have been stolen from the entire road between Lal Dighi and the General Post Office (GPO), and outside St John’s Church, which houses the mausoleum of Job Charnock, arguably the founder of Calcutta.
The fencing along the pavements outside the West and East gate of Raj Bhavan is missing. Ditto on the pavement around Lal Dighi.
Outside the Writers’ Buildings, the streetlights are missing. Only the posts remain.
Outside the former Allahabad Bank headquarters and the Eastern Railway headquarters, the remnants of the footpath fencing are being used by hawkers to tie overhead tarpaulin sheets or for other purposes.
“We designed the street furniture based on available pictures and the extant architecture of that period. Our objective was to freeze the look of the place in the mid- or late 19th century, when Calcutta was the capital of India and Dalhousie Square the centre of activities,” said the former KMC official.
The cobblestone pavements, different from the paverblock pavements or concrete pavements found elsewhere in Calcutta, were also made to keep the old look of the place.
Post-Independence, Dalhousie Square was renamed Binoy-Badal-Dinesh Bag (BBD Bag).
Hakim told Metro: “Petty thieves are stealing the street furniture. I know there is CCTV coverage but the police have to act. We, from the KMC, have filed many complaints.”
A KMC official said the pavement railings and lamp posts were painted ahead of the G20 summit in 2023. “Some G20 meetings were held in Calcutta, so we painted the street furniture in Dalhousie,” said the official.
Indira Mukherjee, the deputy commissioner of police, central, said: “The KMC filed one complaint of theft of footpath railings in Dalhousie, adjacent to Raj Bhavan and AG Bengal, in 2023. We were able to recover the stolen materials. No complaint was lodged in 2024.”
A Calcuttan lamented that Dalhousie Square and its adjacent heritage zone fell off its pedestal when big corporates started leaving Bengal. Even the state secretariat was moved across the Hooghly to Nabanna by the Mamata Banerjee government.
The neglect is not limited to the missing street furniture. Some of the lamp posts have been used as anchors for ugly overhead cables, the footpath has been encroached on in several places and boards put up outside the GPO, Writers’ Buildings and Raj Bhavan mentioning their brief history are barely legible now.
Some of Calcutta’s grandest buildings are around Lal Dighi, the waterbody in the middle of the square. These include the Writers’ Buildings, Hong Kong House, Royal Insurance Building, GPO, Reserve Bank building and the Eastern Railway headquarters, among others.
“This does not happen in any other big city. It is sad,” said Partha Ranjan Das, a member of the state heritage commission.