A Kolkata story: A slum with hundreds of people on the terrace of a building
Telegraph | 22 February 2025
The City of Joy’s streets hide many surprises; some roofs do too. Like Karnani Estate, the storied five-storey building at 209, AJC Bose Road in the heart of Kolkata.
Residential quarters and offices dot the dense block of concrete around the building; a lift goes straight to the sixth floor, where on one side is Skyturf, a popular rooftop place to book for playing games and hosting events.
On the other side of the same sixth floor, behind a locked door, is where the terrace residents of 209, AJC Bose road live – around 700 people in roughly 120 dingy tenements, some with a concrete roof, others covered with asbestos sheets.
A five- to six-member family shares space in each of the shanties. A narrow lane divides the dwellings on both sides of the terrace – just like a slum on the ground. Utensils, water-filled cans and flowerpots line both sides. There are chicken and roosters strutting about.
From the road below, there is nothing to show there are people living on the roof of one of the prime locations in the city with a nearly uninterrupted view of the skyline.
The Raos, the Swamys, the Qureshis, the Ansaris who live in the part of the terrace accessible only via a staircase trace their history here to the time of American soldiers in Calcutta during the Second World War.
Karnani Estate is at the crossing of AJC Bose Road (erstwhile Lower Circular Road) and Theatre Road, beside a petrol pump and opposite the prominent Chinese eatery Jimmy’s Kitchen.
The then red and white Karnani Estate – built by Seth Sukhlal Karnani, honoured with the Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1936 – was a favourite among the US soldiers during World War II. The heart of the White Town the British rulers established in Calcutta.
The plush apartments and well-stocked bar were a great hit among foreigners looking for accommodation in Calcutta, which was – once upon a time – called the Second City of the British Empire and also the City of Palaces.
Since then, for over seven decades now, the terrace of Karnani Estate has been home to families whose ancestors worked as chefs, maids, chauffeurs and attendants for the American soldiers and others housed on the five floors below.
In what may seem like the plot of a Korean movie, the terrace dwellers are still “naukar-chakar” (servants) for those living on the floors below.
Post-Second World War and India’s Independence, the American soldiers and other gora sahibs were replaced by desi landlords who bought or rented the vacant flats or converted them into offices. Today, a 727-sq-foot office space in the building costs Rs 70 lakh and up.
Naukar-chakar is the answer an elderly woman who lives on the second floor of Karnani Estate gives when asked who lives on the terrace.
A slum by any other name
The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines slums as a densely populated area of substandard housing, usually in a city, characterised by unsanitary conditions and social disorganisation.
The United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), the UN agency promoting sustainable urban development, characterises slums as households lacking a durable housing structure, access to clean water, access to improved sanitation, sufficient living space and secure tenure.
“A slum is a compact settlement of at least 20 households with a collection of poorly built tenements, mostly of temporary nature, crowded together usually with inadequate sanitary and drinking water facilities in unhygienic,” says a central government slum committee report published in August 2010, before the last census held in India.
The terrace residents of Karnani Estate get drinking water once a day from a tank on the premises. Each unit has an electricity meter. There is one toilet block for the hundreds of people — at the back of the terrace behind the water tanks.
The residents of the Karnani Estate terrace are living in a slum, which they realise but do not want to accept.
Around 16.4 million people – 8 per cent of the population – in Brazil live in its storied favelas. In Mumbai, nearly half of the city’s estimated 12 million residents live in slums -- 24 per cent of the habitable area in the financial capital of India -- with four to 10 people huddled inside each of the zillion shanties in the 2,397 slum clusters.
For 30 years, the Maharashtra government has been working on making Mumbai slum-free under the Slum Rehabilitation Authority. Slums have been replaced with highrises constructed by the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority, with the dwellers switching to improved living conditions.
The late Hugo Chavez as President of Venezuela encouraged slum-dwellers in the capital city of Caracas to occupy the Tower of David, a 45-storey skyscraper, turning it into presumably the world’s tallest slum.
The Tower of David started its journey to be a five-star hotel and luxury apartment block in 1990. By 2007, it became home to 3,000 people who left their shanties in the ill-reputed Petare slum of east Caracas and moved into the half-constructed high-rise with large rooms, balconies.
The rooftop of Karnani Estate is nothing like the Tower of David. The terrace slum has a temple, a mosque, a church and a grocery shop.
“We have been staying here for a long time, but now we can’t sleep. They play till 2am,” says a resident buying a cigarette from the store, referring to the turf on the other side of the locked gate.
“My parents lived here. I have lived here all my life. My husband died here,” says Amlu Rao, whose grandfather had come to Calcutta from Jamshedpur. Her son is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in commerce from the nearby Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose College.
“Our parents could not give us an education. But we think differently from them. We have sent our children to schools and colleges. We want a different life for them,” says her neighbour Uma Swamy.
Most of the residents are reluctant to talk. They are hostile about pictures being taken of their homes.
In October 2023, Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee – also known for a tendency to rename – decided to replace the word bustee that is slums with the Bengali word Uttaran (uplift). While the Kolkata Municipal Corporation still has a bustee development department, on the roads leading to city slums arches marked “Uttaran” have been erected.
The Karnani Estate terrace has no such board.
Change and fears
“We vote for TMC. Can you ask them to fix the lavatories here,” says an elderly resident of the Karnani Estate terrace.
The lavatory is at the end of the terrace. If you venture near it, the stink sticks to the nostrils for days.
Some of the residents are worried; they say they have been served eviction notices.
“What do we say? It is a fact that we are living here in this prime location rent-free,” says Hanumanthu Rao, a former terrace resident who works and lives in Delhi. Hanumanthu is in Kolkata for a ritual following his father’s death.
“Everyone wants to move out to a better place. We are all held back by our circumstances. This is the only place I have known as my home,” he says.
His grandfather, a chef, had landed in Calcutta around the same time when Clyde Wadell, an American military photographer, was assigned as the personal press photographer for “Supreme Commander Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten.”
Sixty photographs of Wadell’s were later compiled and published as a book named A Yank’s Memories of Calcutta.
The print of a photograph of Karnani Estate clicked by Wadell is available for Rs 12,000 – more than what many of the families staying on the terrace probably make 80 years later.
But will this rooftop slum get an “Uttaran” board or will the KMC clean the lavatories?
Swapan Samaddar, mayor-in-council, bustee development, environment & heritage for the KMC, says he had no idea that there is a rooftop slum in the city.
He says Uttaran is just a name change, not a programme.
“Civic amenities to be slums are provided under the KMC. We provide amenities when a councillor writes to us seeking it on their letterhead. We provide services to these places, even if there are ownership or legal issues, on humanitarian grounds,” Samaddar tells The Telegraph Online.
Samaddar knows the building, though is taken aback when informed that there is a rooftop slum.
“I didn’t know. If there are so many people living there I will definitely think of a solution. I may speak to mayor Firhad Hakim so that we can provide for the inhabitants.” Samaddar says.
He also mentions that there may be a law that says there can’t be a slum above three-four storeys, but adds: “Ayin manusher kolyane, manush ayiner kolyane noy [the law is for the welfare of the people. People are not for the welfare of law].”
Sammi Jahan, councillor of Ward 64 of which 209, AJC Bose Road is a part, knows about the people living on the terrace.
“An estimate has been submitted for building toilets on the premises,” she tells The Telegraph Online. “We have not received any complaints on the drinking water supply. The building owners and residents will hold a meeting soon and take a decision on the dwellers. After that we will be able to start work there.”