apart from the duty of presiding over the council meetings, he was naturally expected to be a man of immense influence and what he might not do by virtue of power vested in him by law he could accomplish by virtue of influence which he possessed. It is significant that the first Mayor was Deshabandhu Chittaranjan Das, the accredited leader of Bengal at the time. Among the other Mayors were Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, Sri J. M. Sen Gupta and Dr. Bidhan Chandra Roy.

Supervision In 1954

The Corporation working under the Act. 1923 was superseded by virtue of a special Act passed by the West Bengal legislature in 1948. It is not for me to admire a lost cause. But it will not be doing justice to the men who ran the Corporation between 1924 and 1948 to say that the Corporation's maladministration was notorious during the period. There is no gainsaying the fact that all was not well with the municipal government of Calcutta. But standard of efficiency was not very high anywhere in India. Only more people watched the conduct of affairs of the Corporation at close quarters and more people were directly interested in its affairs than in the case of a national or provincial government. In any event when the Mayor himself under peculiar circumstances wrote to the Government for enquiry into the affairs of the Corporation, the Government had to go the whole hog. It superseded the Corporation, vested its administration in the hands of an official administrator and appointed a Commission for making a comprehensive enquiry. For about four years the Corpora、 tion thus remained superseded and meanwhile the enquiry was carried on by a body headed by the late Mr. C. C. Biswas, who before appointment to the High Court Bench had been a nominated member of the Corporation

for years.

Calcutta Municipal Act 1951

Largely on the basis of the recommendations of this body the new Municipal Bill for Calcutta was drafted. It became an Act (Calcutta Municipal Act) in 1951 (Act XXXIII of 1951) with some Amendments. This Act is the fundamental law under which the municipal affairs of Calcutta are conducted to-day. A basic change was made by it

in the system of administration as conducted under the previous Act. The municipal authority was again dispersed. The Commissioner who is the Chief Executive Officer of the Corporation is now appointed by the Government and has been made largely independent of the elected authority. The Committees have also been given some statutory powers. Although these changes have not yet proved a violent departure from the system in vogue up to 1948, they indicate a basic change in the organisation of municipal government in Calcutta and the change may become more and more manifest in future. Who will prophesy that this change will be for the better or worse civic government of Calcutta ?

Since the integration of Tollygunge Municipality from 1st April, 1953 the Corporation Council consits of eighty-six members, eighty of them being elected by singlemember Constituencies as Councillors, the Chairman of the Calcutta Improvement Trust being an ex-officio member, and five being co-opted as Aldermen. There are some people who think the number is too large. But as you know this number is not large in comparison with the total membership of a municipal council in Britain. In fact, this large membership is necessitated by the fact that the Corporation does not do its work mainly through the Council, meeting as such. It works much more through the Standing Committees whose numbeer is now nine, each of them having ten members with power to elect three associate members from outside as experts. It is not the practice in the Corporation to elect a person to more than two Standing Committees. The Committee work is not, as some may think, an arm-chair job. It entails a good deal of labour. In view of this if one member is elected to more than two Committees, the work suffers. We have to guard against this. Among other new features in 1951 Act mention may be made of the Borough Committee. Each Borough comprises of 5 Constituencies and there are 16 Borough Committees for the 80 Constituencies. The idea

is of decentralising Corporation work of local interest. Late Dr. B. C. Roy was very much enthusiastic about these Borough Committees and it was his idea that the Borough

should be given more powers and funds to function adequately.

The election of the Mayor is vested in the municipal council and the election has to be made each year from amongst its own members (Aldermen or Councillors). Under the Act of 1923 the Mayor, as I have said already, was only to preside over the meetings of the council. Under the Act of 1951 the Mayor has been given the additional function of disposing finally of appeals of Corporation employees against disciplinary action taken by the Commissioner or the Corporation. Apart from these functions he has no other statutory obligations.

The Commissioner has been given wider powers. He is the Supreme Head of the Executive and has to supervise and look after all work. The Calcutta Municipal (Amendment) Ordinance, 1932 (West Bengal Ordinance No. III of 1962) inserted a new Section in the Act which provides that if the State Government is of opinion that it is necessary for improving the municipal administration, it may on requisition by the Corporation depute one or more officers who will act as Special Deputy Commissioners and assist the Commissioner to take charge of such branches of the municipal administration as may be assigned to them by the Commissioner. These officers would function under direct administrative control of the Commissioner and are not responsible to the Corporation.

During the last one hundred years the problems of civic administration have assumed increasing intricacy. The population which was less that 400,000 in 1863 has grown to nearly three million. The municipal area of Calcutta which was six square miles in 1863 has grown to nearly 38 square miles. This small area with such a huge population creates apart from any factor, great problems of its own. As compared with the Calcutta Municipality the problems of congestion are far less acute in other metropolitan cities of the world. The area which was so far included within the jurisdiction of the London County Council was 117 square miles and the population 3,348,336. In New York in 1950 the population was 7,091,957 and the area 317 miles. square

was

In comparison with the popnlation the income of the Corporation is small. Many of the ills of administration derive from this fact. The total income in 1962 was about Rs. 9 crores and a half, of which as much as Rs. 5 crores and 85 lakhs were realised from the Consolidated Rates. The Government has helped us with about one crore and it is earmarked for the payment of Dearness Allowance to the employees of the Corporation. There is no grant-in-aid system here in this State whereas in British municipalities that is the sheet anchor of municipal finance. If the Government is kind and sometimes it happens to be kind, we may get a lump sum for a project requiring heavy capital expenditure. How to improve our financial position has become our chief headache. The consolidated rate is already heavy, at least for those who own houses for residential purposes. We cannot ask for increase of rate without endangering the position of the middle class people of the city. This is not the occasion for going more minutely into the details of this problem and I shall not do

So.

Drainage

By the close of the eighteenth century the problem of drainage in this ever growing city had become acute. In 1803 Lord Wellesley, the Governor-General drew up a Minute in which he emphasised the importance of proper dranage. He regretted the extremely defective character of the public drains and water courses in the city and appointed a Committee. The ball was thus set rolling. But apart from the construction of the Beliaghata canal in 1810 and a survey of Calcutta by Lieutenant Sachalch, nothing more substantial came out of Committee's activities. In 1821 Lieutenant Sachalch who had undertaken the survey proposed the construction of large masonry sewers from the river to a proposed circular canal. No action was evidently thought desirable on these recommendations. Some years later. (in 1836) the Fever Hospital Committee was appointed and it submitted its concluding report in the latre forties (1847). It recommended, after considering all available engineering advice, the construction of underground sewers. There were of course many

detractors of this idea. But the idea caught hold of the imagination of most responsible people. A practical sheme to be prepared took a number of years and it was not till 1855 that the British Officers-in-charge of the Calcutta Municipality accepted it and forwarded it to the Government for approval. The Government on its side now proceeded to gather further information and advice on the subject. It is significant that when the Government submitted the scheme to Mr. Rendel of Messrs. Rendel Brothers, Sanitary Engineers, Wes minister, his advice was that the sewers should gravitate to the Hooghly river. In any event it was not till April, 1859 that the scheme forwarded by the Municipality was sanctioned by the Government but it was not accepted by the municipality for obvious reasons.

The history of the Calcutta Drainage works may be broadly divided into four periods. The initial stage between 1859 and 1875 is identified with Mr. Clark (Secretary and Engineer to the Corporation) the second and intermediate period between 1875 and 1891 was covered by the regime of Mr. Kimber (Chief Engineer). The third period between 1891 and 1902 was the the period during which various project for the drainage works of the suburban area, were prepared and put forwared by the Chief Engineers Mr. Kimber and Mr. Hughes and the fourth period covers the period when Mr. Ball Hill (Chief Engineer) carried out the scheme for the drainage of the added areas.

During the decade ending with the year 1930 under Dr. B. N. Dey, (Chief Engineer and Special Officer, Drainage) quite a number of small schemes were executed.

Calcutta is divided into two main areasthe town system and the suburban system. Under Dr. Dey's internal drainage system another area, namely the added area system, can be called the third area. The town system gravitates to Palmer's Bridge pumping station, and the Suburban System to Ballygung pumping station, and the discharge from both the pumping stations is conveyed to Bantolla wherefrom two separate channels -one for Dry weather flow and the other for Storm water run to Kulti outfall river 21 miles away from Calcutta. There is a sedi

mentation Tank at Bantolla for treatment of Dry weather flow.

The area of the suburban system is about 12.5 square miles drained with the terminal Ballygunge Drainage Pumping Station wherefrom the sewage is pumped into the outfall system.

There are 95 miles of brick sewers (main) with a further provision of about 4 miles of main brick sewer under the drainage extension scheme. So far as pipe sewers are concerned the length is about 326 miles. In addition there is surface drainage including Tollygunge area totalling about 382 miles. Water Supply

In olden times Calcutta depended for its water supply upon water taken from the Hooghly river, from the tanks excavated throughout the town and from shallow wells. In or about 1820 a system of open raised culverts was constructed in some of the principal streets from which water was supplied to the people and which also fed into the large tanks in the town. The culverts were filled by watter pumped from the Hooghly at Chandpal Ghat into a settling tank from which the water gravitated into the culverts.

The first work for supply of filtered water to the town commenced in 1857 which took 3 years to complete. It was designed to supply 6 million gallons of filtered water per day to a population estimated at 4 lakhs giving an average of 15 gallons per head at

a cost of Rs. 66 lakhs. This consisted of a pumping station of Pulta with 6 pucca settling tanks, with a capacity of 3 millions gallons each, a pumping station at Tallah and another at Wellington Square. The pumping stations at Tallah and Wellington Square were provided with underground reservoirs having capacities of one million and six and a quarter million gallons respectively. The filtered water from Pulta gravitated to Tallah reservoir through a 42 inches C. I. main. From Tallah the water used to be pumped partly to consumer direct and partly into the reservoir at Wellington Square from which distribution was made by pump.

By the end of 1870 daily consump ion of