Proshant Chakraborty | 24 February 2025
A detour to Kidderpur
When I arrived at Kidderpur tram depot, it was already 9:00 AM. I was supposed to get there half an hour earlier, but the West Bengal State Transport Corporation (WBSTC) bus that was supposed to bring me here had abruptly changed its route. Though it was still early-February, the Calcutta heat and humidity had already drenched me in sweat. Of course, it didn’t help that I had to take a long walk to reach my destination.
As I neared the depot gates, I noticed the public gathering had already started. Members of the Calcutta Tram Users Association (CTUA), a civil society group advocating for reviving and restoring the city’s iconic tramways, held banners and posters that listed the benefits of public transport. Also present was a local organisation that coached kids’ football in Kidderpur (also called Khidderpore or Khidirpur), one of Kolkata’s oldest neighbourhoods and a port on the Hooghly River.
After some brief interviews with local reporters, we started a march along the Kidderpur tram route, which had been discontinued after the tram tracks were covered with bitumen (tar) in 2023. While the government claimed this was to prevent road accidents, local residents and groups criticised the stoppage of trams as it made the city inaccessible.
As the march continued, CTUA members took turns to inform residents and onlookers about the importance of reviving the tramways. Buses, rickshaws and other vehicles drove by, as volunteers and traffic police personnel guided the march through the traffic. The gathering concluded with some brief speeches, which we then bookended with the Calcutta tradition of adda—street-corner conversations over hot cha (tea served in tiny clay cups).
Reviving Kolkata’s “pride”
For most of my life, Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) was always associated with trams. Even after Delhi, Bombay and Madras had shut down their trams, Kolkata remained the only Indian city where trams still operated in densely-packed and crowded routes, trudging alongside pedestrians, cycle-rickshaws and buses.
Unlike the Kolkata suburban railways or the Kolkata Metro (which was the first in India), the city’s trams were an iconic part of its urban tapestry and social fabric. For decades, trams have remained a mainstay in the lives of Calcutta residents, including in the imagination of Bengali diaspora like me. Indeed, as many present at the Kidderpur gather remarked, trams are Kolkata’s “pride” (garbo).
However, Calcutta trams are presently an endangered mode of public transportation.
Though tram services have been steadily declining since the 1990s, only a handful of services remain operational today, and that too on a limited number of routes. After I parted ways with the CTUA members, for instance, I made my way to the Gariahat tram depot, only to realise that there were no trams for the next couple of hours. Unlike the trains or the metro, it seemed that even existing tram services—otherwise a vital part of any viable urban transit system—did not operate on a regular schedule.
Advocating for public transport
For nearly a decade, civil society organisations like the CTUA, as well as NGOs like People United for Better Living in Calcutta (PUBLIC), have been attempting to not only fight against the closure of the Calcutta tramways, but also trying to revive them.
Recently, PUBLIC and another private lawyer successfully filed a public interest litigation (PIL), a form of citizen-led judicial intervention in India’s justice system, in the Calcutta High Court on this matter. In January 2025, the court ordered the restoration of tram routes including in the Kidderpur-Alipore area, where the gathering had taken place.
It was no coincidence that the gathering at Kidderpur included young boys who were all clad in their colourful football gear. This particular tram route led to another iconic Kolkata neighbourhood, Maidan—a large, green place along the banks of the Hooghly, which also includes iconic buildings like the Victoria Memorial. Reviving the trams would therefore mean that these kids would have a cheap and reliable mode of transportation to get to Maidan where they played football.
Calcutta trams were also an important talking point in another protest march last year that was part of collective demonstrations and protests after the rape and murder of a young doctor at a public hospital in Kolkata. While members of the CTUA had joined the march in solidarity, it eventually underscored how public transit and walkable cities were equally crucial for safety and accessibility—something that the Indian feminist movement “Why Loiter?” has long argued for.
Sustainability, heritage, and public access
As an anthropologist studying public transport, my interactions with Kolkata’s tram advocates, though brief, underlined several important lessons that urban studies have taught us.
Public transit infrastructure, especially those powered by electricity, are some of the most sustainable and efficient modes of transportation today, and important in reducing urban pollution and congestion. While Indian cities like New Delhi are perennially affected by poor air quality and pollution caused by stubble burning, pollution in coastal cities like Mumbai and Kolkata are primarily caused by unceasing construction and vehicular emissions. The year 2024 had also seen the largest increase in private vehicle ownership in both Kolkata and West Bengal state.
However, we must also be critical of viewing sustainability as simply transitioning to green energy. Many smaller Indian cities, for instance, have witnessed metro projects that were incredibly expensive but failed to achieve ridership numbers that would actually make them sustainable. Such modes of transport are also prohibitively expensive, since they need to generate revenue to repay international loans that funded these projects. This makes them inaccessible for even regular users, as we saw with the recent fare hike in the Bengaluru Namma Metro.
Kolkata’s trams, quite like the Mumbai local trains I study, have the potential to be both ecologically and socially sustainable only if they remain affordable to the vast majority of urban inhabitants.
This also means that the West Bengal government’s efforts to limit trams to a heritage route is also deeply unfortunate, since it would go against the ideals of urban public transport.
I actually find this so-called heritage argument rather misleading, since we need only look to other cities, like Gothenburg (where I am presently based), to realise how trams can be run as both public transport and heritage.
Every Saturday, for instance, visitors to Gothenburg can ride on the Liseberg Lijn—where several heritage trams (which are maintained and preserved at the Gothenburg Tram Museum) run from Central Station to the Liseberg amusement park. These heritage trams operate on the same route as their modern counterparts, showing how the goals of heritage preservation and sustainability are closely aligned.
Questions for the future
At the time of writing this blog post, members of the CTUA and other tram enthusiasts are gearing up to celebrate the 152nd anniversary of the Calcutta trams on 24th February 2025. And given the recent court intervention mentioned above, they do have some reason for celebration, though with some degree of caution.
On February 18, the Calcutta High Court, which was hearing a PIL against the bituminisation of tram tracks, ordered that “no trams lines should be closed until a designated committee inspects all the lines.”
However, the Court amended the earlier order on removing bitumen, which prevents any meaningful restoration of tram services. It also suggested a potential public-private partnership (PPP) model for the modernisation of tram routes, a proposal later endorsed by the West Bengal Transport Corporation (WBTC).
While there is reason to be hopeful about the future of Kolkata’s tramways, I believe they should be a fully publicly-owned mode of transport—belonging to the city and its people, not the interests of private corporations looking for profit. In fact, the idea of profit is an anathema to the value of services like railways and trams. These infrastructure are not only a mode of public transport, but they are also a public good.
Restoring an iconic service like the Calcutta trams would require diverse voices and publics coming together, as well as scientific expertise and knowledge. Until that happens, we should keep advocating for sustainable cities, so Kolkata—the City of Joy—can eventually celebrate the revival of its pride.
Keywords: #Kolkata #Trams #India #PublicTransport #Anthropology #Heritage
Proshant is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg. His PhD thesis explores the repair and maintenance of Mumbai’s iconic suburban railway trains. He has previously worked as an applied anthropologist and research consultant in Mumbai, India.
Comments