Kolkata - geography.

« Other places of interest in Kolkata are the fashionable Jawaharlal Nehru (formerly Chowringhee) Road, the city’s main thoroughfare; the Raj Bhavan (1802; formerly calledthe Government House), the state governor’s residence; the Indian Museum (1875), which contains noted displays on archaeology and natural history; and the BirlaIndustrial and Technological Museum.

The Botanical Gardens (1786) in Hāora (or Howrah), Kolkata’s twin city, features many tropical plants in addition to a famous banyantree, the branches of which spread 381 m (1250 ft) in circumference. III ECONOMY As the capital of British India and home to the fertile agricultural and mineral-rich land of eastern India, Kolkata was one of the first areas of India to develop industrially.The first jute and paper mills of India were started in the Kolkata area in the 1800s.

By 1921 nearly 35 percent of India’s industrial workers were located in Kolkata.However, Kolkata began to lose its industrial leadership after India gained its independence in 1947.

One cause was the loss of Kolkata’s raw jute supply when Bengal wasdivided into West Bengal and East Bengal, with East Bengal becoming part of Pakistan.

Competition in jute manufacturing from East Bengal (later East Pakistan, nowBangladesh) further hurt Kolkata’s jute industry.

Competition and slow growth also hit other traditional manufacturing areas, such as heavy engineering, rubber, and paper. Other factors that have hurt metropolitan Kolkata’s industrialization include a 1977 ban imposed by the Indian government on new licenses of large-scale industrial units inthe large metropolises; labor troubles since the end of 1960s; pro-union attitude of the state government; severe power shortages; limitations on raw materials; andshortage of capital.

Moreover, a slow depletion of water volume in the Hugli River limited the size of ships at Kolkata’s docks, causing Kolkata to lose its status as thepremier port city of India.

The water supply problem has been resolved to some extent by diverting water from the Ganges River to the Hugli, and by constructing adiversion canal and the Farakka barrage, which increased the depth of the channel, in 1976.

A deep port at Haldia, about 65 km (about 40 mi) south of the Kolkata, has alsobeen established.

Ships arriving at Kolkata from the Bay of Bengal travel only when the river is in high tide, escorted by specially trained Hugli pilots; additionally, the riverchannel is constantly dredged.

Few new major industries came into the KMD in the 1970s and 1980s, but in the mid-1990s the state attracted some large-scale capitalinvestments both from native and foreign sources because it relaxed its anti-capitalist stance. Although Kolkata’s poor economic factors have caused it to lose its designation as India’s largest commercial and banking center, it is the headquarters of many nativebusiness firms, banks, and international corporations.

One of India’s largest companies, Birlas, is headquartered in Kolkata. As the remaining agricultural land has been lost to urban development, the percentage of Kolkata’s workers employed in various fields has changed.

About 60 percent ofworkers are employed in services and about 40 percent in industry.

The agricultural and industrial sectors experienced the greatest declines.

The majority of peopleemployed in the service sector are involved in trade and commerce, in jobs that generally offer little pay or security.

Most of this group works in retail or small-scale tradingestablishments, often without a roof, either in a family business or employed by a small investor.

Kolkata still continues to attract surplus labor from surrounding areas,increasing the population over and above the city’s natural birthrate increase. Public transportation, such as buses, trams, trains, and subways, are the principal means of transport in the Kolkata metropolitan area.

Buses operate throughout the area,and trains have north-south lines with a few east-west connections.

There are two major train terminals: Sealdah in the east central part of Kolkata and H āora across theriver from the Central Business District.

Electric trams operate in Kolkata proper.

The aging buses, trains, and tram cars suffer from overloading, creating uncomfortablerides.

Subway construction started in 1972 and became operational with 7 km (4.3 mi) of line in 1984.

By 1995 all of the subway’s 16.4-km (10.2-mi) route from Dum Dumto Tolluguye was completed.

The subway carries an estimated 25 percent of Kolkata’s 7 million commuters.

Cycle rickshaws are not allowed in the city of Kolkata, but theyare common in the metropolitan area.

Hand-pulled carts are used for short-distance cargo hauling.

Private automobiles, extensively used in Kolkata and H āora, areincreasing in numbers and are owned by the wealthy.

The streets of Kolkata remain congested with taxis, private automobiles, buses, slow-moving trams, and hand-pulledcarts.

Air pollution caused by automobiles, buses, and industrial emissions is severe.

Kolkata’s international airport at Dum Dum provides service for both national andinternational airlines. IV POPULATION According to the 2001 census, the Kolkata metropolitan area had a population of 13,216,546, with a very high population density of 10,607 persons per sq km (27,477persons per sq mi).

The growth rate of the metropolitan area population was 19.9 percent between 1991 and 2001, up from the 1981 to 1991 growth rate of 18.7 percent.The population of the city of Kolkata grew more slowly than the metropolitan district.

Since India’s first census in 1872, Kolkata has generally been India’s largest city,although in 1991 it lost that status to Mumbai.

About one-third of the total population of Kolkata’s metropolitan area lives in slums.

Many other Kolkata residents are so-called pavement dwellers (homeless).

Mother Teresa, a Roman Catholic nun who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950 to helpthe poorest of the poor in Kolkata and all over the world. V EDUCATION AND CULTURE Kolkata is the home of the University of Calcutta (founded in 1857) and Jadavpur University (1955).

Rabindra Bharati University (1962), devoted to fine arts, is housed atthe former residence of Bengali poet and Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore.

Part of the Tagore residence is now a museum.

Another Nobel laureate, SirChandrasekhara Venkata Raman, who received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1930 for his discovery of the Raman effect on light, worked and researched in Kolkata for a longperiod.

Sarat Chandra Chatterjee, a highly regarded Bengali fiction writer of the early 20th century, lived in nearby H āora.

Ram Mohan Roy, sometimes called the father ofmodern India, began his social reform for abolition of suttee (burning to death of a wife with her deceased husband) in Kolkata.

He also founded Brahmo Samaj, a modern Hindu religious sect, in the city in 1828. More than 70 percent of Kolkata’s population are literate.

The literacy rate is higher for men, who generally receive more education than women; for every three men onlytwo women are literate. Several languages are spoken in Kolkata, including English.

Bengali speakers constitute 60 percent of the city’s population, and there are Hindi (23 percent), Urdu (11percent), and Oriya (1.3 percent) speakers as well.

After British India was partitioned into India and Muslim Pakistan in 1947, a large number of Muslim residents migratedfrom Kolkata to East Pakistan, while many Hindu refugees arrived in the city from East Pakistan.

Today Hindus constitute 83 percent of the city’s population while Muslimsmake up 14 percent; the rest of the population is comprised of small groups such as Christians, Jains, and Sikhs. VI HISTORY Kolkata was founded in 1690 by British trader Job Charnock as a trading post of the English East India Company.

It was then known by the British name of Calcutta.

In themid-17th century the Portuguese had a trading outpost in the area at Sutanuti, followed by the Dutch, who constructed a diversion canal at the bank of the Hugli River, nearthe present Central Business District.

The old Fort William was built to protect the English post in 1696.

The city became famous in 1756, in England particularly, whenSiraj-ud-Dawlah, a Bengal ruler, captured the fort and, according to British historians, stifled to death 43 British residents in a small guardroom called the Black Hole ofCalcutta.

The city was recaptured by the British under Robert Clive in 1757.

The English initially built an intricate transport network through the Hugli-Ganges water system,but it was the railroads, introduced in the 1850s, that successfully established connections with the hinterland and the rest of India.

The city eventually had the largestconcentration of trading establishments in India, and a Western-style business district evolved by the end of the 19th century.

The colonial city maintained a strict divisionbetween the crowded and ill-planned native quarters to the east and north of the Central Business District, and the spacious and well-planned quarters where the Europeanslived in the south and southeastern parts of the old city.

After independence, the former European quarters were either turned into residences of the Indian rich or, as in the. »