The nostalgia of trams-everyone has a story

The Sundarban Tramjatra aims to raise awareness about trams and the Sundarbans. But the struggle to save trams in the teeth of government opposition remains an uphill one

- SANDIP ROY

(Our beautiful trams, our Sundarban).

As Swarna Chitrakar sings about crouching tigers and trundling trams at the Esplanade tram terminus in Kolkata, she unrolls the scroll she has painted. Tigers pounce on a flock of fleeing deer. Snow-white cranes fly over blue waters and kingfishers swoop to catch fish. A rishi sits in prayer at an ash-ram in Gangasagar while boxy tram cars run along the edges of the scroll, the passengers sitting by the windows engrossed in newspapers.

It seems an odd juxtaposition. Tram lines do not run through the mangrove forests and waterways of the Sundarbans.

But Chitrakar, a folk artist who paints patachitras, isn't selling a tiger-safari tourist-brochure version of the Sundarbans. On her scroll, she has painted women carrying baskets of mud on their heads to shore up the river bank. She sings about pollution and cyclones and climate change. And that's where trams come in. As the West Bengal government goes to court to dismantle its 150-year-old tram system, a group of activists are fighting doggedly to save it, not as a heritage tourist attraction, but as green transport in a time of climate change.

"Cities need heat plans," asserts Pradeep Kakkar, co-founder of PUBLIC (People United for Better Living in Calcutta). "A major contributor to heat in cities is carbon emissions. And trams do extremely well in reducing carbon emissions."

That's why PUBLIC, which works to protect the Kolkata wetlands, became a litigant in the case to save Kolkata's trams. The Calcutta high court blocked the government from bituminising the tram tracks and selling off the tram depots, a verdict the government has appealed in the Supreme Court.