Story

An international conference on "Migration, Diaspora and the City: Mobility and Dwelling in Calcutta" was held in Calcutta on 12-13 December 2008. The conference was jointly organised by the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, the Diaspora Cities research team and The City Centre, Queen Mary, University of London, and supported by the Leverhulme Trust.

V Ramaswamy, Honorary Chairman of Howrah Pilot Project, presented a paper at the conference, titled "Priya Manna Basti, Howrah: The story of a community".

Here's the abstract of the paper.


Priya Manna Basti, Howrah, a century old jute workers’ slum, is currently home to about 20,000 people, mainly from labouring, Urdu-speaking, Muslim households. The people living here belong to Bihar and eastern U.P.

Labouring rural people, historically disenfranchised and unlettered, arrived in search of livelihood and settled in Howrah. They lived for decades in a degraded environment. Notwithstanding the disruption of communal riots and partition, during the 1950’s this community witnessed a profound new beginning in self-help efforts towards formal education. They generated community leaders who saw education as a key means to social advancement. They set up local schools which generated large numbers of educated men, several of whom went on to acquire respectable and remunerative jobs. Self-help efforts flourished notwithstanding the discrimination against Muslims in north India in post-independence India.

This story was reversed, first by the de-industrialisation in West Bengal beginning in the mid-60s, and then by the criminalised political culture consolidated over the last two decades. Community initiative has been uprooted, the community reduced to dependence on the crumbs that the party may throw their way, and criminalised in the process. This transformation is what the CPI(M) has presided over in its three decades of power.