Think of an island which is fertile and grows all the food that the people residing there need. It produces fairly good amount of surplus but since it is cut off from and has no communication with mainland, it cannot send surplus food there and has to waste them.
While food grows aplenty, the islanders direly need to improve their lifestyle, for which they need brainy people and other products from elsewhere. Once again, it cannot avail any of these since it doesn’t have any connection whatsoever with mainland.
The island’s rulers are smug that they produce enough food for themselves and so they thought why else would they need any outside help!
Then comes the disaster. One year it rains so heavily that nearly the whole island is flooded. Water washes away whatever food grains are stored in granaries. People die dime a dozen with no food and no means to protect them from severe floods. Above all they die because they have nowhere else to flee to.
If not exactly similar, Kolkata, indeed most of the state, has been like the island for a long, long time. Leaving the metro, the 2nd Hooghly Bridge and EM Bypass, there has been no addition in the past many decades in terms of ease in commuting to the city, teeming with millions.
For some time now, there are talks to improve commuting infrastructure in the city and nearby suburbs. Plans bandied about are grandiose in scale, but little action is seen on the ground.
With that as a backdrop, today may see a new beginning. If a committee headed by PM clears the proposal, Kolkata’s beleaguered airport at Dum Dum will see a massive makeover in 3 years time.
The plan includes building a 50-ft tall swanky steel-n-glass structure designed by France’s Aeroport de Paris that will have 48 parking bays (as against 28 now) and about 8 aerobridges that can function simultaneously.
2 terminals are slated to come up with a combined capacity to handle 20 million passengers a year. The domestic terminal will cater to 15 million of them (up from 4 million now), and the international building 5 million (up from a meager 8.2 lakhs now).
Going by present trend, the refurbished airport will be good to meet growing air traffic till 2016. After that another larger airport will be required to handle estimated traffic of 80 million passengers by 2025. [Collated from TT, Apr 18]
Giving proposed new airport an able company is a logistics hub coming up in Howrah at the junction of 3 national highways, NH-2, NH-6 and NH-117. It’s being built by Bengal Unitech Universal with project consultation by Singapore’s Jurong Consultants.
The 108-acre project on 2 adjacent sites is being touted as the most modern, integrated logistics hub in India.
It’ll have 20 two-storey warehouses, 6 G+9 office towers, parking space for at least 750 large vehicles like trucks, trailers, etc., and other amenities like auto spares shops, other retail shops, banks, post office, eateries, health center, dormitories for truck drivers, and so on.
Clearly, like the new airport, the logistics hub will ensue speedy collection and disbursal of products from and to all over the country. Seen with the planned deep seaport off Sagar Islands, the logistics hub may emerge as an important center of activity in future.
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