Kolkata - geography.

« 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 Hāoraacross the river from the Central Business District.

Electric trams operate in Kolkata proper.

The aging buses, trains, and tram cars suffer from overloading, creatinguncomfortable rides.

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 Dum to Tolluguye was completed.

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

Cycle rickshaws are not allowed in thecity of Kolkata, but they are common in the metropolitan area.

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

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

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

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

Kolkata’s international airport at Dum Dumprovides service for both national and international 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 18.7percent.

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’slargest 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 Kolkataresidents are so-called pavement dwellers (homeless).

Mother Teresa, a Roman Catholic nun who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, founded the Missionaries ofCharity in 1950 to help the 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 housedat the 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 along period.

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

Ram Mohan Roy, sometimes called thefather of modern 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 menonly two 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 residentsmigrated from Kolkata to East Pakistan, while many Hindu refugees arrived in the city from East Pakistan.

Today Hindus constitute 83 percent of the city’s populationwhile Muslims make 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.

Inthe mid-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 HugliRiver, near the present Central Business District.

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

The city became famous in 1756, in Englandparticularly, when Siraj-ud-Dawlah, a Bengal ruler, captured the fort and, according to British historians, stifled to death 43 British residents in a small guardroom calledthe Black Hole of Calcutta.

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 cityeventually had the largest concentration of trading establishments in India, and a Western-style business district evolved by the end of the 19th century.

The colonialcity maintained a strict division between 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 Europeans lived in the south and southeastern parts of the old city.

After independence, the former European quarters were either turnedinto residences of the Indian rich or, as in the Park Street area, into commercial areas. With the dominance of leftist political parties in the Bangla state government in the late 1960s, Kolkata’s municipal government also came to be controlled byCommunists.

Corruption and bureaucratic inefficiencies caused city services to deteriorate under this government, and today Kolkata is one of the most ill-serviced andchaotic metropolises of the world.

In January 2001 the spelling of the city's name officially changed to Kolkata. Contributed By:Ashok K.

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