A group of Kolkatans advocating that trams should be run as an integral part of the public transportation system in the city held an outreach meeting at Lake Market on Sunday afternoon.
They said the meeting was held on a Sunday, and ahead of the Puja, so that their message reached more people. A large number of people, mostly Puja shoppers, stepped out across the city on Sunday, the second last weekend before the Puja.
At least three street-corner meetings, pressing for more trams, were held in north and central Kolkata earlier. Sunday’s meeting was the first in south Kolkata.
Members of the Calcutta Tram Users Association, which advocates a wider tram network in the city, said they were opposed to seeing the tram as a heritage transport. Instead, trams should be widely used to ferry people.
“The government shuts down trams during the Puja. Running trams during the Puja could help a large number of commuters. Besides, they could also earn a good revenue for the government on the festive days,” said Debashis Bhattacharya, a founder-member and the president of the association.
Another member of the group said there would be special Puja parikrama (Puja tour) services but those will be pre-booked.
“What about the common people who would be out pandal-hopping? If the government can run trams for Puja tours, why cannot they run normal services?” he said.
A senior official in the state transport department, however, said tram services are not shut down during the Puja. “There are time limitations, according to the Puja traffic plan prepared by Kolkata police,” the official said.
Bhattacharya spoke about an “ongoing effort to destroy trams and their viability”.
Trams now run on only three routes — 24/29 (Tollygunge-Ballygunge), 25 (Gariahat-Esplanade) and 5 (Shyambazar-Esplanade).
On these routes, too, only a few trams run, he said. “Hardly two or three trams run on these routes. The interval is as long as 30 minutes. How can one expect people to depend on trams if there are so few services? But this fact will be used to propagate that trams do not have users.”
Mayor Firhad Hakim had said in August that the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) had told the state transport department that trams should be running on only four routes.
Running trams is possible only on wide roads, not on narrow thoroughfares like Rabindra Sarani (Chitpore Road), Hakim said.
But tram lovers have been opposing the government’s stand for long. They argue that there are seven tram depots, one workshop and tracks along many roads. It is possible to run trams on many more roads, they said. Even in 2017, trams were running on over 20 routes, one of them said.
Sunday’s outreach meeting began around 5pm and continued till 7pm.