Visitors to the city’s parks will be made aware of the contributions of the persons they are named after as well as the momentous events the parks have been witness to. The West Bengal Heritage Commission has undertaken a project to erect blue plaques in several parks under Kolkata Municipal Corporation.
“Few visitors are aware of the identity of the people the parks are named after. We will start with Hrishikesh Park in the first week of May,” said Shuvaprasanna, the chairman of the commission.
Four other parks are included in the first phase — Sraddhananda Park, Subodh Mullick Square, Sadhana Udyan in Rajabazar and Rabindra Kanan in Ahiritola.
Hrishikesh Park on Amherst Street has come up on land that belonged to Hrishikesh Laha. “The entire stretch from Hrishikesh Park to Thanthania Kalibari belonged to the Laha family,” Shuvaprasanna told The Telegraph on the sidelines of a programme to mark World Heritage Day.
Laha, a businessman and philanthropist, owned ships and was the sheriff of Kolkata. He was also president of the Bengal National Chamber of Commerce for 26 years.
Sraddhananda Park, not far from Hrishikesh Park, is likely to be the second to get the plaque. It witnessed many agitations during the freedom movement, with leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose in attendance.
Sadhana Udyan, popularly called Ladies Park, is named after social worker Sadhana Sarkar, the first Bengali woman to pass LLM (Master of Law) and also the first woman lecturer to teach law at Calcutta Law College.
Wellington Square may have long been renamed Subodh Mullick Square but few know of the industrialist and nationalist or of his contributions, like donation of Rs 1 lakh towards the establishment of Jadavpur University.
The commission had organised the programme on Monday at its office at Satyendra Bhavan in Behala. The building had been donated to the state government by the family of Biren Roy.
The speakers at the programme included Rajya Sabha MP Jawhar Sircar, commission secretary Umapada Chatterjee, commission member and architect Partha Ranjan Das, former police commissioner Soumen Mitra and former IIT Kharagpur professor of architecture Sanghamitra Bose.