The state government wants to restore trams between Esplanade and Kidderpore, a route that cuts through the Maidan, mayor Firhad Hakim said on Friday.
The mayor chaired a meeting with transport minister Snehasish Chakraborty and Calcutta police commissioner Vineet Goyal during the day to discuss trams.
Hakim said trams are running on three routes but there are “safety issues involved”.
He also said the Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC) will tell Calcutta High Court to let it remove tram tracks from roads where bitumen has been poured over the tracks, overhead cables have been removed and there is no possibility of trams running again.
“We will give these proposals to the court,” said the mayor. The court is hearing a petition on the preservation of trams in Calcutta.
A division bench of the high court headed by Chief Justice T.S. Sivagnanam told the state during a hearing on Monday that a committee that the court had set up was “constituted for the purpose of ensuring restoration of the tram services and not otherwise”.
In August, the bench had formed an advisory committee that would work to preserve trams in Calcutta.
The court also said that it had come to know that the city’s police were opposed to trams on many routes.
The court’s order mentioned the objections from the police. “What we gather is that Kolkata Police are objecting to the tram services being operated in all the routes on the ground that the trams are very slow and
cause traffic congestion on the road,” the order said.
The order also said that the police were “one of the stakeholders in the entire exercise” and “their view alone cannot be taken to be the final”.
On Friday, Hakim said: “We want to run trams on the Esplanade-Kidderpore route. This is our proposal.
“Trams are already running on three routes, but there are safety issues. On the Maidan, there are separate tracks (separate from the road) for trams (on the Esplanade-Kidderpore route) and there will be no safety issue. We will put all these observations before the high court.”
He did not elaborate on the safety issues but spoke about accidents caused by tram tracks.
Earlier this year, the court had asked the state government to stop pouring bitumen over tram tracks.
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, said Debashis Bhattacharya, one of the founders of the Calcutta Tram Users Association, a group of Calcuttans who are advocating for a wider tram network in the city.
“Hardly two or three trams run on these routes. The interval between two trams on each route is at times as long as two hours. How can one expect people to depend on trams if there are so few of them? But this fact will be used to propagate that trams do not have users,” said Bhattacharya.
He said the services on the Esplanade-Kidderpore route stopped after Cyclone Amphan — which had struck in May 2020 — caused snapping of the overhead cables that supplied electricity to the tramcars.
“The transport department has for the past two years been promising to run trams on the route, but there has hardly been any progress,” Bhattacharya said.
Asked what would happen to the tram depots if trams routes are scrapped, the mayor said: “The government will use them in other ways.”