Heritage conservation laws in Calcutta allow easy downgrade of protected structures and pave the way for demolition of protected buildings.

This is something that Mumbai has been able to avert by making the process more complicated, a former commissioner of Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation said at an online discussion on protecting Calcutta’s built heritage on Friday.

V. Ranganathan, who headed the Mumbai Heritage Conservation Committee, also said Calcutta should consider identifying and declaring stretches as heritage precincts as many parts of the city were dotted with buildings that had an aesthetic appeal.

A heritage precinct is different from a heritage building. While an individual house can be tagged as a heritage structure, a precinct is a collection of houses on a road that together tell the story of a time, of a place or culture. Declaring a neighbourhood as a heritage precinct protects any of these houses from being pulled down and helps preserve the aesthetic appeal of the place for the time to come.

Mumbai has several areas declared as heritage precincts where buildings enjoy a shield from indiscriminate demolition.

Other speakers at the virtual discussion also repeated the call for having heritage precincts in Calcutta.

“One of the disadvantages of the heritage protection laws in Calcutta is that the heritage conservation committee functions under the municipal corporation. It becomes easier to influence downgrading a building in such a case. A municipal corporation has to deal with more political pressure,” said Ranganathan, who retired as the chief secretary of Maharashtra government.

A proposal for downgrading a listed heritage structure is sent to the Calcutta Municipal Corporation’s heritage conservation committee. The committee sends the recommendation for downgrade, if it feels so, to the mayoral council that gives an approval or rejects it, said a senior CMC official.

In Mumbai, such a proposal has to be sent to the state government. “The process is more complicated and stringent (in Mumbai). Apart from extraordinary circumstances, downgrading is not allowed in Mumbai,” he said.

In Calcutta, there have been instances of downgrading of listed heritage structures. The downgrade reduces the level of protection and paves the way for demolition, said author Amit Chaudhuri, founder of Calcutta Architectural Legacies (CAL) and moderator of Friday’s discussion.

Historian Sunil Khilnani speaks at the discussion Telegraph picture

The Kenilworth hotel in Chowringhee was demolished after it was pushed down to grade III from grade IIA in 2018.

Other speakers at the discussion were economist and Nobel laureate Esther Duflo, historian Sunil Khilnani and architect Channa Daswatte.

Chaudhuri said the virtual discussion was organised to restart conversations on protection of heritage in Calcutta, something that was stopped by the pandemic. “But the pandemic could not stop the demolition of old grand buildings,” he said. The Facebook page of CAL has pictures of a beautiful house on Lansdowne Road being pulled down at the moment.

The speakers spoke of identifying and declaring parts of Calcutta as heritage precincts.

Daswatte, an architect from Sri Lanka who had helped conserve an old mansion in Park Circus that was once inhabited by a family and later turned into a restaurant, was one of the advocates of heritage precinc. “The attempt was commendable. An old beautiful mansion was not pulled down but preserved and then turned into a restaurant, but it was shut down. It could be because this single building stood among others that were not conserved,” he said.

Daswatte said this was where declaring a neighbourhood as heritage precinct could be useful. “A precinct could give the place a charm...,” he said.

Ranganathan told Metro that Mumbai had several parts of the city declared as heritage precincts. One of the earliest to be declared so was the area between Nariman Point and Malabar Hills, where a number of houses have the Art Deco style of architecture.