Trams will be showpieces in Calcutta, the city’s mayor Firhad Hakim confirmed on Tuesday.

Like most things about Calcutta, residents were divided. Many felt it would be a terrible thing to do. Others disagreed.

Calcutta’s trams celebrated 150 years last year.

Supporters of trams said there was no study to show that trams slowed down traffic, an argument that the government has put forward many times as a reason for wanting to stop trams on most routes.

Across the globe trams, were being revived, the supporters said. The state should invest in modernising the fleet, make it more comfortable and run it at frequent intervals so people can depend on trams as a mode of transport, they said.

Hakim’s comments came a day after the state’s transport minister said the government would run trams only on a stretch between Esplanade and Maidan.

Snehasis Chakraborty, the minister, said the transport department was drawing up a report that it will submit before Calcutta High Court. Last year, Chakraborty had said the state wanted to run trams on “four-five routes”.

The high court is likely to hear a batch of petitions challenging the state government’s actions, or lack of action, on trams.

“If a tram runs through Cossipore, it leads to a snarl in the entire area. It is becoming difficult to run trams on such narrow roads. When trams came, there was no Metro rail. Today there is Metro rail on all sides of Calcutta. We have green transport,” Hakim said at the Alipore zoo on Tuesday. He was there for the 150-year celebrations of the zoo.

“We will keep trams as heritage transport, from the Victoria Memorial to Esplanade and back, through the Race Course. We will have joyrides. There is the Metro for people’s needs. It is fast and green,” he said.

Tram advocates disagreed.

Pradeep Kakkar, founder member of the NGO PUBLIC that filed a public interest litigation against pouring bitumen over tram tracks, told Metro: “Responding to an RTI query, the state transport department told us there has never been any study to suggest that trams slowed down traffic. On what basis is the mayor or others making such statements?” Kakkar asked.

A bench headed by Chief Justice T.S. Sivagnanam had in May last year barred the state from pouring bitumen over tram tracks. In June last year, the bench spoke about the need to preserve Calcutta’s trams and directed the state to set up within three weeks an “expert committee” for the preservation of the “heritage transport”.

The high court also barred Calcutta Tramways Company from selling any property till further orders.

“Only three meetings of the expert committee have been held so far. The last was held in January. We have written repeatedly to the state to convene meetings, but they did not,” Kakkar said on Tuesday.

Tram advocates also said the government was speaking in two voices. The state transport department had last year filed an affidavit before the high court and said they had a plan to revive trams.

“When a petition was filed that trams were being shut down, the department filed an affidavit denying the allegations and said they had a timeline on when to revive which route. Now the minister of the same department is saying that trams will run on a portion of only one route. This is very surprising,” said Debashis Bhattacharyya, founder of the Calcutta Tram Users Association (CTUA), a group advocating a wider tram network.