Kolkata Metro

The Kolkata Metro or Calcutta Metro is a metro system serving the city of Kolkata and the districts of South 24 Parganas and North 24 Parganas in the Indian state of West Bengal. It is the first underground metro railway system in India. The network consists of one operational line (Line 1) and one under construction (Line 2), with four further lines in various stages of planning. It was the first such form of transport in India, opening for commercial services in 1984. It is the 17th zone of the Indian Railways system.

History

After Independence in 1947, the transport problem of Kolkata drew the attention of city planners, the state government and also the government of India. It was soon realized that something had to be done and quickly in order to cope with the situation. Dr. Bidhan Chandra Roy, the then Chief Minister of West Bengal, first conceived in 1949, the idea of building an Underground Railway for Kolkata to try to solve the problems. A survey was done by a team of French experts, but nothing concrete came of this. Efforts to solve the problem by augmenting the existing fleet of public transport vehicles hardly helped, since roads account for only 4.2% of the surface area in Calcutta, compared with 25% in Delhi and even 30% in other cities. With a view to finding alternative solutions to alleviate the suffering of Calcuttans, the Metropolitan Transport Project (Rlys) was set up in 1969. The MTP (Rlys), with help of Soviet specialists (Lenmetroproekt) and East German engineers, prepared a master plan to provide five rapid-transit (metro) lines for the city of Kolkata, totalling a route length of 97.5 km in 1971. However, only three were selected for construction. These were:

Kolkata

Kolkata (Bengali: কলকাতা / কোলকাতা) /koʊlˈkɑːtɑː/, formerly Calcutta /kælˈkʌtə/, is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal. Located on the east bank of the Hooghly river, it is the principal commercial, cultural, and educational centre of East India, while the Port of Kolkata is India's oldest operating port and its sole major riverine port. As of 2011, the city had 4.5 million residents; the urban agglomeration, which comprises the city and its suburbs, was home to approximately 14.1 million, making it the third-most populous metropolitan area in India. As of 2008, its gross domestic product (adjusted for purchasing power parity) was estimated to be US$104 billion, which would be third highest among Indian cities, behind Mumbai and Delhi. As a growing metropolitan city in a developing country, Kolkata confronts substantial urban pollution, traffic congestion, poverty, overpopulation, and other logistic and socioeconomic problems.

Kolkata–16

Kolkata–16 or Calcutta–16 (Bengali: কলকাতা–১৬, released 1999) is a Bengali song album of Anjan Dutt. This album was manufactured and marketed by RPG music. This album had songs like Half chocolate, Ekdin Brishtite.

Tracks

References