A shanty by a narrow branch of the Kestopur Canal 2
Credit: Anuska Paul

Not all water fits into the dominant urban imagination of the Smart City. Gaping potholes, water-logged streets, overflowing drains, swollen canals, for instance, are blemishes on the cartographic imagination of the ‘clean’, ‘orderly’, gated city. But in the Kestopur area of Kolkata, which has shared a long-drawn and contentious relationship with water, excess water refuses to be contained, a persistent reminder of a certain urban “backwardness”, uncontrollably jutting out and flowing over from cartographic margins onto the compulsively regulated urban mainland of flyovers, arterial roads, and high-rises. Not all of this excess water is pushed onto the frontiers; some of it is redrawn into carefully managed eco-amenities to meet the “green desire” of an upwardly mobile upper-caste urban population.¹ As for the rest, the question arises: who is made to live with this excess water, deemed waste and impure; who is made to carry its weight, and who is made to reside along its edges? The question, then, is not simply how the Smart City manages its water, but where it sends the water it refuses to see.

The Making of Salt Lake and New Town

The Kestopur khal area and its adjoining basti settlements sit sandwiched between the organised ‘satellite township’ of Salt Lake on its east and the emerging smart township of Rajarhat-New Town to the north, north-east, and west. As the urban-village prolifically expands further onto the East, every new construction pushes the canal-side area further upon itself, doubling up, with people falling over shops, shops falling over canals, canals falling over people. This incurs the progressively growing wrath of the “smart” babus, their upper-caste “neighbours”, enraged by the filth, crowd, impropriety – utterly dysregulated, nothing “in-its-place.” We chose this particular canal-edge area in the interiors of Kestopur for our research precisely because it sits on the edge of two smart-townships. Its liminal geographic and spatial location was incredibly telling and exposed differential outlooks in spatial and infrastructural governance and distribution.

A counter-cartographic drawing depicting the spatial arrangement of Kestopur and its neighbouring areas with the Kestopul canal flowing alongside the informal settlements of Gouranganagar, Mridha Market, and Jagatpur on one hand and New Town and Saltlake on the other. Credit: Tanuj Mallick

Bound on the west by the Hooghly River and on the east by the East Kolkata Wetlands (EKW), the city maintains an eastward drainage system that pumps its waste water largely towards the east. The Kestopur and Bagjola Canals are two of the most integral canal systems in this aspect, directing the flow of water further down the east and aiding in the drainage of surrounding areas. Canals have historically been understood as passive hydraulic mechanisms that regulate the flow of water. But if they are in fact passive sites of hydraulic infrastructure bereft of political accountability, why is it that makeshift, informal, toiling, lower-caste settlements mushroom along its edges and not world-class vista apartments? Why do garden-view vistas not grow along open canals? The city then does drain east. But not every part of the East receives the city’s waste equally, with some sections bearing the disproportionate burden of waste water while others exercise access to neat civic infrastructure. 

This history is inscribed in the very making of these townships. Named after the saltwater lakes which filled the area, Salt Lake carries, from the very moment of its inception, the weight of environmental culpability. The township came into existence by draining excess water into the Kestopur and Bagjola canals to enable raising its height to an altitude immune to flooding, and to make it suitable for residential use by upper-caste, upper-class white-collar professionals and government public servants.² Therefore, to render Salt Lake habitable, its surrounding neighbourhood settlements had to be made deliberately uninhabitable. Similarly, the coming-of-age of New Town, which has been a subject of substantial scholarship, conceals a more obviously coercive history of forceful land occupation, eviction, filling up of wetlands, depriving several thousand families of a sustainable livelihood dependent on aquatic systems.³

It was important to trace this history to show how urban spaces are deliberately constructed to unequally reproduce environmental burdens across lines of caste and class. The city’s boundaries, then, are not porous but selectively permeable: carefully designed to keep privilege dry while channeling its excess elsewhere. What is rendered waste for some becomes the condition of habitation for others, as caste-class inequalities continue to be deliberately reproduced through the everyday hydraulics of the city. Therefore, it is not simply the deprivation of clean water resources (as typically, rightly, observed in rural spaces), but rather also the forced proximity, management, and toxic excess of wastewater that produce everyday contours of caste-based violence in the urban space.

A section of the Bagjola Canal near the Jatragachi Pumping Station. The latter pumps waste water from the township of Rajarhat-New Town onto the Bagjola Canal, with these intersections carrying water with particularly high indices of pollutants. Credit: Anuska Paul

Migration, Livelihoods, and Memories Along the Canal

The whole Adarshapally stretch lining the Kestopur Khal is home to a mixed group of lower-caste populations involved in motley professions. The entire area along the canal from Jagatpur on one end to Jatragachi on the other houses various Scheduled Caste communities, most prominently a large concentration of Matua population. The Matua are a Dalit community historically associated with the Namasudra caste. Many Matua families in West Bengal trace their migration to present-day Bangladesh, with successive waves of displacement and migration shaping their settlement across the state.

As opposed to the assumptions with which we went into the field, not all families in these paras are (newly) migrant populations – some of them have resided in the area for decades. Santosh Halder (name changed) remarked that his extended family has been residents of the area since the late 1990s. He reminisced that the entire area adjoining the canal, including large swathes of land on either side towards Salt Lake and Rajarhat, used to be wetlands, ponds, and agricultural land, with most of the adi population, including his forefathers, involved in fish farming, pisciculture, farming, and aquaculture.

If one starts from Jagatpur, the southernmost point of the canal in Kestopur, walking all the way till Ghashkhali in Sunderbans where the Kestopur Canal meets the Kulti river, one would have chosen to forsake the Basanti Highway, walking instead along the canal, allowing it to unfurl varying sediments of its social life, passing through neighbourhoods and histories which bear testimony to Kolkata’s epistemic alterity, a very different narrative of neglect and dispossession. When we asked Namita Mistry Di (name changed), one of the migrant residents, why they had decided to settle here of all places, she responded that this place was “close to home,” and that many of her relatives had previously settled here. In a different context, upon being asked how often the canal water was cleaned, one interlocutor responded barely once a year, adding that infrastructural maintenance and municipal accountability here was scarce and the difference between this place and mainland Kolkata was akin to that of “gram aar shohor (village and city).”

This invocation of village life is testimony to the lived perception of this place in the minds of the migrant residents of its liminality – just enough city to earn them exploitative, underpaid gigs in wage labour while not enough to erase all traces of a village life. And in this memorial continuity of fisheries, marshland, and swamps, the canal formed one of the most central architectural markers of an earlier past, of an inter-generational way of life and livelihood. The canal water constituted a means of relational continuity that cushioned the shock of relocation.

An illustration depicting the making and unmaking of Rajarhat- New Town, with huge stretches of agricultural land and water bodies supporting sustainable living of native populations to the flourishing of real estate projects and flyovers. Credit: Tanuj Mallick

However, this memorial anchoring wasn’t the only reason why these communities had migrated to the canal-edge. Relatively cheap accommodation and flexible rentier policies formed the material basis of migration around the khal-par areas, even though such accommodation came at the expense of access to health, hygiene, and basic dignity of living. The canal-edge is lined with makeshift shops supported on bamboo dotted across the entire stretch of the street. Many of the shops also have a partitioned section which doubles as a one-room residence for many of the shopkeepers. It is only very recently that some of them have been able to build or purchase small one or two-room shanties through loans, which also embroils them in an indefinite legal and financial binding.

It is possible that the responses of the interlocutors were mediated by the urgency of the present political moment, but what came pouring through even before we had completed our question was their apprehension over imminent eviction. Many responded, “Ei khal er opor amader jeebon chole” (Our livelihoods are dependent on this canal). Therefore, the flexible rentier policies were not a result of benevolence. It was the concession they paid in exchange for precarity. Even for those who “owned” land along the canal, the deal was constituted mostly through verbal arrangements rather than legal paperwork, which made them extremely susceptible to eviction, as many of them half-heartedly conceded that they were “occupying government land.”

These apprehensions were exacerbated by complaints from the residents of New Town high-rises who have repeatedly petitioned against the “encroachment” of communities along the canal-edge. For example, in a Facebook group called “New Town Forum and News”, a digital interactive space of the township residents, the area was variously designated as “dirty”, “uninhabitable”, “chaotic”, “unclean”, “unsafe”, “den of Bangladeshis, Biharis, Rohingyas” and “hub of illegal activities”. The canal was repeatedly invoked in the defence of ecology, as a site of waste and degradation attributable to the communities living along its edges.

From Wetlands to “Eco” Infrastructure: Water, Urban Development, and Erased Histories

During our fieldwork visits across the New Town area, we noticed a pattern in the nomenclature of the up-and-coming high-rise residential complexes. Most of these projects invoked the logic of “greenness” in their architectural principle: “Sunrise Greens”, “Urban Greens”, “Eco Palace” or even “Urban Sabujayan”⁴ located further towards the South. This is not a feature of Rajarhat alone but generally of apartment complexes all around Kolkata, built slightly into the interiors, playing off the produced spatial logic of the ‘Urban Village.’ This term applies not least because these landscapes are constructed over a pre-existing rural landscape containing villages, agricultural fields, ponds, wetlands and locally embedded communities, many of which come under increasing threat but still continue to survive in precarious conditions. Rather, the term ‘Urban Village’ posits itself in the global real estate market as a self-sufficient system laying claims to an eco-friendly urban consciousness while also infrastructurally developed enough to meet every need of its residents. This frequent foregrounding of New Town’s green spaces, water bodies, ecological infrastructure and “sustainable” planning then obscures underlying histories of violence and works to legitimise the eviction and displacement of certain populations under the guise of supposed environmental concerns.

A clean, green stretch outside a New Town gated apartment

Canal-side settlements near Gouranganagar, Jatragchi. Credit: Anuska Paul

The history of Dhopir Bil⁵, unbeknownst to public memory, bears out this history. Historical evidence of the Bil survives only in the oral narratives of the indigenous Muslim population of its adjoining agricultural villages and perhaps in a handful of early, obscure archival maps of Rajarhat. Now modified, the Dhopir Bil, once part of a larger hydrological network connected to the Kestopur and Bagjola canals, has today been transformed into the Eco Park lake, a commons reimagined as an urban amenity. Water is not made available here for public use but selectively aestheticised. An age-old waterbody housing several species’ of fish, the Bil served an integral function for the residents of the neighbouring village of Ghuni. A small Muslim village lying adjacent to present-day Eco-Park, its residents have been historically dependent on the waterbody for their livelihood, using it for pisciculture and related activities. However, the making of Eco Park meant that the Bil was fenced off, entry was restricted, and the island at the centre of the Bil was transformed into a high-end private tourist getaway: the cafe Ekanta Cottages, which now serves a distinctively tourist function for the rich, upwardly mobile, and propertied urban population. What remains a most jarring fact of dispossession is that the villagers of Ghuni, deprived of livelihood, were forced to take up the caste-based occupation of clearing garbage from these water bodies, including the canals, having found themselves with no other means to a livelihood.

The Dhopir Bil and its adjoining waterways irrigated Rajarhat's highly productive agricultural lands and linked wetlands across the eastern floodplain. In other words, Dhopir Bil was not simply a "waterbody”, it was part of a functioning hydrosocial landscape. While earlier the relationship between the Bil and its surrounding indigenous population was marked by a symbiotic relationality, today it is a transformed wetland, from a commons resource to an “Eco” amenity: rebranded and commodified to serve private enterprises, with its ecological and social functions fundamentally altered and considerably destroyed through profit-driven urban development.

Living with the City’s Waste: Water, Labour, Markets, and Everyday Life Along the Canal 

A hand-drawn illustration showing the circulation and unequal distribution of common water resources. Credit: Tanuj Mallick

The differential distribution of water use reveals another glaring aspect of capitalist caste-based hydro-politics within the urban-scape. In the hand-drawn illustration above, we see that drinking water in New Town, Kolkata is drawn from the Hooghly River. This water then undergoes several stages of purification, first, centrally at the New Town Water Treatment Plant and then subsequently, at the respective overhead tanks for the different Action Areas. This water is used by the planned township residents not as drinking water but for other purposes such as washing, tap water, etc. Drinking water is consumed from aquaguards performing a final round of purification, generating purified/RO water finally fit for consumption by the residents.

In stark contrast, we see that water is supplied to the canal-edge settlements directly via an underground pipe through an electric pump. Waste water discharged from high rises via pipes into the canals sits in close proximity to the water delivered to the homes of canal-edge populations. Anjana Maity Di (name changed) remarked that most of the settlement residents used this water for both washing and cooking. However, as a single mother with a child at home, she did not want to risk the possibility of water-borne infection. With one water drum priced at rupees twelve, and despite the financial strain incurred in the process, she purchases drinking water for over a hundred rupees every month.

With dispossession of agricultural land, many original agricultural communities in the region were increasingly incorporated into the service economy surrounding New Town: construction, domestic work, security, transport, food vending, small shops, maintenance and other informal occupations. In other words, the people whose land enabled the creation of the new city subsequently became workers servicing the new city's upper-class population. The communities who enabled the “self-sufficiency” of the urban apartments through their labour bear the disproportionate burden of wastewater, a hydro-residue accumulating on their home fronts in the canal water. 

Informal shops along the canal-edge. Credit: Anuska Paul

The canal then carries the disproportionate burden of the city’s wastewater for those who live along its banks, but it is also a prolific site where urban life gathers. As already mentioned, the comparatively relaxed rentier regime along the canal has enabled a continuous stretch of informal shops, markets and settlements, sustaining livelihoods even as these remain perpetually vulnerable to eviction. The canal-side is not a dead or residual urban edge: it is a living market, with one bustling marketplace following another, their stalls piled with vegetables, fish, and poultry brought in from the surrounding villages. The relative affordability of these goods makes the stretch attractive even to residents of the New Town high-rises. Yet the same density that makes these markets useful appears to trouble those very consumers. The crowd, the noise, and the sheer visibility of working bodies are frequently experienced as an intrusion into the ordered urban landscape.

For some residents, the canal is not simply the setting of precarious work but an extension of inherited livelihoods. We spoke to Robin Da and Jaya Di, a couple from the Matua community engaged in the craft of idol-making. They described the location of their workshop beside the canal as advantageous to their work. They dig the soil from the canal bank to shape their murtis, making the canal materially inseparable from their craft. Here, something conventionally understood as polluted, discarded, or impure enters into the making of objects that will themselves become sites of ritual purity. The canal's “waste” is therefore not simply waste: it is appropriated, transformed, and made productive within an inherited artisanal practice. 

An idol-maker’s workshop along the canal-edge. Robin and Jaya Pal have been crafting idols for generations. Credit: Tanuj Mallick

Perhaps the most striking contradiction emerged in a conversation with Banalata Maji Di (name changed), who recalled that the canal-side stretch had once remained dark and vacant, making it difficult and unsafe for women to navigate after dusk. The proliferation of houses, shops, vendors, neighbours, and passers-by in the last decade or so had, paradoxically, made the road safer. Our own experience walking along both banks of the canal bore this out. Unlike the comparatively deserted, gated and dimly lit stretches of Salt Lake, the canal-side settlements generated a dense everyday sociability: people sitting outside their homes, vendors calling out to customers, workers moving between shops, neighbours crossing paths, and commuters passing through. The very density that is so often read by the planned city as disorder becomes, for those who inhabit the canal-edge, a source of connection and safety.

The canal, then, cannot be understood simply as the city's hydraulic receptacle. It is at once a drain and a marketplace, a site of dispossession and livelihood, a repository of waste and a source of material for sacred production, a space marked as unsafe and a space made safer through the density of everyday life. Its lifeworlds emerge precisely through the porosity that the planned city seeks to contain: people, water, commodities, labour, and memory continually cross the boundaries between city and village, formal and informal, clean and dirty, visible and invisible. What appears from the vantage point of the Smart City as an excess to be contained becomes, from the canal's edge, the very substance through which urban life is made and pursued through people’s everyday struggles.

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¹ Smart City Enterprise: Case Study of New Town Kolkata highlights the demographics of the New Town highrises.  

² Read How Salt Lake was born 

³ The Sanhati portal contains extensive documentation of the entire history of the Rajarhat land grab and subsequent farmers’ protest including A history of the brutal Rajarhat land acquisition, Bengal’s new IT hub and Rajarhat: When the Government Loots

⁴ Towards Sustainable Flows, A Citizen’s Audit of Kolkata’s Canals published by the Kolkata-based Jaladarsha Collective contains reference to the Bishnu Pada Pakhira v. West Bengal Pollution Control Board, a legal case filed at the National Green Tribunal (NGT) against the Urban Sabujayan residential housing project in Kolkata over allegations of illegal construction and wetland destruction. Read more Here.

⁵ The memory of the Dhopir Bil is constantly invoked as an ecologically potent water body by the members of the Rajarhat Jomi Bachao Committee in journalist, filmmaker, and writer, Pramod Gupta’s documentary on the Rajarhat land acquisition titled, Amader Jomi te Oder Nagari. Watch the documentary Here and Here. Mention of the Bil’s afterlife can be found in Suman Nath’s article, “Of Liminality and Identity of the Built-In City: Theory and Evidence from New Town, Rajarhat,” published by Springer in the edited volme Urban South Asia. Past, Present and Future