WHAT'S IN A RENAME?

On October 17, while inaugurating a Durga Puja in Kolkata, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee decided that a slum should no more be called a basti-the Bangla word used for a slum, which has gathered all the usual socio-economic connotations reserved for words marking out the poor.

- Arkamoy Datta Majumdar

She instructed Kolkata mayor and minister Firhad Hakim to change their generic name to the rather more exalted uttaran-'ascension' in Bangla. The government even came up with advertisements publicising the step. But many slum-dwellers across Bengal's urban areas and especially in Kolkata soon discovered a dire facet to this exaltation-literally, a sense of being lifted off the ground under their feet.

This relates to the fact that the land on which many have resided for generations has of late been claimed by builders, and residents are being served eviction notices. For quinquagenarian Tarun Raychowdhury, the fight to save his residence in a slum on the eastern fringes of Kolkata began eight years back. He's among the 133 residents of 4, Ram Mohan Mullick Garden Lane who were asked to vacate their homes in April 2015 by a real estate firm, which claimed that it owned 6.3 acres of the land on which the basti stood. An even bigger shock awaited them after the eviction notices. Raychowdhury explains, "We have been paying for this property as thika tenants for years. But when we went to pay our municipal taxes, there was no record identifying us as the legal lessees."