From my scrap book :: 15 :: Tram services in Gwalior?

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The other day a heartwarming news item came, of all the places, from my hometown, Gwalior. It was reported that the Gwalior municipality is planning to introduce tram services like those in Kolkata making use of the tracks that were laid during the reign of the Scindias. Some of these tracks even now run through the city. Earlier, however, many more areas were covered by these tracks many of which have since been uprooted as they fell in disuse.

 The reporter, apparently, was unaware of the fact that all the four metro towns of the country were served by trams, the most efficient of which was the BEST of what was then known as Bombay. The authorities of Bombay, Delhi and Madras were quick to remove the tram lines to provide for more road-space for the burgeoning automobile traffic. Kolkata, for some reason lagged behind and failed to do away with the tram services. Perhaps, the pressure of the commuters who did not wish to lose a cheap mode of transport did not allow the authorities to discontinue the services. Soon, however, with the rise in environmentalism the authorities saw new virtues in these services that ran on non-polluting electric traction. The tracks had already been removed from quite a few areas of Kolkata before the city woke up to the system’s advantages and the services that are now being run are, necessarily, a bit too truncated.

The news item made my mind travel back in time more than 70 years to the early and mid-1940s when we as children used to travel in Gwalior State Railways for visiting the Gwalior Fair or to see the Scindia Gold Cup hockey matches. We used to catch the train as it came from Kampoo at the cute little Elgin Club Station (right in front of Victoria College across the Private Road) and go rocking and swaying as we went through the Jiwaji Club, the                                  Jhansi Road, the Gwalior Railway Station on to the Race Course or a little further up, the Gwalior Fair. It was a very enjoyable ride for us children in a mini train. The Scindia Gold Cup and the Gwalior Fair would be held in the month of December – the season of jujubs and roasted peanuts. The children would fill themselves up with either of the two and muck up the compartments.

While the narrow gauge trains did not serve the city so very well they did connect the outlying areas like Kampoo where the Gwalior Potteries was located or MotiJheel about four miles away which had the water works. But it was out of the town and was frequented by tigers. The Old Gwalior and Birla Nagar townships were also served through GolaKaMandir. The town has now expanded on all sides and the surrounding rural areas have now been included in the town. While the city has become an educational hub it has since acquired an industrial area at Malanpur as also an air force base.

 As I see it tramways will suit the town immensely. In the US they call them “light rail” and the system of Portland, Oregon was in the news sometime back wherein it came in for praise for providing clean, non-polluting, efficient public transport. I have had the good fortune of using some of the US and European systems and found them efficient. The one in Vienna is very good. The Viennese system also offers an alternative mode for visiting the neighbouring spa town of Baden. The tramways are cheaper than metros as one doesn’t need to provide stations at every stage – a stop like a bus-stop would be just fine. Besides, one does not need to go in for costly tunneling or building over-bridges.

Kolkata tramways are now offering a mobile restaurant as well as a stationary one as also one for tourists for their sight-seeing forays in the town. Possibilities are immense, what one needs is only imagination. That is not the case with a metro system which generally runs somewhat removed from a city’s boisterous life and prevailing confusion.

A growing town has to have profusion of public transport so that people do not have to use their personal vehicles and foul up the city’s environment. These are the days of multimodal transport for the benefit of commuters. Each mode satisfies the need of its particular clientele. Take for instance Bangkok. Forty years ago it had only buses which now reportedly have been converted to run on gas. It also has developed a metro system that is still expanding. In the meantime it came up with another mode of transport – the sky train. Chinese have all kinds of sky trains – running on tracks or suspended from tracks. Hence mobility in a metropolis like Bangkok is not a problem.

One can only wish that the Gwalior municipality completes its preliminary work on drawing boards and launches the tram services as early as possible. I, for one, would like to wish it God speed!

*image from internet

Gas lamps of London

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The feature on lamplighters of London in the Times of India of last Sunday literally dug out from the deep recesses of my mind the memories of gas lamps and their lighters in my birthplace Gwalior in Central India. More than 60 years ago in the early 1940s Gwalior was a small town of about 80000 or so but it used to be the capital of the princely state carrying the same name. Its maharaja was the third richest of all the Indian maharajas after the Nizam of Hyderabad, and Maharaja of Mysore. Being the capital, it had

stately buildings, a beautiful palace that was built in the 19^th Century on the pattern of the palace at Versailles and broad roads. While most of the roads were illuminated at night by electric incandescent bulbs many lanes, including ours, had gas lights to light them up.

Our house was on the junction of four rather broad lanes. The lane right in front was the main one which took off from the main road and led on to the junction and beyond to the innards with narrower lanes, alleys and pathways. Plumb next to a wall separating a huge unused property in front of our house there used to be a lamp which

would be manually lit in the evenings and put out in the morning.  It was a gas lamp and a man would trudge slowly down the lane in the gathering dusk carrying on his shoulder a short ladder that was just long or tall enough for him to be able to reach up to the lamp to light it. There were, if I remember, four such lamps down the length of the lane and he would go to them one by one to spark them. He would observe the same routine in the mornings but only to extinguish the flames by merely capping them for a few moments.

 This must have been very early in my life, maybe in the late 1930s or even in the early 1940s. Some evenings the man wouldn’t appear

at all and the lane would remain dark and forbidding. What I have come to appreciate now is that a small town in a principality in an obscure part of India had gas lamps even in lanes in some areas, if not all, of its capital and for which the administration had taken trouble to lay pipes below the ground to take gas to them. That the feudal administration of Gwalior had thought of providing such an amenity for the common people in those early years of 20^th Century takes it a few notches higher in my estimation. Eventually, however, the gas lamps were replaced by electric lights but that was much later – around mid-1940s or, maybe, even later. I wonder whether other such princely states had gas lamps like we had. I know for sure, however, that Calcutta, the capital of British India for a long time, must have had gas-lit streets before they were replaced by electric lamps. The Strand Road along the River Hoogly in Calcutta, for one, continued to light up the boulevard for quite some time with gas lamps even after independence.

The feature on London spoke of how the city had been a pioneer in street lighting. The first ever public lighting with gas was installed in Pall Mall in 1807. To celebrate the birthday of King George III, Frederick Winsor, an engineer, lit the most spectacular of candles. To gasping crowds, he instantly illuminated a line of gas lamps, each one was fed with gas pipes made from the barrels of old musket guns and all Winsor had to do was apply a single spark to light up the whole street. The Mall was reported to be almost impassable with spectators until after midnight. The lighting of the Westminster Bridge followed in 1813. The first electric light made its appearance in 1878 on the Thames Embankment.

 

But the feature was not about electric street lights which today make London streets bright and glowing at night. It was about the gas lamps, about 1500 of which still light up London, including the sophisticated long avenue of Kensington Palace Gardens. These are among the last of the early 19^th Century gas lamps that are lovingly taken care of and lit by five remaining lamplighters who, in fact, are engineers of British Gas. It is a labour of love for them. Iain Bell, a lamplighter, so dearly loves them that he runs his hands over the lampposts so tenderly as if he was examining an antiquated sculpture. His objects of ardour are, indeed, beautifully shaped posts with stylised glass lanterns that decorate the streets as very beautiful components of street furniture. Bell jokes that at the time of the Olympics the lamps in this part of town were the cleanest in London; the lighters kept finding excuses to clean the lamps on Horse Guards Parade, the venue for the (bikini-clad) beach volleyball matches. 'The lamps,' Bell says, 'were so clean you could eat your dinner off them.'

The surroundings of Buckingham Palace are lit up by gas lamps.

These were reinstalled on special lamps that have a crown on top and are listed. Maintained by a team of six lamplighters round the clock, the lamps are kept in a condition to light up by themselves at dusk. In daylight, each lamp burns with a tiny pilot light. At dusk, a timer fitted to each lamp moves a lever to release a stronger stream of gas which gives enough power to light up the mantles to give off that softer light as against the harsh light of the electric lamps

Having survived the electric lamplights and the Great War II, they are well into the 21^st Century mostly because of the dedicated love and care of the lamplighters. Whereas the gas lamps of Gwalior have disappeared without a trace and the current generation may not even be aware that they once existed, the British sense of history will surely take London gas lamps down to the succeeding generations throwing their soft and subdued light on their evolution and history.

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Photos: From the Internet

GREENING OF GWALIOR

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Gwalior Fort

Gwalior is where I was born and brought up. It was a small town then – of about a lakh and a half. Climatically, it was cold in winters and very hot in summers with temperatures touching 45 to 46 degrees Celsius. The town was seemingly situated in a bowl with hills all around that had only scrub forests that hosted small game and an occasional big cat. These used to radiate heat of the sun that would relentlessly beat down on these rocky hills with sparse vegetation. With the thrust on urban expansion most of these hills have since been colonised.

However, happy tidings have since come from the town. Yesterday a news report said that the collectors of the district - past and present - planted 5 lakh trees over the last four or five years ushering a 'green revolution' in the city and the district. Of the 5 lakh saplings that were planted more than 4 lakh have survived and most of them have become young trees. The success that the bureaucrats got in ensuring a relatively much higher survival-rate of the saplings was because of the detailed plans drawn up for their care and their meticulous execution. They seem to have avoided monoculture and have planted saplings of a variety of trees like neem, sheesham and gooseberry, etc. These are big trees, though not fast growing but of immense value.

The successive collectors solicited and received unqualified support from several NGOs, other informal organisations and people in general. The report says that while the 'green revolution' has touched the villages around Gwalior, the city itself has been brought within its sweep. The hills in and around the city are reported to be sporting a green appearance. The greening has

Scrub forest

inevitably brought down the temperature by at least one degree Celsius and, the reports say, precipitation in the town has also increased. Encouraged by the success, the officials have taken up the work of greening the roadsides in the town. Unlike the Bhopal Municipal Commissioner, they seem to be oriented differently and are believers in the concept of developing roadside greenery

No wonder their efforts have brought recognition and rewards for the city and the district. The entire project and its implementation has been called for by the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, Mussourie, and is going to be included as a case study in its curriculum on the subject of Environment to orient the probationers towards this important aspect of administration.

There seems to be still some hope for the country.

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 Photos: From the Internet