In the many years that the Leftist parties governed West Bengal, they paid little attention to protection of the environment. It just wasn’t part of their paradigm for development. They also had no time for anyone who thought differently. In an old-fashioned way, they ran a closed administration and you had to be very brave to want to be out of step.
It was in such circumstances in the 1980’s that Dhrubajyoti Ghosh, then a mere civil engineer in the Public Works Department, discovered the garbage gardens and sewage-fed fisheries in the eastern fringes of Kolkata. . .