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 th