Kolkata

This book explores the spatial characteristics of the city of Kolkata in India in terms of the physical, economic, social, political, and environmental aspects of urban geography, and focuses upon the inherent processes that impact its transformation. It discusses different facets of urban geography and highlights the contemporary challenges of a major primate city in South Asia, which represents the conflicts between the traditional and the modern, the rich and the poor, the skyscrapers and the shanties. With its detailed empirical research and mapping exercises based on real-time remote sensing data, the book offers an understanding of a range of contemporary urban issues. It examines the spatial consequences of urban sprawl, land-use changes, ecological crisis, climate change, critical disasters, dynamics of the peri-urban interface, neighborhood restructuring, debates around heritage conservation, housing poverty, gray spaces, governance and the political landscape of the city. This book will be useful to students, teachers, and researchers of geography, especially human geography and urban geography, urban studies, urban development and planning, regional planning, social geography, governance, ecology, economics, and South Asian studies. It will also benefit urban planners, development professionals, and those interested in the study of the city of Kolkata and its transformations.

This book examines the politics behind, and the socio-economic and ecological repercussions of, the making of a new township, variously called New Town, Megacity or Jyoti Basu Nagar, in Rajarhat near Kolkata. Conceived by the West Bengal state government in the mid-1990s, in pandering to the vision of urban planners of creating a hi-tech town beyond an unruly, crowded Kolkata, and feeding the hunger of realtors and developers, the city is built on the foundations of coercive, even violent, land acquisition, state largesse and corruption — and at the cost of erasing a self-sufficient subsistence economy and despoiling a fragile environment. Yet, after its completion and departure of construction labour, the new town appears as a necropolis, a ghost city, that belies its promised image of an urban utopia, even as the displaced locals lead a precarious, mobile existence as ‘transit labour’, engaged in odd and informal jobs. Written on the basis of intensive fieldwork, government documents, court records, and chronicles of public protests, this book broadly analyses the politics and economics of urbanisation in the age of post-colonial capitalism, particularly the paradoxical combination of neoliberal and primitive modes of capital accumulation upon which the global emergence of ‘new towns’ is based. Departing from the dominant styles of urban studies that focus on cultural or spatial analysis of cities, the authors show the links between changes in space, technology, political economy, class composition, and forms of urban politics which give concrete shape to a city. It will immensely interest those in sociology, political science, economics, development studies, urban studies, policy and governance studies, and history.

Brimming with information on the cultural corner of India, this Footprintfocus guide will take you from the hill station of Darjeeling to Sunderbans Tiger Reserve.

This region takes in the contrasts of India. From the brash and chaotic Delhi, through Varanasi, India’s holiest city, to the cultural hub that is Kolkata, these cities will truly provide an experience of India. Footprint Focus provides invaluable information on transport, accommodation, eating and entertainment to ensure that your trip includes the best of these dynamic destinations. • Essentials section with useful advice on getting to Delhi, Varanasi and Kolkata. • Comprehensive, up-to-date listings of where to eat, sleep and play. • Includes information on tour operators and activities, from tightly packed markets to visiting the holy riverbank. • Detailed maps for Delhi, Kolkata and other key destinations. • Slim enough to fit in your pocket. With detailed information on all the main sights, plus many lesser-known attractions, Footprint Focus Delhi to Kolkata provides concise and comprehensive coverage of one of India’s most fascinating regions. The content of Footprint Focus Delhi to Kolkata guide has been extracted from Footprint's India Handbook.

This book examines the global influence and scope of medical tourism with an emphasis on the city of Kolkata in Eastern India as an emerging destination at the regional scale. Through a geographical research perspective, the book discusses the importance of the phenomenon of medical tourism including recent trends, policies, and scale studies to develop sustainable strategies for medical tourism at particular micro destinations. In nine chapters, readers will become familiar with the multi-billion dollar industry of medical tourism and the problems currently associated with medical tourism at multiple scales. The trends of medical tourism in and around the city of Kolkata are used to demonstrate the roles of infrastructure and stakeholders in implementing feasible and sustainable medical tourism in an emerging destination. The first two chapters of the book provide an introduction to medical tourism and the methodologies of this study. Then chapters three through nine focus on medical tourism in the case of Kolkata to discuss the regional applications and developments of medical tourism. Topics addressed include medical tourism facilities, stakeholders and tourists, guest-host relationships, an assessment of development versus risk, and an evaluation of strategies to manage rising medical tourism in Kolkata. The concluding chapter discusses future strategies that could be used to implement the potentialities of a metropolitan city as a medical tourism destination, based on studies done in Kolkata. Readers who will find this work of interest include students, practitioners, geographers, and researchers and policymakers engaged in the medical tourism industry.

Based on a survey of women workers in Kolkata’s IT sector, this book argues that growth of the IT sector has created a demand for skilled professionals. This has provided scope for highly educated urban women to create a space of self-expression and enjoy enhanced status and prestige within their families. These women workers carefully plan their career and daily activities, keeping in mind the need to balance diverse and conflicting needs of work and home. This kind of decision-making occurs outside the utilitarian framework and is better framed in terms of Herbert Simon’s ‘satisficing’ approach, which takes into account the bounded rationality of agents. Written in lucid, non-technical language, the book will be an invaluable addition to existing works on gender and labour studies and will be of interest to social scientists undertaking research on gender, labour and the IT sector.