After Wellesley's departure, the work of town planning was carried on by the Lottery Committee (1817) with the help of the government.
The Lottery Committee was so named because funds for town improvement were raised through public lotteries. In other words, in the early decades of the nineteenth-century raising funds for the city was still thought to be the responsibility of public-minded citizens and not exclusively that of the government.
The Lottery Committee commissioned a new map of the city so as to get a comprehensive picture of Calcutta. Among the Committee's major activities was road building in the Indian part of the city and
clearing the river bank of "encroachments". In its drive to make the Indian areas of Calcutta cleaner, the committee removed many huts and displaced the labouring poor, who were now pushed to the outskirts of Calcutta.
The threat of epidemics gave a further impetus to town planning in the next few decades. Cholera started spreading in 1817 and in 1896 plague made its appearance. |
