CLASS POLICIES IN METROPOLITAN DEVELOPMENT 17 servants withia the Corporation limits vary between two and three lakhs. These people and the vast majority of those employed in offices constitute eighty-five to ninety percent of the population of the metropolis. It is not unusual, therefore, that in Calcutta poverty should stare at the viewers with stark nakedness. The Nature and Impact of State Policy These are the people who should have formed the target of any rational metropolitan development planning. Targets they have become alright, not of development, but of attack. Calcutta has already spent an enormous amount of money for drawing up blueprints for development and executing some of them. The Fourth Plan allocation was to the tune of about one hundred and fifty crores of rupees. The Fifth Plan outlay was almost twice this size. Crores have come and are coming as foreign aid, the latest being the Rs 83 crore loan from the World Bank. The CMDA had submitted to the World Bank a package project which envisaged an expenditure of about $ 180 million on water supply, sewage and drainage, traffic and transportation, bustee improvement and setting up of townships. What are the highlights of these developmental programmes? Let us go by the comments of the State Planning Board.6 The characteristic of the programme mix is mainly oriented towards basic urban infrastructure like water, drainage, sanitation and transport. But this without any effective programme of maintenance and which the fragemented administrative structure of the metropolis has neither the fiscal resources nor the trained manpower to maintain. On the other hand, education, health and housing, the basic human necessities, have been virtually given a go by. This metropolis has as its citizens the largest number of illiterates that any city of its size can claim (40 percent of city population). Inadequacy of health services needs no data to prove it. We have already noted the housing situation. Pressed by public opinion, the CMDA had undertaken a programme of improving the slums with additional light and water connections and construction of sanitary privies. Some work was done. But absence of continuous attention has taken the situation back to square one. While the transportation development programme has led to the construction of wide and straight boulevards through the city, mass transit service remains totally overlooked except for what is being done for the proposed Underground Railway. As a rule charges for public services have been growing persistently. ^These major new investments'* wrote the State Planning Board, ^provide an immense opportunity for reshaping Calcutta, as also its other corollary of speculation in land market".7 In fact, with every single developmental investment the corollary has been on the rampage. Real eatate speculation in this metropolis has never been so profitable. Land prices have never