Logistical Worlds -Concept note

Contingency is the nightmare of logistics. Contingency is more than unpredictability or randomness. Contingency registers the force of material practices and events that disrupt logistical operations. Labour strikes, software glitches, inventory blowouts, traffic gridlocks – all interrupt the desire for a smooth world that animates logistical interventions and fantasies. Contingency produces variation and movement that prompt the invention of standards and protocols. Contingency demands ‘fault tolerance’ to make logistical worlds seamless. Once a normative state has been achieved, disruption and renewal can happen again. Contingency makes logistics.

The part of the project studied by CRG will revolve around the idea of shifts in logistical infrastructure of the Calcutta port in the context of development of new trade routes and implementation of the Look East policy of the Indian government. The specifics of development of a port system in Calcutta and uniqueness of its strategic location (intertwined with the port system at Haldia) will also come under scrutiny. Apart from that, the town of Siliguri, a nerve centre of military logistics, located in the northern part of West Bengal and connecting trade routes with several neighbouring states and countries will also appear in this study in the context of logistical development and generation of various forms of informality and illegality. Study the strategic position of the port of Calcutta, to look into the vision of forming of a port system taking into consideration both Calcutta and Haldia.

The first question relevant for a genealogical analysis was pointed out, namely: What made Calcutta such a major port in the past, despite its being a river port? It was suggested that here we need to explore the key question whether Calcutta being the capital of the British empire helped the port thrive or was it the other way round insofar as the port gave British power, entrenched in Bengal, a huge leverage in empire building? Following that trail the other question that was raised was: Does the old factors that made the Kolkata port such an important entrepot for trade and commerce still hold good — if not wholly, at least partially? Or else what explains Calcutta port’s survival? Is it only it is a public sector undertaking, or has it much to do with Calcutta’s geo-strategic and geo-economic location?

The objective would be to underscore the linkages between calculations governed by spatial considerations and speculations insisting on space making exercises so that the material foundations of infrastructure, software and labour come to the surface. What is even more interesting in this context is the fact that KPT is still a public sector enterprise with thousands of permanent staff and millions of dollars in built-in assets – a typical case in many Asian countries. The connections between various forms of calculation about the details of pilotage and drafting, revenue and expenditure of the port system, valuation and depreciation of human and non-human assets, risk assessment and insurance technologies, etc., and modalities of financialization of space by reforms in rent structure and revaluation of land holdings with a strong emphasis on investments in creating special ‘economic’ and ‘aesthetic’ zones as part of the urbanization drives in neoliberal capitalism cannot be addressed if we do not consider the governmental apparatuses that are in operation here.

Similarly there is a need to rethink the geo-imagination of north Bengal at a time when its ideational remit is being expanded by statist defence neurosis as well as everyday practices of mobile peoples. Conjointly, is it possible to think of this reimagined north Bengal as more integrally a part of the northeast, with its border economy and its “travelling actors”, so to speak? At another level, through its rhizomic entanglement of control, crime, communication and capital, Siliguri shows us that a border economy does not remain confined to the border and borderlands but seeps and segues into the so-called mainland to bring about powerful transformations in the economies of the mainland and cities therein. Going a step forward, it may be said that the metro-polarities of Siliguri present before us the idea of what may be paradoxically called a “futuristic archetype” of a border-city. It is archetypical in the Jungian sense of being a mental image— a dream project— that is already-always present in the collective unconscious and yet, insofar as it is a mental image, it is an abstraction that is realizable only at some indeterminate and permanently deferred point in the future. In this sense, Siliguri approximates the untimely; for, as Deleuze tells usand probably fittingly for Siliguri, “there is no present which is not haunted by a past and a future, by a past which is not reducible to a former present, by a future which does not consist of a present to come.”

The following points would be addressed in the study: (1) Cost of operation in the port; (2) Locating the shifts in the infrastructural network of the port, and in this context the possibilities and recent programmes of revival of the port; (3) Given that the port is considered as belonging to service sector, possibilities of introduction of fresh business areas and coming of new stakeholders which can make the port more alive; (4) Uniqueness of the geo-political location of the Calcutta port (along with Haldia port) and its hinterland; thus studying the location of Calcutta in the framework of trade routes to northern and north-eastern part of India, and the possibility of road connectivity between Calcutta and Thailand.; (5) specificity of the port in the global network of logistical connectivity, particularly in the East and the North east; and (6) pattern of crime, disaster management and security system.