Roads to be renamed after Gourkishore Ghosh, Barun Sengupta & Amitava Chowdhury

The state government will rename three roads after three renowned journalists Gourkishore Ghosh, Barun Sengupta and Amitava Chowdhury, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee announced on Monday.

The roads will be formally renamed at a function on June 19. The Information and Cultural Affairs department will identify the roads which will be renamed. A road off Kankurgachi, where Ghosh used to live would be renamed. Similarly, two roads situated in the areas close to Bartaman Bhavan on JBS Halden Sarani and

Ranikuthi where Sengupta and Chowdhury used to live would be renamed after them.

Ghosh, who wrote under the penname Rupadarshi, received the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay award in 1981. He was arrested, put behind bars by the Siddhartha Shankar Roy-government during the Emergency.

Barun Sengupta, a reporter of Janasevak and Anandabazar, who later launched Bartaman, was also arrested and put behind bars by the Siddhartha Shankar Roy-government during the same time. Sengupta was a source of inspiration to Mamata Banerjee when she had led a series of movements as a Youth Congress leader and as the supremo of Trinamool Congress. Sengupta was a reporter in a vernacular daily and because of his determination, he successfully launched Bartaman, a Bengali daily in the early 1980s.

Amitava Chowdhury, the former news editor of Jugantar, a Bengali vernacular newspaper, was famous for his versatility. His limericks are very popular but was also an essayist and as a former student of Santiniketan, he carried out extensive research on Tagore.

Meanwhile, Mamata Banerjee will also inaugurate a museum at Mahasweta Devi's residence on Tuesday. The Magsaysay award winner had received mementoes and gifts from scholars, litterateurs and also ordinary people both from within the country and abroad. A museum has been set up to display them and it would be thrown open to public.

Mahasweta Devi fought to establish the rights of the Sabars who had been branded criminals by the British and for many years after Independence, they carried on with this stigma. Finally, they got their rights following her relentless fight. She was very close to Mamata Banerjee and wrote several articles against the antipeople decisions of the Left Front government in Nandigram and Singur.

On Monday, Banerjee and Firhad Hakim, Sovan Chatterjee, Subrata Mukherjee and Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay were present at the Eco Park. She is slated to inaugurate the Japanese Garden by pressing the button at a function to be held at Netaji Indoor stadium on Tuesday afternoon. The garden will be the first-of-its-kind in eastern India and one of the 500 Japanese Gardens outside Japan.