it is not as if this new disaster was unexpected unlike majerhat bridge which although warned about was still in some way an unexpected happening especially for those who died and those who fell in their vehicles this one snapping at the heels of the bridge collapsing has been at the firing end of dire predictions based on numerous past experiences and present conditions especially when seven major fires over the last 10 years have been blazing examples for the future the fire department says they deal with at least 50 small fires in this area every year the bagri market fire last sunday may not have killed anyone but it sent an estimated rs 200 crore to rs 1000 crore worth of commercial goods up in smoke depending on who is telling you these figures a little before the festival season this is a disaster for many how this happened is also not a mystery electrical short circuits are usually the prime reasons the stocks of highly flammable wares stored in rudimentary safety and usually in fire hazard conditions is the other cause for the fire to rage uncontrolled for longer than necessaryfires are not new to the burrabazar area once a huge yarn and cloth market known as sutanuti haat started by bengali traders sett and bysack and identified by historians as existing as far back as 1738 it was set on fire by troops of siraj uddaulah in 1756 after that it eventually expanded into what was supposedly asias largest wholesale market in anything that could be traded anything is not an exaggeration merely a simple fact despite the decline in fortunes of calcutta city over the years it is still impossible to place an authentic value on the actual volume of business and commerce that is conducted here every day unauditable cash transactions account for large volumes and include transactions in kachcha as black money is called no written records are maintained in such cases everything hinges on memory and trusteven during the central governments unwarranted demonetisation of november 2016 hard cash transactions continued with impunity allegedly reduced in value but not by much old notes were exchanged for new then at an average levy of 40 as service fees news reports of 2008 and 2016 go into some finer details of cash dealings here and honestly nothing has changed since that november i recall my regular gujjar taxi driver in delhi offering to instantly exchange old notes for me after deducting 40 of their value out of curiosity i asked him how he was doing it when people were standing in frustratingly interminable queues outside banks he laughed uproariously and told me it was all happening via cullkatta knowing i was from there i chose then to be part of a long queue suffering as i invariably did from a paucity of personal funds but now i understand what he said having wryly dismissed it thenthen of course one must wonder at how municipal trade