This photojournal about the Pallikarnai wetlands was created by Sivapradha and Lalitha from the Centre for Development Finance, who spent many hours going back and forth to Pallikarnai to take photos of an issue that they are both concerned about. We felt we should share this piece of work with all our users!

Click here to view: Pallikaranai Photostory

Transparent Chennai Team

This video and write-up is from Video Volunteers  (http://www.videovolunteers.org/), a media organization that works towards empowering the world’s unheard and disadvantaged communities. We thought that this video captured some very serious problems with solid waste management in the city. People that live in low-income communities are often neglected when it comes to the provision of public services and amenities, such as solid waste management. Watch this video to learn more!

Over a million slum dwellers don’t have access to basic sanitation in Chennai – home town of this video’s correspondent.

Nearly 25% of Chennai’s 7 million citizens live in the city’s various slums. But when it comes to basic civic facilities like sanitation, the administration always tends to forget them.

In this video, Mani shows us an example in Kotturpuram slum where ten thousand people live in extremely poor sanitary condition. Every lane in the slum is covered with rotting garbage and sewage flowing out of homes and clogged drains. No municipality worker comes here to clean the roads or clear the drains.

This is because, Mani says, slums are never considered as important as other areas of the city by the administration. So services such as sanitation and garbage collection hardly reach the slum dwellers.

Though residents of Kotturpuram slum have made repeated complaints to the municipality over the unclean roads, nothing has been done. Now, if we are to think that every slum more or less share the same set of problems such as sewage, unclean water and road, we get a picture where the city administration is practically ignoring the need demand of nearly one and half million people!

Waste management and sewage treatment have been Tamil Nadu’s worst areas of performance. There are two rivers that flow through Chennai city – Cooum and Adyar. Both of them are heavily polluted. The Cooum in particular has been severely polluted with effluents from some business establishments, and plastic bags and sewage from slums on its banks.

Mani who lives quite close to Kotturpuram says that currently the government of Tamil Nadu working on a plan that aims to make Chennai ‘slum-free” by 2013.

As a part of the plan, Tamil Nadu government has started constructing several residential complexes across Chennai to rehabilitate slum-dwellers. But Mani says, besides providing shelter, the government also needs to provide other civic facilities to the slum dwellers. Otherwise they will continue to live in the unhealthy condition that they do now.

Are there civic issues in Chennai that you would like IndiaUnheard to report on? If yes, let us know by submitting your story idea.

“Source: Video Volunteers – http://indiaunheard.videovolunteers.org/mani/chennai-slums-garbage-woes/“

By Vaishnavi Narasimhan

The Pallikaranai marsh is one of the last remaining ecosystems in Chennai. The marsh spread over 5000 hectares during the time of independence and has now been reduced to less than 600 hectares due to rapid urban expansion.  Urban development in Chennai has historically gone hand in hand with reclaiming wetlands for waste disposal, housing and commercial and industrial purposes. Therefore, many water bodies associated with the Pallikaranai have been polluted and converted into waste water drains, resulting in a heavy loss of habitat.

The map below shows the various reasons for Pallikaranai’s shrinkage over the years. The Pallikaranai is bifurcated by the Tambaram Velachery Main road and the Pallavaram Radial road. Bifurcation has shrunk the marsh and also led to the loss of several species and habitat. The Chennai Corporation dump site is located on the northern side of the Pallavaram Radial road. Another dump site, used exclusively by Alandur Municipality is located on the eastern side of the Tambaram Velachery Main road. Apart from municipal solid waste, construction debris, tyres and untreated sewage water are all illegally disposed into the marsh. Infrastructure and construction projects such as the National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT), The Center for Wind Energy Technology (C-WET), the MRTS and construction of various IT company campuses on the banks of Pallikaranai have all contributed to the shrinkage of the marsh. Rapid urbanization over the past decade has resulted in congested residential areas near Pallikaranai and the rise of restaurants, shopping malls, skyscrapers, hospitals, and so forth, all weakening the ecological functions of the marshland.

The Shrinkage of Pallikaranai

The Pallikaranai marsh is important for several reasons. The marsh is connected to 31 different water bodies, all of which release surplus water into the marsh during the monsoons. Therefore, the marsh and its related water bodies are part of a system that is important for mitigation of flood waters. The marsh is also crucial for ground water recharge, soil and water conservation and lends itself as a grazing area and breeding ground for many species of fish and birds. Furthermore, it adds aesthetic, cultural and heritage value to the city. Our precious Pallikaranai is in great peril, unless immediate action is taken to stop dumping and other activities that will ultimately lead to the death of the marshland.

Reference: Chandramohan. D.B., Bharathi. D. The Role of Public Governance in Conservation of Urban Wetland System: A Study of Pallikaranai Marsh.

It has been a while since I last blogged. I could not find an appropriate topic to blog about. Moreover, the team has been blogging regularly about latest events and updates, so I waited till I was adequately inspired to put down my thoughts in words. Today seems to be the day. As I sit at home enjoying the long weekend, I can’t help but think about Transparent Chennai, and the team’s dream to make it a citizens-led platform. Each and every member of our team has an aspiration for this polluted and crowded yet strikingly beautiful city of Chennai. After the successful launch of our website, our aspirations and dreams look slightly more realistic and achievable. By asking our users to contribute, we have moved one step closer to our dream. There is this one thought that keeps the team going – ‘What if Transparent Chennai succeeds in its endeavor to empower its citizens?’ While that remains a question to be answered in due time, one might wonder who the real master minds are behind the project.

I would call them the men ‘behind the scenes’. Prabu Raja from the tech team, without whom our mapping project would have been impossible, says “I am very fond of mapping and work towards improving the technology for development. I want to leverage my skills to reach out to the citizens by allowing them to view data on exciting and easy-to-understand maps.” When asked about the city, Prabu tells me, “I hate traffic jams and I feel sad about slum dwellers living close to Cooum who suffer the most when Chennai gets flooded during incessant rains. Chennai in my dreams would be a city where all these issues have been taken care of.” Muthukumaran, who sits right next to Prabu, shares similar thoughts. “I really enjoy working on this project because the very idea that I can reach out to Chennai’s residents through this medium excites me,” says Muthu. “I only hope that people appreciate this project and come forward to join us in this modest effort of ours to change Chennai for the better.” Muthu is the man behind the interesting design of the website which has evolved over time  to become more user-friendly and catchy.

Meryl Mary Sebastian, our longest standing intern, leads a hapless life as she goes around from one zonal office to the other searching for mapable data. She might be the youngest member in our team but don’t you underestimate her skills to gather and organize data. “This project introduced me to ideas of how and what a city could be. I love that we are creating a space for information that will empower and encourage the citizens of Chennai to participate in the planning and shaping of their city,” says our intern. All that she aspires for is a ‘clean and green Chennai!’ Our newest member Vaishnavi Narasimhan has been on a roll ever since she joined the project. When questioned, she gives a curt reply – “I would like to see more trees and less garbage.” Vaishnavi has been traveling to each and every place in the city where one can find heaps of garbage. If you are a resident of Chennai, you would know that her task is practically endless. She also loves chatting up with groups and organizations and has been crucial in getting the project its due publicity.  We have one another Muthu working from home, who is invisible even to the team, but his work speaks for him. Whenever we have a problem of transferring data to the GIS platform, we look towards Muthu for solutions. His data cleaning work involves a lot of patience and time, and the team in its entirety was really happy to meet him during the launch of TC!

There have been 10 more interns for this project from different parts of the world who came and worked with us because they found the project interesting and exciting. All these members are invisible to the citizens we reach out to, but they are undoubtedly the real face of this project. Three cheers to all of you out there. Of course, there is something about this project that brings us all together – this project is about how we can make each and every day of our lives better. The website has massive potential which can be realized when more, and eventually all of us, come together and realize our duty to voice our opinions as informed and empowered residents of Chennai. Imagine- One day all of you MIGHT have enough walking space in Chennai, an excellent public transport which takes you to your destination in no time, a flyover which serves its very purpose, pollution free roads and parks, a clean and hygienic place to pee whenever you feel like and not having to hold it till you reach home, door to door collection of garbage and no mountains of smelly filth strewn around the streets of Chennai! Nobody but you can change this ‘MIGHT’ to ‘WILL’. We have already taken a number of steps towards getting closer to our dream and probably yours as well, but the rest is your responsibility.

Contact us immediately!

Posted by Somya Sethuraman

This week, we have created a layer which allows you, the user, to mark a location on the map. We are putting this out here as a proof of concept/ technology and we hope that some individuals or groups will want to create a layer of their own using this tool. If you are interested in creating a thematic layer around a particular topic of interest, do get in touch with us. We also encourage you to contribute to this blog and contact us for any other kind of information you would like to see on this or if you would like to collaborate in some way.

Upcoming features over the next few weeks will include a layer on Solid Waste Management, a layer which will allow you to tag a location on the map and lodge a complaint with the Chennai Corporation, an online polling feature and a mailing list. Stay tuned and do keep checking in. If you would like to get updates on new features/ blogposts, please contact us and we will pre-register you on our mailing list when we roll it out.

Some quick usage stats from Google Analytics:

Though this site has been live and attracting users for over 6 months, the response to our launch event has been amazing! We have had over 2800 users (see the map below) visiting the site since our ‘official’ launch 10 days ago! These 2800+ users have spent an average of approximately 5 minutes on the site and there have been 12,250 page views! What’s more, about 2200 of these visitors are ‘unique’ visitors. Considering the niche segment the site caters to (citizens concerned about one particular city in India), these are very heartening statistics.

Understandably, a majority of our visitors (~1800) have been from India and of these ~1800, about 1300 from Chennai. What is surprising, however, is the no. of visitors from all over the world from Dubai, London, Muscat, Singapore to almost every major city in the US!

We thank our visitors for their support and hope to continue providing exciting content to all visitors!

Posted by Akshai Abraham

I first heard about this project “Transparent Chennai” from an intern working on the project at CDF sometime in the month of July. Upon learning what the project was endeavouring for the Chennai citizens, the component that most interested me was the mapping of city’s bus routes. Having been fleeced by the auto drivers of Chennai in the first two months of my stay in the city, I was just starting to explore buses as an option to run my errands around the city.

So soon after the TC launch on 4^th October, I logged in to check out the feature on bus routes. In the past week thanks to TC I have discovered two new bus routes from Adyar to Santhome (6D and 21T) in addition to a new bus stop near home (this one sadly has no bus shed or a board to announce its existence to the commuters!). But TC mappers discovered this one too!!!

By playing around with this tool, one can discover the various permutation and combination of buses available between two destinations. For example, now I know that by breaking my journey at Satya studio while commuting from Adyar to Santhome, I can greatly increase my options. There are 5 bus routes from Adyar to Satya studio and 4 more between Satya studio and Santhome. This is in addition to the 2 new direct bus route discoveries made through TC. Now you can see the humongous jump in my bus route options.

Our TC is truly an apt acronym for “Take Care” I would say….

Posted by Sivapradha, Researcher, Centre for Development Finance, IFMR

By Vaishnavi Narasimhan

Chennai has many environmental assets, including around 3000 water bodies. Some of these include:

1)      A long sea coast with two tidal creeks – The Adyar Creek and Ennore Creek.

2)      The second largest lagoon in India – the Pulicat Lake.

3)      Several other lakes, such as Redhills, Chembarambakkam, Poondi, Cholavaram and Porur.

4)      Many Estuaries and backwaters, such as the Adyar Estuary and Creek.

5)      Weltands and Swamps – Pallikaranai, Oggian Madugu, Madavaram and Ennore.

6)      And a large number of smaller lakes, eris, ponds and several temple tanks.

So why do we still face severe water shortages in the city?

Over the years, these water bodies have shrunk due to various reasons. Water bodies are generally viewed as sources of irrigation and drinking water and not environmental assets. Therefore, lakes and rivers that do not provide water for irrigation or drinking are often reclaimed as wastelands, without considering their ecological significance.

Furthermore, rapid urbanization and industrialization has led to large scale encroachment into water bodies. Houses, apartment complexes and buildings are built over lakes and eris, causing them to perish and obstructing the flow of water. With real estate and land prices skyrocketing, people are scrambling to get their hands on any piece of land, and often end up building on areas where lakes used to exist not so long ago. This is, incidentally, also one of the major reasons for severe flooding during the monsoons. Encroachment into water bodies also severely reduces the potential for groundwater recharge. Even though Chennai receives an average rainfall of 129cm, well above the national average, encroachment allows only 5% of this water to percolate into the ground. Furthermore, we have already exploited about 80% of our ground water and experts fear that any more extraction from the ground could lead to salt water ingression (movement of salt water into fresh water reservoirs due to a pressure gradient).

This is a 65-year old map that shows the locations of several water bodies. The gray areas of the map represent eris, or small ponds. The gray water bodies are seasonal, in that they appear during the rainy seasons and remain dry during the rest of the year. Comparison of this map with a more recent map will show that several of these water bodies have shrunk and several have completely disappeared.

Map showing waterbodies

Hello friends,
We need all of you(in Chennai and vicinity) to attend this open house
tomorrow, Sat the 9th Oct 2010, as we are at a very critical juncture in
terms of saving democracy and restoring people’s faith in the election
system. The top officials of this department will be in attendance tomorrow
and we need to show to them that there are a good number of socially
responsible citizens who are wanting these undemocratic acts to
stop…Please forward to all your contacts and make tomorrow’s event a full
house….

STOP CASH for VOTE!(huh!) Tomorrow 9 Oct 10, 10.30 am at Chennai-5th Pillar
and allies hold Open House on “FREE & FAIR ELECTIONS- Combating Money &
Muscle Power in 2011 TN Elections”- P.S.Higher Sec.School, R.K.Mutt Road,
Mylapore- Chief Election Commissioner, Dr. S.Y. Quraishi presides. Other
panelists include former …CEC, Mr.Gopalaswami, former TN Election
Commissioner Mr.Naresh Gupta. All are welcome- Let us RESTORE PEOPLE’S FAITH
IN DEMOCRACY AND ELECTIONS- More details on
http://www.facebook.com/l/59156ZTZ6NXUcG1wjDEdgPkPALw;www.5thpillar.org(Help
spread the word by re-posting on your facebook wall, orkut or
blog..Thanks.)

In solidarity,
Vijay Anand.

President- 5th Pillar
41, Circular Road, United India Colony,
Kodambakkam, Chennai- 600 024.

A letter from our friends! Transparent Chennai requests you to attend this event!

Transparent Chennai’s toilets layer got some publicity after the official launch of the site on Monday. The most detailed article, which ran in the Times of India (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/Only-600-public-toilets-in-city/articleshow/6686444.cms), captured the nuances of our findings well, but was slightly off on one of our numbers. I want to take this opportunity to talk about our toilets layer in more detail here.

Our team became very interested in access to sanitation for the poor last year, and we began to ask questions about the number of public toilets in the city. When we approached the Chennai Corporation for information about the total number of public toilets and their locations, they told us to go to the zonal offices because they did not have the information. So, one of our team members visited each of the city’s ten zonal offices, and asked whether they could provide her a list of the toilets in their zone. Zonal staff were, for the most, bemused by our interest, and provided the information voluntarily. But before we put the data up on the site, we decided to file an RtI application for the same information, just to confirm our numbers. We were really surprised to find that the numbers were all completely different. Here’s a table with the numbers that we first received from the Zonal offices and what the RtI data turned up.

The numbers are not radically different, but these discrepancies still bring up important questions about the management of toilets in the city. If the Chennai Corporation does not have a central register of toilets, how do they know where more toilets are needed? How is “access” to sanitation across the city even calculated when the city government does not have a central register of the number and location of public toilets? How much money is allocated for improving access to sanitation in the city, and how are strategies to improve sanitation decided upon?

We hope to be exploring these questions in more detail in our research over the next couple of months, and plan to hold a meeting on public toilets and access to sanitation, particularly for women in the city, in November. Check back for details of this meeting if you’re interested in this topic, or contact us to help us in mapping and surveying toilets in the city!

- Nithya V Raman

Do you ever wonder where all your trash ends up? We throw tons of garbage into our trash cans everyday and completely forget about it. It seems to magically disappear out of our homes and we never have to deal with it again. At least, that’s what I thought until I went on a “Garbage Yatra’ all across north Chennai.

As one of Transparent Chennai’s initiatives, I went about looking for dump sites all over north Chennai. Mr. Paramanandam, a very knowledgeable field worker from Exnora, was gracious enough to take me around the city to examine the solid waste management situation. Paramanandam explained that there are four steps to disposal of garbage. The first step is Primary Collection, which involves picking up garbage from each doorstep on every street. Smaller vehicles are used for easier accessibility. These vehicles assemble at a collection point where they transfer the garbage to larger vehicles. Garbage is then taken to transfer stations and temporarily placed at these locations. A transfer station is a site used for the temporary deposition of garbage, before it is transported to a larger landfill. Gargage in Chennai is taken to one of 8 transfer stations. Each zone is assigned a particular transfer station. Garbage from all of the transfer stations then taken to one of two major dump sites in Chennai – Kodungaiyur in the north and Perungudi in the South. However, I learned on the field trip that there are several other unofficial dump sites all over the city, apart from Kodungiyur and Perungudi.

Paramanandam explained to me that solid waste management in the city is a huge disaster. The problem arises because of Chennai’s large population and sizable floating population, consisting of traders and workers traveling in and out of the city on a daily basis. Chennai churns out around 3500 tonnes of garbage each day. The Chennai city corporation clears our around 65% of this garbage everyday, but is unable to handle the rest due to lack of man power and facilities. Additionally, residents fail to comply with garbage pick-up times, by not putting out their garbage before 7:30am, as per the Corporation’s schedule. Hence, the remaining 35% of garbage ends up along road sides, in water bodies and even storm water drains. Thus, residents of Chennai are posed which a host of serious problems, such as mosquitoes, ground water pollution, diseases and flooding.

Our first stop was the Basin Bridge Transfer station. I couldn’t help but notice the putrid air around us as soon as we got close to the transfer station. There was a large slum across the street from the transfer station. The slum dwellers, I was told, use the station as a public toilet everyday, making living conditions around the area worse than it already is. I was warned against taking pictures or notes conspicuously at the transfer station. I noticed a few trucks going in and out of the station, carrying mounds of garbage. I was told that all of this garbage is taken to the dump yard un-segregated. Though small efforts have been made at separating degradable and non-degradable garbage, the corporation does not have the resources or the willingness to handle this effectively and ends up mixing the garbage together before transferring it to the dump yards.

After basin bridge, we drove along the harbor on Raypuram Beach Road in north Chennai. The beauty of the harbor was marred by islands of garbage all along the coast. We then drove up to Ennur and stopped at the Ennur thermal power station. Every so often, I would notice small bodies of water along the side of the road covered with water lilies and other beautiful vegetation. Most of them were either entirely covered with garbage or were on their way to becoming unofficial dump sites. Paramanandam explained, that water bodies are often the first place where industrial wastes get dumped. The highly industrialized northern part of Chennai suffers from severe ground and surface water pollution.

We continued on to a few municipalities and town panchayats in north Chennai. Most of north Chennai seemed to be underdeveloped with respect to infrastructure and urban development. Garbage in each of these local bodies is managed separately from the corporation. There was a common theme to all of these municipalities and panchayats – poor waste management. Garbage seemed to be everywhere, blanketing ponds and lakes, and burning in mounds on the side of the road.

The climax of our trip was the visit to the 360-acre Kodungiyur dump yard – one of two huge official dumpsites in Chennai, where half of Chennai’s garbage ends up. I could smell the stench at this site well before we got close to it. The yard was enclosed by a large wall that extended far and wide to hide the awful site that lay within. Unfortunately, I was strictly forbidden from taking pictures. I took a quick peak into the yard and saw huge mountains of garbage for miles. The weight of the garbage that is dumped by each truck is measured before it goes into the yard. New garbage is constantly dumped over existing garbage, and no initiatives are taken to clear the old garbage and rehabilitate the dump site.

One of our last stops was the Koyambedu market dump, which is a large, unofficial dump site that is not handled by the Chennai corporation or any municipalities or panchayats. This dump sites houses all of the degradable waste that comes out of one of Asia’s largest perishable goods markets. Paramanandam described this waste as “good garbage,” because it could be composted and used to produce energy. However, it rots in a large ground at the moment.

Koyembedu Market

The Koyambedu Market dump

The field trip showed me that the trash that we throw out does not disappear out of our lives, but affects us every day by befouling our roads, polluting air and water, causing diseases and, finally, destroying the beauty of our city. According to Paramanandam, the first step to better solid waste management is for residents to say no to garbage. A few tips that he gave me were to carry your own bag when you go grocery shopping and avoid using plastic bags, buy items with minimal packaging, avoid purchasing disposable items, reuse items such as plastic or glass bottles, newspaper, etc, recycle, and compost your kitchen waste.

Written by Vaishnavi Narasimhan