In one of the earlier posts titled “Chennai Metro Rail: Is it the best solution to the city’s increasing traffic problem“, we had listed out a few concerns that CMRL would have to address in order to ease traffic congestion. Now, a new problem that has emerged is the acquisition of land. The Hindu reports that 30 hectares of land allocated to the CMRL for building the train depot at Koyembedu might not be sufficient. The design of the depot requires additional 5.5 hectares and sources state that  25 shops might be displaced in the process while 100 other shops will face inconvenience.

Other problems that the metro is likely to face in the future are the high operation/maintenance costs and high electricity bills. There is already a wide gap between the projected demand and current supply of electricity in Chennai and with the advent of metro, the rising deficits will inevitably be borne by the poor and marginalised sections of the society. Read article…

——

Roshan Toshniwal

Information regarding an interactive discussion organized by PUCL-Tamil Nadu & Puducherry & Dept. of Outreach Programmes, Loyola College:

Invite

When money and muscle power rule elections; when honest candidates face threat to contest; when votes of the people are bought by the politicians; when paid news shape the image of the candidates… are we, as citizens, helpless to prevent the open and brazen sabotage of the electoral process? What can citizens do to bring about free and fair elections?

We believe that citizens can make a difference. We invite you to discuss what we can do.

PUCL-Tamil Nadu & Puducherry & Dept. of Outreach Programmes, Loyola College

Jointly invite you to an interactive discussion meeting on ‘Election Monitoring – The Law and Experiences- Role for Citizens, Media and Official Agencies

On 27^th Mar.2011 (Sunday) @ 3.00pm @ Preview theatre, Visual Communications dept., Loyola College, Nungambakkam, Chennai-34

Speakers

Mr.Naresh Gupta IAS (Retd), Former Chief Electoral Officer

Mr. M.G. Devasahayam IAS (Retd), Forum for Electoral Integrity

Mr. Sam Rajappa, Senior Journalist, The Telegraph

Mr. Arokiyavel, Senior Magazine Editor, Vikatan Group

Mr. T. Ramakrishnan / Mr R. Kolappan, Journalists, The Hindu (to be confirmed)

Mr. Subramanian, Fifth Pillar

Presided by Dr. V Suresh, National Secretary – PUCL

———————————

We invite students, young lawyers, teachers, officials, journalists and citizens to participate in the meeting.

Most of us inherently trust maps, but maps are actually ‘manipulated reality,’ reality as the map-maker wants us to see it. In India, we go one step further. For a map-maker working with government data, maps are the reality that we can piece together from the clutter of government data sources.

While working with maps for several projects, including with the Transparent Chennai project (www.transparentchennai.com), I too am forced to try and represent reality or come as close to reality as possible. However, when working with Indian data and maps, even without discussing technical issues such as different projection and coordinate systems, more often than not, the simplest task becomes a headache. As a simple example, try ‘googling’ the number of districts in India. From various sources you would come up with 593, 596, 626, 631, 640, 642 etc. While we are familiar with some of the changes our government has made, such as the creation of Uttarakhand (or is it Uttaranchal? more on names later) and Chhattisgarh, most of us would not know of the many changes happening to districts in the country. Taking just the census years from 1961 onwards, the number of districts increased from 339 in ’61 to 359, 414, 472 and finally 594 in 2001. The number today in 2011 could be 600 if you go with the Department of Land Resources, Ministry of Rural Development[1] or maybe 626 or 627 depending on which page of the SAME government owned website[2] you want to believe!

So what does one do when there is data pertaining to a particular year which is to be displayed thematically on a map? Take a dataset of any year and Murphy’s Law will ensure your map is of another year. What do you do with a district such as Ariyalur in Tamil Nadu which features in Census 2001. If you have data pre-2001, you will spend hours figuring out that Ariyalur was part of Tiruchirapalli in 1993 which was then split into 3 districts in 1995 (Karur, Tiruchirapalli and Peramblur). Come 2001 and Peramblur was split into Peramblur and Ariyalur so the once single district in 1993 is now four districts in 2001. But its now 2011 so why look so far back, you say. Fair enough. We have Ariyalur in 2001. Now 2002 comes along and we go back to a combined Peramblur! So Ariyalur disappears! What do you do now with your latest map? You can’t even map the most basic of data sources, the census! But wait, Ariyalur is making a comeback! Forward to 2007 and it reappears! Match your data to your map or your map to your data or just give up?

Let’s take a break from boundary issues for a while and look at names. District names are well… just names right? But if you are trying to automate the matching of data, the name of a district assumes deadly headache-inducing powers. We have already seen how using district codes from Census data is pretty pointless, so we are left with only district names to work with. Anyone who has done a bit of work with maps/ data would have suffered through districts which could be prefaced with West, Paschim, Paschimi; or East, Purbi, Purab, Purba; North, Uttar, Uttara; or South, Dakshina, Dakshin. One could say, no big deal – we know north, south, east, west, just use find-replace operations, problem solved. But what do you do with Alappuzha, Aleppy and Alleppey, or Kannur, Cannanore and Kanoor, or Kollam and Quilon, or Kozhikode and Calicut, or Thiruvananthapuram and Trivandrum, or Thrissur and Trichur? And that’s just from the state of Kerala. In our very own Tamil Nadu, that southernmost place that every 12 year old knows of could be written as Kanyakumari, Kannyakumari, Kanniyakumari if we stick to official names. If the creator of a dataset has split the name into two words or misspelt it, then there are many, many more permutations! But at least they sound similar. What about Sivaganga? It could be Sivagangai or (get this) Pasumpon Thevar Thirumagan or Pasumpon Muthuramalinga Thevar!!

Name-games over, let’s get back to our boundaries, but this time going down to lower levels of administrative boundaries to face some more conundrums. Even if you manage figuring out the difference between blocks, taluks, tehsils and mandals you can rest assured Mr. Murphy and his law will be around to see to it that you have block data and taluk maps. Go down a level or two more to city level and you are guaranteed to have to choose from two or more sources. First, one has to understand the difference between zones, divisions, wards, assembly and parliamentary constituencies and various other terms for varying urban entities and their classifications. For e.g. try to get ward boundaries of Chennai. The Census ward boundaries and the Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA) boundaries are so vastly different that there is no reconciling the two. Visit our ‘build a map’ page <http://www.transparentchennai.com/buildamap/> and select ‘Census data by ward boundaries >> Ward boundaries only” and “Ward Boundary (from 2008 CMDA Second Master Plan)” for instant confusion! Obviously, if one is trying to show census data thematically on a map one can’t use the CMDA boundaries even though they seem to correspond better to other sources.

Or try to figure out assembly constituencies. Earlier, the Election Commission helpfully published constituency shapefiles on their site but has now discontinued the practice. So one has to either digitize from other pdfs or jpegs or try to build up shapefiles from published information. One such source is the Chennai corporation website[3] which provides a table listing which wards fall into which assembly constituency. Another source is the website of the Office of the Chief Electoral Office, Tamil Nadu which publishes a pdf giving the same information – which wards fall under which assembly constituencies[4]. So we proceeded to make maps using both sources. The results are below.

Each colour in each of the above maps represents an assembly constituency. So ideally, both maps should look like similar sets of a jigsaw puzzle – even if different colours are used for each piece, their shapes and sizes should be the same. Just one of them – Saidapet towards the lower left corner – looks similar in both maps, but closer inspection reveals a difference of one ward between the two maps. Thus, if one derives maps from the two sources, not a single constituency has a boundary which can be accepted as confirmed from two sources. An attempt to triangulate using a third source may very well throw up a third unique map! Factor in the fact that the city of Chennai is currently in a phase of expanding its city limits to include various village panchayats and all you can do is hope you have enough aspirin to deal with the headache that is sure to follow.

Akshai Abraham with inputs from Prabu R.

[2] http://districts.nic.in/ and http://districts.nic.in/dstats.aspx

[3] http://www.chennaicorporation.gov.in/zone/zoneAddress.htm

[4] http://ceotamilnadu.nic.in/forms/int3.pdf

Transparent Chennai recently created a new map of police stations for Chennai’s residents. Information on local police is scattered all over the internet but there isn’t a one stop source for this kind of data. And that’s why Transparent Chennai decided to create a layer that collates and presents all necessary police related information on a single map/layer. Let’s look at some existing literature on police and law enforcement in Chennai.

Chennai Police is categorized into ‘city’ police and ‘suburban’ police. Chennai and suburban Chennai (outside the corporation boundary but inside the development authority area) are two districts in the northern zone. The city has 9 subdivisions, 29 circles, and 119 police stations of which 27 are (All Women) police stations.[1]

While the suburb police have 3 subdivisions and 13 circles, 49 police stations of which 8 are All women police stations.[2] The city today has a total of 163 police stations.

A brief history of police presence in Chennai:-

The existence of police can be traced back to 1659, when the British engaged Pedda Naik to guard the town of Madraspatnam with assistance from peons. The board of Police was constituted in 1770 by the then Governor Josios DuPre in order to deal with public nuisance, and maintain public health and order. In 1771, Governor Stratton appointed a “Kotwal” to control prices of commodities in the market and to discipline tradesmen.

Later in 1780, the post of Superintendent of Police (SP) was created to supervise the markets and to reduce prices of provisions. In1806, Walter Grant became the first regularly appointed SP with three police magistrates. The police forces have gone through various changes and reforms not since then. While they were called the Imperial Police during the British Raj, today they are collectively called the Indian Police Force.

Standards: According to UDPFI(Urban Development plans formulation and implementation guidelines) standards, there should be one police station measuring 1.5 hectares between every ninety thousand people and one police post between every forty to fifty thousand people inclusive of residential accommodation (to keep the prisoners for a short while). There should be one district office and jail between ten lakh people and a police line for every twenty lakh population.

The Chennai metropolitan area has a population of 73.44 lakhs (2001 census) and163 police stations surpassing the standard requirement of number of police stations. However, they do not qualify the norms for requisite space indicated in the standard. Chennai has 12 district level offices and the largest central prison in the country in Puzhal. There are 2 police lines the suburban and the city police. Although Chennai does not meet all the UDPFI standards, it has a good police presence in the city.

Mapping: Although crime can be reported by simply dialling 100 on your phone, one still needs to go to the area police stationfor filing an FIR (First Information Report). Hence, we decided to create a platform wherein users could access all relevant information needed to file an FIR. Information containing address, contact number, contact person was gathered from different websites in an alphabetical order. Then all police stations (both city and suburb) were manually located and marked using Google Earth. Some of the police stations were already marked on Google maps and Wikimapia.  Using geographical information system, stations were marked on satellite images (Google earth). This was necessary to avoid confusion as several police stations were situated in a locality that did not bear the name of the area the police station is to serve. Example:  The Amjikarai police station is near the Anna Arch on the 3^rd Avenue road which is in Annanagar area.

Since the location details were taken from other websites, authenticity is not guaranteed. We request our site users to kindly update us in case if we missed or wrongly marked a police station.

One can view this map through ‘Build A Map’ feature on our website. Clicking on ‘Police Stations Layer’ will give take you to this map. There are 163 police stations in all which have been categorised into city police, All Women police station, Suburban and All Women suburban police stations. The following chart indicates the data:

Please help us map the remaining police stations, especially women police stations, through our user driven layer.

[2] http://www.tnpolice.gov.in/chennaisuburbanpolice/

Roshan Toshniwal

The announcement of a comprehensive online passenger information system by the Metropolitan Transport Corporation (MTC) comes as a relief for Chennai’s commuters. This information system promises to provide details of the routes, timings and bus stops.  A recent article in Hindu -

“The entire programme has been outsourced to Ascenso Telecom Solutions, which has agreed to offer the service free of cost in exchange for advertising rights…A senior MTC official told The Hindu that the proposed helpline would function like a call centre. Information about bus stops along a particular route number, origin and destination, journey time, fare details, and expected time of arrival at a particular bus stop will be available through the service.”

Every time Transparent Chennai’s team members set out  to collect complete bus routes information using GPS units, different sources told them about MTC’s plan to establish this information system. Transparent Chennai was advised to not replicate something that was going to be out in the near future. However, we still went ahead hoping that this exercise would highlight the urgent need for this kind of information and push the authorities to make it accessible. We managed to collect complete (each stop) information for 70 bus routes. We also repackaged MTC data so that commuters could view them on maps.

Image: Transparent Chennai’s Bus Routes Layer

As expected, this is the most celebrated feature of our website. Months or probably years have passed and MTC has still not activated its information system. Transparent Chennai hopes that this time the announcement is for real. Till then commuters can come to our website and access our bus routes information!

—————-

Somya Sethuraman

I recently started working on an urban poverty scoping exercise with a representative from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. As part of this project, I have had the opportunity to meet with many urban planners, government officials, academics and civil society workers all over the country. I have learned a great deal about the obstacles in providing basic services to the urban poor. The common woe amongst all stakeholders that I have spoken to remains the lack of capacity required to dispatch services in an effective manner. Thus, when I asked these stakeholders which area under poverty alleviation requires intervention, many pointed out that a focus on capacity-building could help make poverty reduction programs efficient and targeted to achieve more success in shorter periods of time.

The 74^th Constitutional Amendment mandates the local government with the responsibility of urban poverty alleviation. However, many municipal governments have shown incompetence in utilizing funds appropriately. Mr. Ajay Suri, Regional Advisor for Cities Alliance, stressed that municipalities are starved for skilled urban planners, economists, statisticians, researchers, designers and architects to take on the role of urban development. While money is abundant, the technical assistance required to implement projects and disseminate funds are not available, due to which poverty alleviation programs, such as Basic Services to the Urban Poor (BSUP, under JnNURM), do not always achieve their goals. A recent article in the Indian Express stated that The Intergrated Housing and Slum Development Program, which is another sub-mission under JnNURM, has utilized less that 50% of its allocated funds on projects. According to housing minister Kumari Selja, one of the reasons for under-utilization of funds was lack of capacity of local bodies to implement projects.

Over the past year, the GoI has established five new urban institutes in Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Chattisgargh. These institutes are intended to be the training grounds for new generations of urban planners, research organizations, and consultancies that provide technical assistance to cities. Unfortunately, working for the municipal government is not looked upon as an attractive profession. Furthermore, organizations such as the National Institute of Urban Affairs struggle with retaining young professionals due to the diverse and attractive employment opportunities that they are presented with. There is dire need for experts in municipal governments, without whom no amount of money or schemes can fully achieve success.

Vaishnavi Narasimhan

As Tamil Nadu gears up for the much awaited elections now scheduled to be held on April 13, 2011, speculation hits new levels. “Who will win this time?” and “Will DMK retain its power?” are the nature of questions that are doing the rounds during coffee breaks. Media is also trying hard to ensure that the gossip doesn’t die before the actual results are out. A recent piece in Dinamalar looks at attendance data for TN MLAs to create further hype.  Apparently, leading MLAs like Jayalalitha, Vijaykanth and NKKP Raja have attended very few sessions out of the total of 225 days when the assembly was convened in the past five years. For instance, Jayalalitha who is the opposition party leader has a shocking attendance record of only ten days in the past five years. She has also not visited the new assembly building till date. Second and third in order of lowest attendance are NKKP Raja and Vijayakanth who attended the Assembly Session for a total of 33 and 53 days, respectively.

MLAs who have 100 percent attendance are – Angaiyarkanni, Saba. Rajendran, Udhaya Sooriyan, Iyappan, Kannan, V.S.Babu, Kamaraj, Sundar, Renganathan, Vidiyal Sekar and John Jacob. Among these MLAs, only one – V.S. Babu – is a Chennai MLA from Purasawalkam constituency. While attendance data is not the only indicator of an MLA’s effectiveness, it does reflect to a certain extent the degree of an MLA’s involvement and level of interaction with his constituency. Here it is important to note that more than hundred MLAs did not raise even a single question during the question hour.

There are so many parameters that need to be taken into account before one chooses his vote. The attendance data might not be the most accurate of all parameters. Every MLA needs to sign the attendance register before he enters the Assembly Hall. However, many MLAs forget to do so and later send in letters to the speaker stating their presence during a particular session. This leads to errors that cannot be or are not always verified. Speaking of votes, if your area has undergone significant and positive developments in the last few years, who is to be really thanked? Well, every MLA is responsible for his constituency and is allocated funds under the MLA Constituency Development Schemes (MLACDS). Come back and read our blog to know more about Chennai specific MLACDS and other election related details!

-  Somya Sethuraman

(The views expressed here are not entirely the author’s but based on a tamil article in dinamalar.com).

Thanks to Lalitha for translation.

Increasing population and traffic have always been the biggest concerns in developing cities. Chennai Metropolitan Area with an aggregate population of 70.41lakhs (2001 Census) is very dense within the corporation limit. The city has a very diverse transportation network with the city buses, suburban trains, MRTS and now (the metro and BRTS in offing) interlinking the city.

Although the city has upgraded its transport infrastructure (suburban train to be specific) well in advance of the assessed ridership demand the challenge for the urban planners and transport engineers to ease traffic congestion is far from over.

With the formation of Unified Metropolitan Transport Authority, integrating inter-modal transport services is expected to improve and commuters can travel more conveniently by shifting modes to reach their destinations. The concern for the Chennai metro rail is their present route and the cost of commuting.

Snapshot of the CMRL:
Chennai Metro Rail Limited(CMRL) is a special purpose vehicle and a joint venture of the Tamil Nadu State and the central government. The estimated project cost is around Rs. 14,000 Cr of which 41% is being funded by the centre and the state government equally and the remaining is through a loan from Japanese International Cooperation Agency. The first phase of the project is divided in two corridors spanning 45kms of which 24 km is underground and 21km is elevated. The cost of constructing each kilometre of underground tunnel is Rs.300 Cr compared to Rs. 100 Cr for the elevated track. Each corridor has 17 stations with Central and Alandur stations featuring in both the routes.
Corridor 1: Wahermanpet, Mannadi, High Court, Central, Secretariat (new), LIC, Thousand lights, Gemini, Teynampet, Chamiers Road, and Saidapet will be underground. While the Little mount, Guindy, Alandur, Officer training academy, Meenambakkam and Airport will be elevated.
Corridor 2: Central, Egmore, Nehru Park, Kilpauk Medical college, Pachaiyappa’s college, Shenoy nagar, Annanagar East, Annanagar tower, Thirumangalam will be underground. While Koyembedu, CMBT, Arumbakkam, Vadapalani,Ashok Nagar, KK Nagar, SIDCO, Alandur and St. Thomas mount are elevated.

Concerns:
The main motive of this route was to link all the important gateways of the city which are already well connected through the bus and train services. Although, Metro has adopted a clean and energy efficient way of functioning, its capital, operation and maintenance costs are expected to be very high. However, a few concerns continue to remain unanswered:

1. No public meetings held: Chennai Metro is considered a landmark project involving huge amount of funds and considerable realignment of the city landscape and yet the people in the city had no say on the route or the making of the project. Most of the project is being built on the public land owned by railways, state and central government but a few hundred families will get displaced in the process. The CMRL claims to have adequately compensated the project affected parties and have had meetings with the affected parties alone.
2. Integration with the MRTS/ Suburban/ City buses: Both the corridors run almost parallel and in close proximity to the suburban train running from Chennai Beach to Tambaram station.
Corridor 1: intersects the suburban train at St.Thomas Mount and the MRTS at Chintadripet. The bus frequency plying on the Mount Road connecting Chintadripet (MRTS) to Saidapet suburban train is good, and adding a metro on this route will eat into the ridership of the buses and trains in the normal hours.
Corridor 2: from Kilpauk Medical College till the central station and from officer training academy to airport the metro runs parallel to the suburban train. The metro could have integrated this route with the existing suburban route and saved public money. The CMBT and Thirumangalam are well connected with the central station with frequent bus services and little congestion on the roads.
3. Unnecessary added Expenses: The metro runs below the Anna and E.V.R. Salai while it runs on an elevated track on the Jawaharlal Nehru Road (Inner Ring Road) although all are equally wide. The underground construction costs three times more than the elevated track and also raises safety concerns at nights.
4. Non Inclusive mode of transport: The metro is a sophisticated and comparatively more expensive mode of transport than the bus. This will deter the average commuter from using it. The metro will have strict safety norms which might dissuade the vendors to carry their merchandise for their business.
However, it is expected that the commuters will switch from their two and four wheelers to metro reducing congestion on these roads and helping in better road and traffic management. Although, inadequate parking facility for two and four wheelers on the trunk road, might flood the abutting streets with vehicles to become a potential traffic bottleneck.
5. Accessibility: As the sidewalks on the arterial roads are narrow the access to the metro (a grade separator) will further reduce its width and the pedestrians will get further marginalised.
It has also been observed that the narrow roads feeding ridership to the suburban trains and MRTS get clogged due to heavy vehicular traffic. Nelson Manickam road and South Usman road are a few feeder roads that get clogged.

The metro was successful in Delhi because of its coverage and the bus services were unable to meet the demand. Moreover, the vehicular density in Delhi is amongst the highest which clogged the city roads hence the metro proved as the best alternative. In Chennai the buses and the suburban trains complement each other but its capacity is reaching its upper limit. The advent of metro will decongest the roads and will certainly share the burden of the buses to provide a better travel experience in future. While, the advent of metro is expected to shift motorists into using public transport, and reduce congestion, its development should also reduce vulnerability of the poor and marginalised.

—–

Roshan Toshniwal

In December 2010, Reclaim Our Beaches (ROB), a local youth initiative in the city, contacted Transparent Chennai to see if TC could, in any way, help strengthen a proposal that they were sending to the Chennai Corporation on the need for dustbins and toilets on Elliots and Valmiki beaches. A methodology for data creation was devised that would benefit both organizations. For ROB, it was the creation of spatially precise data that buttressed the need for dustbins and toilets, and for TC, it served as a starting point for infrastructure and pollution mapping of Chennai’s coastline. This blogpost will tell our readers about how the data created helped strengthen ROB’s proposal to the Chennai Corporation.

Dustbins and Toilets on the Beach:

ROB’s campaign, which involves placing dustbins and toilets on the beach as a first step towards a healthier beach environment, led them to a meeting with the Chennai Corporation, a civic body responsible for maintenance of public spaces and amenities in the city among other things. The meeting ended with the corporation suggesting that ROB submit a proposal stating the nature of problem and related demands concerning Chennai’s beaches.

While thrilled at the opportunity to come up with a sound proposal that would put dustbins and toilets on the beach they soon realized that it was not an easy task to create a convincing proposal especially since they were an unregistered organization. The need to make their proposal more persuasive was why they initially contacted TC.

TC and ROB:

At TC, a methodology was devised for obtaining information on the formal and informal uses of Elliots and Valmiki Beaches that would help ROB to: 1. help reinforce the need for dustbins and toilets; 2. provide insight into the most effective locations for the same.

How so? Let us explain by using Elliots beach as an example.

While ROB already had data on the amount of trash along the coastline, this data was repackaged to spatially showcase how dirty the beach was during different days and times. We did this by mapping sites where trash had accumulated on different days to get a spatial sense of the problem. In our study, a trash accumulation site was defined as any area where more than 5 pieces of trash were found together.

These sites were mapped by ROB volunteers on Monday 20/11/2010

These sites were mapped by ROB volunteers on Sunday 02/01/2011

As you can see, these maps provide a strong spatial representation of the problem of trash on Elliots beach. What’s even better is by overlaying this data with the existing neelmetal dumpsters and government operated dustbins in the area, one can easily see how the present waste management system is inadequate.

Similar representations of informal urine hotspots were mapped and overlaid with information of public toilet facilities in the area to present the need for more toilets.

To help in locating ideal places for trash bins a heat map containing a point density algorithm was used to spatially show the most concentrations of trash thereby showing where trash bins would be most useful.

Example heat map using the trash accumulation data obtained on 20/11/2010

The same methodology was used to stress the need for toilets as well. We hope that these maps will help ROB’s proposal to the Corporation and eventually result in more dustbins and toilets on the beach.

Go to Build A Map feature on our website to explore our Beach Layer! Please do write to us and give us feedback on our methodology.

- Siddharth Hande

The much talked about elevated expressway from Chennai Port to Maduravoyal finally gets Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) clearance from The Ministry of Environment and Forests. For those who were unaware of this project or the recent developments, snapshots of maps from Transparent Chennai’s website might be of some help.

Following is a rough route map of the planned elevated expressway:

Further details are given below:

Right from its planning to inception stage, this large scale infrastructure project received a lot of negative criticism on account of not being pro-poor and environmentally friendly. Yet the project has so far succeeded in getting all approvals required for the smooth implementation of the project. While the CRZ clearance is subject to compliance with certain conditions, the question is are we well equipped to oversee that these conditions are not violated in due course?

Read more about this recent development in Hindu.

——

Somya Sethuraman