A guest post from our intern Anjney Midha, who helped us with the mapping workshops held in Olcott School

Little hands crease the white chart paper, as fingers clutching felt pens and crayons dart about quickly, outlining squares and other shapes. I catch glimpses of symbols and colors; a cricket bat occupying a large oval in one corner of the sheet, a pair of hands clutched in a Namaste in another, and a large mustachioed face under a label titled ‘Watchman’s booth’.

All around me, children of the eighth grade at the Olcott Memorial School in Besant Nagar are busy mapping out their school’s campus in groups, developing their own unique symbols and keys, color schemes and layouts. Working together, they turn occasionally to Shobha Narayana, their English teacher, and Siddharth Hande, TC’s workshop facilitator for help. By the end of the session, maps emerge, each diagram telling a story of its own.

Maps are wonderful inventions. As a means of communication, they are invaluable. As navigation tools they are indispensable. And as the creation of children, they are telling of human psychology.

Transparent Chennai recently concluded its Mapping Workshop at the Olcott School. The session was the fourth and last installment in a month long workshop focusing on teaching children the power and value of maps as spatial, political and information tools, and helping them to map their own environments.

In addition to developing the children’s mapping skills by allowing them to plot their school campus, the workshop also involved introducing the students to basic mapping technology, such as GPS, satellite imaging and Google Earth.

Perhaps the most interesting outcome of these workshops comes from comparing the hand drawn maps these children create. Each chart paper tells a different story, communicating nuances about each student’s life. One map is centred around a cricket pitch with sports symbols of volleyballs and soccer goalposts figuring prominently alongside. On another map, three students have meticulously drawn their classrooms, mathematical symbols representing their math lab, book spines iconizing the library and so on. On yet another map, the prayer halls are most dominant. The differences speak of innumerable nuances adults can only begin to guess at. Ask a group of adults to map their office, and the result is arguable predictable; here is the coffeemaker, here is the photocopier, that’s the washroom. And yet, with thirteen year olds, the activity yields diversity, bordering on art rather than science.

We often take for granted that maps are absolute, mere representations of fact. But our mapping workshop makes it clear from the perspective of children that maps are not simply a two-dimensional diagram, but arguments and dialectics, speaking to differences in land usage, lifestyle needs and spatial relationships. We look forward to working with school children in schools all over the city this coming school year to talk about maps, mapping, and representing space.

- Anjney Midha

A recent article in The Hindu points to the extent to which there is a lack of clarity in planning processes in the city. Apparently, the Heritage Conservation Committee of the CMDA has asked that all heritage buildings be avoided when the Metro is constructed. However, according to the article, under the Metro’s current plan, it is set to affect 16 heritage buildings including “Wesley Tamil Aalayam on Broadway, Madras Law College, Ripon Building, Victoria Public Hall, Chennai Central Railway Station, Ramaswamy Mudaliyar Choultry, Simpson building premises, P.ORR & Sons, SBI Building on Anna Salai, Addison & Co, Higginbotham’s, Bharat Insurance Building, Poompuhar, May Day Park, Kilpauk Medical College and Pachaiyappa College.” The CMDA has now requested details about the exact alignment and detailed site plans before they will give permission for construction. But shouldn’t the CMDA already have this information since they are the authority that gives permission for all constructions in the city? Why would this request for information be coming so late in the game? Meanwhile, when Transparent Chennai requested for the total areas of the Metro stations under an RtI, the Chennai Metro Rail Corporation told us that total floor areas were not final because they “may change during construction due to technical parameters.”[1] Would these kinds of last minute changes also cause impacts on heritage buildings?

[1] Source: Response to RtI filed with the Chennai Metro Rail by Transparent Chennai

Transparent Chennai (TC) has set out on an outreach agenda to share its research and talk to interested individuals and groups about the issue of public toilets in Chennai. TC’s research on public toilets began because of a need expressed by female informal sector workers during the course of a public meeting organized in 2009. Recently TC met with a group of women workers from Working Women’s Forum, Chennai. The Working Women’s Forum is an association for women in the unorganized and informal sector. We met a group of 15 women workers from various parts of the city.

When we asked them as to how many of them have ever used a public toilet we weren’t too surprised with their response. Most of the women were living in settlements without proper toilet facilities and resort to open defecation. “We don’t have a choice”, they said. Some said there was no public toilet in and around the area they lived, while others admit the presence of few toilets in their neighborhood which are in a bad condition. “2000 families and 1 toilet, will it be enough?” asked one of the women workers. They emphasized on the condition of public toilets in certain market areas where there are a lot of informal sector workers. In some of these areas the stench from nearby toilets is intolerable but unfortunately the workers cannot afford to move from there as their livelihood depends on it. What these women said only confirmed the purpose for our research on public toilets.

Some of these women have worked as health workers in slums teaching basic sanitation and personal hygiene to slum dwellers. Their training involved teaching people how to use a public toilet. They spoke of a time when Ms. Shanta Sheela Nair (currently Secretary to GOI, Ministry of Mines and former Home Secretary to Tamil Nadu Government and former Managing Director of Chennai Chennai Metropolitan Water Supply Board) was holding office in Chennai and sanitation not being an issue at that point of time. As health workers these women had a duty of reporting all the problems in the slums to Ms. Nair, who would immediately call the responsible authorities to attend to the problems at once. Many a times these health workers would voluntarily take the authorities on a visit to the slums to show them the problem.

The women seemed well aware of the politics associated with public toilets in the city. They remarked that a change in government always brings about some measures to renovate the public toilets but analogous to that they also increase the user charges. “The Corporation is only interested to work where there is more money involved” said one of the participants, “and not where there is a slum. All they want is Lanjam”.

As we proceeded with the presentation the women started to get more involved and everyone had something to contribute to the discussion. While they recognized that there was a need to improve existing toilets in the city they also expressed a need for more toilets in the city. “Toilets kandippa venum” they chorused. One of the women even recommended that we create an ad campaign for this issue just like Revathy in the Domex advertisement!

As we were wrapping up, a woman called out to us and said “When you mentioned that the presentation was about public toilets we felt quite uncomfortable and were unsure of what we were going to hear about. But we now realize that you have spoken about a very important issue… Next time we walk on a road we may look at a public toilet with a different lens”.

- Adya Shankar

Regardless of the place, there are certain kinds of data that are hard for the government to collect. In cities like Chennai, there are large sectors of the population that live in informal settlements or who are seasonal migrants to the city. Neither of these populations gets counted comprehensively in traditional methods of enumeration in the city. For cities in the West, they face a similar problem with homeless city residents, albeit on a much smaller scale.

The city of Los Angeles has dealt with this problem in a very interesting way. Recognizing that an accurate count of the homeless is important for providing adequate services for them, they do a biennial count of homeless people using citizen volunteers. The Census is conducted over three nights, and spans the entire 4,000 square miles of Los Angeles County. According to news reports, in 2009, volunteers in the Census identified “42,694 people living in places unfit for human habitation, including cars, sidewalks, parks, abandoned buildings, and shelters.”

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority partnered with the Survey Research Unit (SRU) at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill to develop the methodology and produce the numbers, while they actually ran the survey themselves with their own staff and network of volunteers. The number of homeless people was arrived at through sampling, because complete enumeration was not practical.

Although the numbers here are significantly smaller than the floating and informal populations in an Indian city, there is still a lesson to be learned from the Los Angeles example. There *are* innovative ways of accessing such hard to get data, and we can use these kinds of methodologies to create useful data for planning at the city level.

Nithya V. Raman

A recent article on the Hindu announced that the Chennai Rivers Restoration Trust has been ordered to devise a plan for the removal of construction debris from the Cooum River. The Cooum has undergone several such clean-ups and restoration projects over the past four decades. In 2009, Deputy Chief Minister announced an ambitious Cooum restoration project, costing over 200 Crores.  Yet another massive river cleaning initiative was announced in September for 2010 to clean over 800 tonnes of solid waste from the river. Despite all the money spent and plans devised, the Cooum continues to be more polluted than a treated sewer. So where does all the money that is budgeted for these projects go? Is the Corporation doing an efficient job of cleaning the city’s water bodies?

Members of Exnora and environmentalists comment that many of these Cooum restoration projects are counter-productive, as they do not address the source of the problems ailing the river and its associated water bodies. Many believe the major contributing factor to Cooum’s pollution is the slums that are situated on its banks. Much of the focus on restoration revolves around clearing slums and beautifying the banks of the river. However, Exnora’s research shows that a mere 0.14% of the water pollution is caused due to these slums, while the major contributing factor to Cooum’s pollution are the sewage pumping stations and treatment plants that dump gallons of sewage into the river every day. The pollution Chennai’s waterways will worsen unless the government takes the initiative to improve sewer collection and treatment.

Transparent Chennai welcomes this guest post from Mr. Bakthavatsalam Narasimhan. We hope that more regular readers of the Chennai Kaleidoscope will also contribute!

Although there has been a lot of talk about the Chennai Metro (CMRL), several important questions remain unanswered about the effects that the Metro will have on other kinds of traffic and transportation in the city, and how the city has planned for these impacts. Unlike the Mass Rapid Transit System (MRTS), the metro will be visible and accessible through arterial roads (Anna Salai, E.V.R. Periyar Salai, Inner Ring Road).

Planning for road safety, especially for pedestrians

According to RtI data Transparent Chennai collected, these three roads have accounted for over 17% of all road accidents in the city between 2006-2010 and about 29% of these accidents involved pedestrians. These roads already have a heavy vehicular and pedestrian traffic. Since users have to walk into the metro station, special consideration needs to be given to the pedestrian infrastructure in these areas as the number of pedestrians will further increase on these roads.

The current percentage of trips made using public transport in Chennai is only 29%. Chennai Metro Rail along with other public transport operators predicts to raise it to about 55% by 2025 by expanding public transport and multimodal integration. As the MTC buses will continue to run on these roads as feeder service to the Metro, the bus stops and the metro station access points should be co-ordinated in such a way that one could access both safely with little or no obstacles. Cordon stations, points where people will change modes, will receive large increases of vehicular and pedestrian traffic, all of which needs to be managed for effective working of this mode. A co-ordinated plan will result not only in reduction of road accidents on these roads but also ensure smooth transition of modal change and better traffic management. Have such plans been put into place? It is not clear from the available information about the Metro.

Planning for parking spaces, changes in land use, and informal markets

As the metro runs through the commercial belt which is already short of parking space, provisions for vehicular parking space will be critical for its success. It will make a huge impact on its surrounding land-use, road pattern, traffic and lives of the people. Without adequate planning for parking space, roads abutting the metro line may see the flooding of vehicles as the parking space in the metro stations premises may not have the capacity to satisfy the needs of the expected ridership. These smaller roads around the Metro may also see changes in land use as more commercial and residential establishment’s crowd around metro stations.

Increase in pedestrian traffic will also likely encourage a thriving informal market in these areas as seen in Mumbai. Have these issues been considered while selecting the locations and planning the space requirement for Metro stations?

RtI Findings: Current space allotted for the Metro

The total floor areas of each metro station is as follows: The total floor areas mentioned in the table below are not final and may vary due to geometry of the locations and may change during construction due to technical parameters.

Source: CMRL through RTI

Kindly note that the underground stations have a much larger area than the elevated stations as the areas above the station could also be used for parking and other facilities suitable to the site’s needs.  The Chennai Metro Rail is integrated with suburban rail at Chennai Central, Egmore, Guindy and St. Thomas Mount Stations. And the CMRL proposes to facilitate seamless integrated ticketing using smart cards through the coordination of the Chennai Unified Metropolitan Transport Authority (CUMTA) which has been set up recently by Government of Tamil Nadu under the Chennai Unified Metropolitan Transport Authority Act, 2010.

Roshan Toshniwal