At four in the morning, the Kasimedu fish market is already abuzz with activity from the first catch of the morning being brought in by small boats and trawlers. The market soon opens to the public and one can get a variety of fresh fish every morning. Fishermen bring in their catch on long, narrow boats which are no more than a couple of planks of wood hammered together. They then proceed to unload the fish and take them to the market place in baskets. The whole area is covered with slime and fins, and the market place is always wet with melted ice. Though the area is part of the Port Trust of India’s property and the fishing activity is informal and relies on old and rudimentary boats and equipment, the fishermen currently supply fish to some of the top hotels in the city.

There is no proper manner in which the discarded fish and fish parts can be disposed in a hygienic way, and it is not unusual to find piles of these left lying to rot for days at a stretch. The area is extremely dirty and unhygienic, and though the fishing communities are able to eke out a daily living, it is obvious that there is much that needs to be done to improve the facilities in order for them to prosper from the activity.

Residents of Royapuram zone, some of whom engage in the fishing activity, are keen to improve the harbour and market area. This is an issue that has come up several times, including in CDF’s Local Economic Environment Planning programme as well as in the initial discussions with residents through Transparent Chennai’s Ward Accountability Experiment. In December 2011, there were media reports saying that the area was going to be developed and the facilities upgraded. However, the more crucial issues will centre on access by fishing communities to the improved facilities and recognition of their rights to continue to live in the area and not be relocated.

Written by Satyarupa Shekhar, researcher at Transparent Chennai. Photographs by Linda Graeble.

This post is the first in the special series of blogposts that Transparent Chennai will be publishing in the coming weeks.  The posts will cover a number of issues ranging from the status of garbage in the city to public sanitation and walkability in ward 176. Written by students from the Asian College of Journalism based on their experiences in the field, these posts will build on the insights gained from Transparent Chennai’s ward accountability experiment.

You can talk the talk, but can you walk the walk?

‘’I have lived with it for 70 years and I know it will not change, this is what Madras is about’’, said a very agitated senior citizen Mr. Subramanian. He was referring to the pathetic condition of the roads leading to the Besant Nagar Bus Depot. From water logging to rotting garbage, overflowing potholes, broken sidewalks and even traffic congestion – the 1st avenue road flanking the Besant Nagar Bus Depot has it all, every civic problem that cripples walkability.

Pedestrians in India are the most neglected lot. Walkability, a measure of how friendly an area is to walking, is evaluated taking into consideration many subjective factors like: quality of footpaths, sidewalks or other pedestrian right-of-ways, traffic and road conditions, land use patterns, building accessibility, and safety, among others. It is in fact an important concept in sustainable urban design. Unfortunately, Indian cities lack all these factors. A recent survey by the Clean Air Initiative for Asian Cities (CAI-Asia) said that pedestrian facilities in most Indian cities were lacking and insufficient. A universal concern for all of the cities studied was also the lack of facilities for people with disabilities. Out of a possible 100 points, the average walkability score of the six Indian cities was a 47 (http://thecityfix.com/blog/new-study-indian-cities-score-low-in-walkability-ratings/). But such macro level problems are highlighted, only at the micro level.

The Besant Nagar area is a very famous neighbourhood in Chennai city. And looking at the condition of the roads leading to its only bus depot, the Tamil Nadu Housing Board (TNHB) should die of shame. The government cannot assume that people don’t walk anymore. Everyone cannot afford cars and bikes. The 1st Avenue road in particular, as it leads to a form of public transport, needs to be in a good condition as people don’t usually go to a bus depot or stand on bike, do they? The ‘so called’ footpaths are used by street vendors to park their trolleys, bicycles and anything and everything else possible. The part where there is nothing, there are broken bricks and shifted tiles filled with water, making it very inaccessible. Not only is there is water clogging on that road, but also garbage bins, overflowing with leftover filth. This deadly combination of stagnant water and dirt is the breeding ground and inception of many diseases.

Commuters — that often include women, students and senior citizens—walking towards the bus stop face a lot of problems. The monsoons have just begun and potholes are massive, housing oodles of dirty rainwater. Water logging is a major issue that hampers walking. The bad maintenance had made the road prone to road mishaps and accidents. There is no zebra crossing, or even if there is one, it is hidden beneath the dirty rain water.  Mr. Ramakrishna, a senior citizen, who has been using the bus depot for over 10 years now said, ‘‘the water logging problem is becoming worse every year and the drainage is very bad. Nobody uses the footpath as nobody knows about it; they should educate people about these facilities.”

The ironic part is that there is a police station bang opposite the road but how much can they do?

Another cause of concern is the presence of a TASMAC outlet in the area (see the map above). The many schools in the vicinity and the students that use the bus depot as a means of daily commute are subject to it’s negative influence.  Also, this increases the vulnerability towards road mishaps. By improving the road environment there will be a positive impact on road safety. The government should identify ‘’black spots’’ or accident prone areas. And on the basis of accident intensity and severity appropriate indicators should be put. The WHO says that Road accidents are the 9th leading cause of death all over the world and are expected to become the 5th by 2030.  And, Tamil Nadu has the 2nd highest road accident rate after New Delhi. Pedestrians and non-motorist are most vulnerable and account to 43% of all fatalities in Chennai. Such alarming statistics and what is our government doing about it?

All these issues trickle down to one main problem of – walkability. In one way or the other, directly or indirectly, water logging, garbage disposal, traffic congestion, public harassment, and potholes affect walkability. The government should make people aware of their rights. A lot of people are not aware of their basic pedestrian rights. Most of them do not even know that footpaths are meant for pedestrians and pedestrians alone. Parking bicycles and putting up stalls on them is an encroachment. Along with all this latest planning, design and other ‘road furniture’ should be used. Such micro level changes will help change India at a macro level. Let’s just hope the government wakes up in time and does the needful. And the question remains: can we walk the talk, our right to walk?

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-  Zahra Khan

I have come across really few studies that attempt to quantify the relationship between water-sanitation and health. This is primarily because testing one in relation to the other, while keeping everything else constant, has proven challenging in the past. How can one clearly tell that the disease caused is a direct or partial result of lack of sanitation? Further, talking about sanitation has been a taboo in most of the third world, and women do not feel comfortable expressing their concerns which has led to less accurate and misleading data. As a result, many studies are able to detect some sort of relationship between sanitation and health, even statistically significant relationships, but the methodologies have often been vague.

This study uses country level data to test – How much does improving access to water and sanitation influence infant, child and maternal mortality? Data for 193 countries was taken from global databases, and results suggest that “access to water and sanitation independently contribute to child and maternal mortality outcomes. If the world is to seriously address the Millennium Development Goals of reducing child and maternal mortality, then improved water and sanitation accesses are key strategies.”

This means that many of the MDGs are related to each other, and we should stop treating problems in isolation of each other. While quantitative analyses are based on a number of assumptions, they assume significance when relationships, correlation, trends and patterns need to be highlighted. I therefore recommend this study to the water and sanitation fraternity across the world.

- Somya

The built heritage of a city narrates its history, the variance in culture that existed and the transition of lifestyles over different periods. It is an exhibit about the past that has survived through generations and over centuries. From an economic perspective it is an inheritance that needs investment in order to reap its rewards. The heritage zones of the city have their unique nature which needs be promoted, protected, conserved and experienced.

A brief history of archaeology and conservation legislations in India

The Portuguese in Goa were the pioneers of archaeology in India which dates back to early 16th century.[1] To start with, the colonial masters brought about the idea of conserving the Rock cut reliefs, the south Indian temples and the remains of the previous masters from the Qutub Minar to the Taj Mahal.

The British had a keen interest in the archaeological wealth of our diverse culture and established the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) in 1861 with Alexander Cunningham[2] as a surveyor. The ASI went through many vicissitudes till the arrival of Lord Curzon in 1899, who was a connoisseur and a keen enthusiast of history. In 1902 the ASI was reconstituted with John Marshal as the first Director General and in 1904 the ‘Ancient Monument Preservation Act’ was passed. In 1906 surveys of hundreds of monuments and sites were declared protected under the act and extensive repairs were undertaken.

In 1921, under the Government of India Act, 1919, archaeology was made a central subject, and the provinces were left merely with the power of declaring monuments and sites protected under the Ancient Monument Preservation Act. The interest was evident with the exploration of Harrappa in 1921 and Mohenjodaro till 1931. In 1932, to encourage outsiders, including the foreigners to undertake exploration, the ‘Ancient Monuments Preservation Act’ was amended. In 1937 even universities like Calcutta, Baroda and Allahabad had played important roles in undertaking archaeological works.

In 1944, Dr. Robert Wheeler the ASI Director General trained and build capacity amongst his staff in modern methods of excavation and conservation. In 1951, under the constitution of India an act was passed to replace the old Ancient Monument Preservation Act of 1932, under which the states were given important role to play in this central subject of archaeology. After several iterations another act Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains (Amendment and Validation) Act 2010 has been passed.

Preserving heritage in Chennai

The listing of heritage buildings in Chennaiwas first made by INTACH which is Asia’s largest voluntary organisation for conserving art and culture. Then in 2003 a separate committee under justice E. Padmanabhan was constituted for identifying and enumerating places of historical importance in and around Chennai. A report was compiled and submitted to the high court in 2006 and draft legislation has been written.A heritage conservation committee has been formed at the CMDA level, but action remains to be taken.

This list comprises of 466 natural and manmade heritages of which three are sadly already demolished.Due to the Chennai Metro rail work the Trevelyan fountain in grounds of the Victoria Public hall has now been removed. The recent fire incidents at Khalsa Mahal and Agurchand Mansion make it evident that much more needs to be done to protect the heritage.

We at Transparent Chennai wish to invite the history and heritage enthusiasts to lend their hands in exploring the heritage of our city. We would like to partner with local groups to start work on the issue of heritage. We will soon be adding a layer of information about it on the site. Are there things that we can do together to increase awareness and encourage people to take action?

Roshan Toshniwal

[1]http://www.indianetzone.com/43/history_archaeology_india.htm

[2]Alexander Cunningham was a military engineer who impressed upon Lord Canning the then Governor General to undertake systematic exploration in the country.

Mark Gorton, founder of several financial and technology companies, was at IFMR’s offices in IIT Madras Research Park recently to talk about his ‘Rethinking the Automobile’ work. Though most of this work is located in New York City, it has implications for almost all cities in the world today. Rethinking the automobile is a movement to recommend policy and functional moves away from using cars and towards more sustainable modes of transportation, including cycling and walking. Many cities in Brazil, China, Denmark, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, among others, have demonstrated that cycling is not necessarily only a recreational activity but a mode of transportation. All these cities flirted with a car-oriented transportation model before moving to pedestrian-friendly cities. If they can, so can Chennai. Or can it…??

I’m a regular user of the local train in Chennai. Though the commute between Velachery and Indira Nagar is short and comfortable, it is the to and from the station that’s an ordeal. The 300 metre walk from home to the station entails walking on the section of the Velachery-Tambaram Link road that connects Vijay Nagar bus stand to the Velachery MRTS station. This road section is busy since it links the two big public transport hubs, has a flyover that connects Velachery to suburbs like Medavakkam and has a private shared autorickshaws hub exactly at the start of the flyover. Yet it does not have a pedestrian crossing, nor foot over-bridges or subways. Close to the station, the road itself is divided by the flyover and each single lane has two-way vehicular traffic! As if that was not enough, there are no footpaths and pedestrians have to navigate between vendors, piles of garbage and parked vehicles!

The Corporation’s website lists the total length of roads in Chennai with a break-up of roads maintained by the Corporation and Highways department, and the lengths of bus route roads, interior roads and concrete roads, but there is no information about the length and location of pavements in the city, nor where improvement projects are being undertaken. Nithya’s recent blog post showing the ratio of pavements to roads from data obtained through RTIs showed some wards having 3.5 times the length of pavement as roads!! Velachery is in the lowest quartile, which makes me wonder that if money is being allocated and spent on building and maintaining pavements, where are they?

But if you thought only public authorities ignore pedestrians, you’ll be surprised to see that private institutions are equally immune to walkers’ woes. While IFMR provides a shuttle service for those who travel by public transport to its offices in IIT Madras Research Park (IIT MRP), the IIT MRP premises itself are far from being pedestrian-friendly. There is no pavement, cars honk rudely at pedestrians who “slow” them down and the security at the entrance stops only those employees who walk to office, letting those that travel by cars, motorcycles and autorickshaws enter freely!!

There have been reports saying the Chennai Corporation was building five skywalks connecting foot overbridges to “activity centres” and three of these will be in Velachery. I’m sure pavements and pedestrian crossings would be cheaper and pedestrian-friendly, but then, I don’t think these influence spending on public infrastructure in Chennai. At least, not yet.

- Satyarupa Shekhar

Ripon Building – Corporation of Chennai stands elegant, but only insiders can tell you about the drab work life inside this heritage building

My work involves a lot of field visits to the Corporation of Chennai – primarily for data collection, but most often than not, to sit around and wait for hours with the hope that an influential government official would agree to listen to my research findings.

It was during these long waiting hours did I find myself thinking about the work environment at the Corporation.

We work in a fancy office with biometric doors and a beautiful cafeteria, but the list of complaints never ends – “It’s so cold in here that I can’t work today” is something that tops our complaint list. Other recurring complaints are about the lousy music in the elevator and the bad service at the food court. Though the management should be lauded for their attempts at trying to provide us with the most conducive environment for us to deliver our best outputs, we continually choose to get worked up about petty issues that have little or no relevance to our actual work.

On the contrary, the Corporation of Chennai, where the guardians of the city are housed, is in a pitiable condition. Metro construction is on in full swing outside the Ripon Building, and the endless renovation work inside the building has left most office rooms dusty, dirty and dull. Apart from the Commissioners, the Mayor and a few other important officials, nobody has the luxury of even an air conditioner during days of scorching heat and humidity. Fans do not have regulators and power cuts in the afternoon are a common occurrence. They do not have a fancy cafeteria, and the elevator is so inefficient that the slowest of walkers can climb the steps faster. The computer systems are ancient, and no one is well trained to operate it. Stacks of extremely important papers are all over the place and no storage facilities to accommodate any of these. It is just astonishing to see the primitiveness of everything in the building – time stands still there.

Metro Rail digging work under way on the lawns of the Ripon Building  — Photo: R.Ravindran

Why would anybody want to work in such a place? How can we expect the officials to come up with city solutions in an environment that breeds demotivation? I know that my colleagues would definitely not work there. Nor would I, but if I ever do – I would certainly rebel and fret a lot about the lack of infrastructure.

The Chennai Corporation is the oldest in India and the Ripon Building looks magnificent – but only from the outside. The story is not different for other zonal offices in the city –it is in fact worse. Unless and until we upgrade the infrastructure at these offices, the educated tech-savvy youth will never have the incentive to quit their fancy corporate jobs in favour of government jobs, and the less competent ones will continue to work there. It is like a vicious cycle which needs to be broken very soon.

- Somya Sethuraman, lead researcher – Sanitation, Transparent Chennai

According to this recent article from the Hindu, the Clean Air Initiative for Asian Cities recently published a study on walkability in the city, giving the city an abysmal score of just 47 out of 100. Transparent Chennai’s recent study in ward 176 found similar scores – the average road there scored 51% on our index. But are the authorities listening? Even roads are in a terrible state in the city – is it too much to hope that new road construction or road improvement projects will include the construction of infrastructure that helps pedestrians.

- Roshan Toshniwal

A recent article written by a friend on ‘walkability’ in Chennai was the voice in my head. Life for a public transport aficionado in this city can be tough, even if you resign yourself to the general harshness of everyday life in Chennai (the heat and the traffic, for instance). Now, difficulties seem even more pronounced after spending the last several months in what is probably pedestrian capital of the world, New York City. Most days, I am just glad to be home alive with only a battle wound or two to show for the day’s commute.

Getting to work every morning is nothing short of an ordeal. My bus ride from K K Nagar to CLRI-Madhya Kailash sometimes lasts up to an hour, almost always spent standing all the way, and that’s the easiest part. Crossing the road from the CLRI side to Madhya Kailash, and then across to the Kasturibai Nagar station usually means 20 minutes of waiting and darting across in the few seconds that the traffic policeman allows you. A five minute ride in a share-auto-spilling-people later, I am standing opposite Tidel Park with thumping heart, wondering if I am going to get to work alive. Minor gap in the traffic caused by exactly two vehicles speeding at less than 70 kilometres per hour, and I run across and climb atop the median, counting my stars – halfway intact. Except, there are at least 5 IT employees who have done the same, and we are all now competing for space on that narrow median. It only takes one to mildly nudge another out, for someone to be mowed down by the relentless speeding traffic. Another minor gap, and we all leap off and run across, feeling like marathoners at the finish line. We’ve made it.

Now for the actual data (Thank you, Google Earth).  The stretch from the Madhya Kailash signal on Sardar Patel Road to the Tidel Park signal on Rajiv Gandhi IT Expressway is a little over two kilometers long. Along this whole stretch, there are only three foot overbridges to get across to the other side – one each at either end, and one in between somewhere, over 700 metres from the nearer one. Admittedly, these three foot overbridges are located at the three train stations on the corridor – Kasturibai Nagar, Indira Nagar and Thiruvanmiyur. But what about people who use the bus stops, which can be up to 300 metres from each of these bridges? What about the people who take share autos to go to the innumerable research institutions and IT parks on the other side? The gaps in the vegetation on the median where these people cross the road, are a very telling picture of the negligence of people’s needs.

To put it in a clichéd nutshell, workplaces on the IT corridor are inaccessible for public transport users. When the stated goal of the country’s transport policy is to encourage public transport use, why are pedestrians so grossly ignored? Even an ‘expressway’ – deserves a few pedestrian crossings, signalized perhaps, or at least subways that don’t hinder speed.

My world needs more safety for pedestrians and public transport users. I am sure much of Chennai agrees with me.

- Priti Narayan, Research Analyst

As Transparent Chennai has worked more and more with government statistics at the city level, we have been surprised at how problematic many of these records are.

Here’s an interesting and revealing image that we wanted to share with you. One of our focus areas in our research is pedestrian infrastructure. We wanted to figure out what percentage of the city’s roads have sidewalks. To do this, our researcher RoshanToshniwal filed a petition under the Right to Information Act to the Corporation, asking for lengths and widths of sidewalks and roads maintained by them by Zone and ward.

When we mapped the sidewalk and roads data, we got some really wild looking numbers. Take a look at the map below:

This map shows the percentage of sidewalks to roads by ward in the city, with white showing wards which reported no sidewalks at all, and the rest of the wards divided into quartiles. The darker the color, the larger the percentage of sidewalks relative to roads. Given what we have experienced of Chennai roads, we expected to see fairly low numbers for these percentages, since many of the roads that we walk on have no sidewalks at all.

But we also saw a number of wards that reported extremely high percentages of sidewalks – one even reporting a percentage of sidewalk to road length of 372%! Even 200% coverage would have made sense – sidewalks on both sides of every road in the ward. But how could any ward have sidewalks that are 3.5 times the length of all the roads?

The city receives limited funds for footpaths – and decisions for how to prioritize this money need to be made with good data about where sidewalks are in the city, and where they are not. Luckily, bad data of the sort highlighted here is not all pervasive – according to the dataset (available for download on this page), most of the 200%+ numbers come from one Zone, Zone 6. Now that the Corporation has expanded, and each new Zone is re-organizing its data, it’s a good time to look closely at existing records and improving their quality wherever required.

Text by Nithya V. Raman
Map by Prabu Raja
Data collection and processing by RoshanToshniwal

It is six years since the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission became official on Dec 3, 2005. These were expected to be the six defining years for India’s urban landscape. JNNURM gave rise to a million new hopes and desires. Its ‘one of a kind’ design coaxed people to believe that hopes would somehow be fulfilled in the next seven years when the program was to be rolled out in our rapidly urbanizing Indian cities. We are now entering the seventh year, and questions are being asked -Have hopes been fulfilled? Did JNNURM succeed in delivering its promises? Did the urban sector reforms lead to equitable, efficient, productive and responsive cities, as aimed by the $20 billion programme? Were reforms in accordance with the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act, 1992 which seeks to strengthen urban local bodies? Unfortunately, the answers to these questions are not so clear cut, as a talk I attended last week made clear.

Recently, Professor K.C. Sivaramakrishnan, a former IAS officer who served in the Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority and is a member of the Technical Advisory Group of the JNNURM, talked about his new book –Re-visioning Indian Cities: The Urban Renewal Mission, at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai. I have to admit that I haven’t read the book yet, but the discussion was intriguing and left the audience thinking about key urban issues and concerns that have plagued the Indian economy for decades.

Sivaramakrishnan started his talk provocatively: “I have lived to see four decades of what one may want to call an urban mess,” he said. He had come to Chennai days after attending the sixth anniversary celebration of the JNNURM held at Vigyan Bhavan in Delhi along with city officials, state ministers and other key urban leaders. He told us that the awards ceremony encapsulated the progress of the JNNURM so far. The JNNURM has had some positive impact: it has prompted people to engage with the urban agenda as never before in Indian history.  Awards were presented at the ceremony to cities whose success stories in providing better services would not have been widely recognized without such a program, like a town in Tripura which successfully implemented 24X7 water. Many more buses are on the roads thanks to the NURM, an objective that was not even part of the original program.

But Sivaramakrishnan cautioned that it was not clear that the program had achieved its ambitious objectives. The program promised to be different, but he argued that the JNNURM was put together like any other centrally sponsored scheme, with all the attendant problems. The concept that ‘better performing cities should get more money’ was shot down by the Planning Commission. Most importantly, he pointed out that the program’s stated commitment to empowering Urban Local Bodies was immediately derailed by treating the para-statals (which are controlled by the state governments) as the same as ULB’s.

According to him, state governments have always undermined and assaulted the capabilities and powers of the municipalities, and that the JNNURM did not change this trend. He argued that “[t]he tendency of the state government to say municipalities are useless has to change. Because of this tendency, parastatals were created. There has been no serious attempt to decentralize in spite of the 73rd and 74th Amendment.”

The floor was then opened to the audience for questions. I must confess that I couldn’t contain my excitement at this stage because I anticipated some seriously controversial questions. Mr. SP Ambrose, a retired IAS officer, Managing Editor of our very own Adyar Times, and also a government servant for many years, did not disappoint me. He asked whether the JNNURM had led to better cities or contributed further to the urban mess. He also asked if JNNURM had done very well in some cities, examples which can be highlighted and replicated in other cities.

To this, the professor immediately said:“Some cities have definitely done well in the last decade but I cannot directly link it with JNNURM’s effectiveness. Cities that have done well, like Surat, did well even before the introduction of JNNURM. This is because of a fairly robust arrangement between the local and state political set up.”

Prof. Sivaramakrishnan also highlighted the impact of the bus component of the JNNURM in cities. “When the BRT was introduced in Delhi, 90 per cent of the car owners said that it was a dreadful concept to have bus lines. 90 per cent of the bus owners and users said this was a wonderful concept. So, one can see the intensity of conflict of interest not only between various levels in the bureaucracy, but also between the different socio-economic groups.” In this case, the JNNURM intensified conflict between these classes, but perhaps such conflict will push cities to make decisions about how to more equitably allocate public spaces like roads.

When the audience further prodded him to comment on the effectiveness of the programme, and why his book refuses to give an overall picture of the efficacy of the programme, he highlighted the lack of adequate data on change. He continued: “Let me tell you about the mid-term evaluation of this programme. Assessment of the projects has just been a box-ticking exercise … There has been no determined effort to break away from patterns.”

Prof. Sivaramakrishnan ended by thanking the audience for taking out precious time away from the kachheri season in Chennai. He closed the evening by saying that one book always gives way to another, and that he is confident that he will be back next year talking about his new book.

Verdict: Grab this book if you are interested in learning more about the JNNURM from the perspective of an insider!

Somya Sethuraman