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

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 74^th 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 73^rd and 74^th 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

We were invited to organize a panel for the India Urban Conference, held in Mysore between November 17 – 20^th, and organized by the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Janaagraha, and Yale University.

The panel was supposed to be a “deep dive” session, in which panelists and audience members could engage in a deep discussion of the issues. We decided to use this as an opportunity to get other people to discuss something that we are always thinking about at Transparent Chennai – about whether the methods that we’re developing here are actually viable as a model for improving participation (and accountability) all over the country.

We wanted to start this conversation because there has been a push for greater participation in urban governance by the central government. Currently, the needs of poorer urban residents are not well reflected in the data used for policymaking, nor does the system of elected government at the city level work well in ensuring that residents’ needs are met. Space for more participation is exciting in theory because there is another opportunity to express these needs. In practice, however, participation in urban governance has been really disappointing.

With one important exception – the increase in participatory data collection. Many community groups across the country are coming together to create data that can accurately capture local conditions, provide a realistic basis for planning, and to create data that can actually hold the government accountable. Such practices have flourished recently in part because of the advent of cheap and widely available technological tools like Google Maps and OpenStreetMap.

Our panelists at the IUC were all people who had worked with urban participation, and most with participatory data collection.

Lalitha Kamath, a professor from TISS, presented a case of formal participation gone wrong: the GBWASP project in Bangalore, where formal avenues for participation failed to adequately provide an outlet for residents’ needs. Sid Hande talked about Transparent Chennai’s ward accountability experiment, in which volunteers created data about civic problems that could hold local elected representatives accountable for local improvements. Monalisa Mohanty, the director of the UDRC, showed maps created by slum-dwellers in Orissa about their own settlements, which looked vastly different from the maps created by city authorities.

Finally, Dunu Roy, of the Hazards Center in Delhi spoke about a number of instances in which groups of workers had come together to create data and maps about problems that they were facing, and used them to come up with surprising and counter-intuitive interventions. He also emphasized that community data creation needed to be combined with community data analysis, because the methods used by formal planners may not apply at the local level. He also emphasized that in many cases, the relationship between the formal city and the informal city was an antagonistic one, and that solutions espoused by workers could not be implemented because of opposition from the government or from other city residents.

So, did we get an answer to our question of whether some of the methods that we’re developing at Transparent Chennai can actually serve as a model for improving participation across the country?

Well, not quite. The kinds of initiatives that Sid, Dunu, and Monalisa discussed are resource intensive and time-intensive, and they also often depend on the existence of a partner organization or group that can help communities to create and process data. They are micro-level processes, that are difficult to scale, and that produce data that is difficult to incorporate into existing planning processes. However, they often yielded information around which communities could organize and press for changes and improvements that really reflected local needs for shelter, services, and livelihoods.

Despite such processes not yielding the kind of models and best practices currently in vogue today, participants at the panel discussion seemed to agree that these practices represent a real deepening of democratic practice. They also provide an important counter to the general discourse around planning today, which largely focuses on responding to a perceived crisis in city infrastructure, rather than responding to citizen needs.

Nithya V Raman

I recently met Mr. V.J. Ravi Gunaseelan,[1] an autorickshaw driver in Chennai for 22 years, and the president of the “All India Road Users Rights and Welfare Association,” a group working towards guaranteeing the rights of different kinds of road users. Our conversation touched upon two important aspects of commuting in Chennai.

First, I asked him about the one of the most frustrating aspects of traveling in the city – why the autos in Chennai don’t run on meters.

According to Mr. Gunaseelan, there have beensharp increases in fuel, tax maintenance and living costs. Because the government does not upgrade the metered fare regularly, it becomes unviable for the auto-drivers to stick to them.Chennai Central used to have a pre-paid auto booth, but the booth has now closed because the rate offered of Rs 9 per kilometer is too low for drivers. Auto drivers also face a lot of other costs. The government provides only a limited number of auto permits, which arethen sold in the black market at an exorbitant price.Auto drivers also pay aregular bribe or mamool to the police. If they refuseto pay, they are falsely fined for breaking rules.

High auto fares have had an impact on their business. Call taxis, which now have comparable fares as auto drivers charge, eat away a fair share of customers making it even more difficult for the auto drivers.Because auto fares are so high, people have taken to using share autos for trips wherever they are available.

I also asked him about thehistory of share autos in the city, and the problems they face in their operations.

Mr. Gunaseelan responded that congestion on buses and haggling for auto rides have increased the popularity of share autos. The term “share auto” means that a fixed fare will be charged for point to point commute. He said that this concept came into existence in 1994 in the Vadapalani- Porur route, andoperated illegally there for many years.

Mr. Gunaseelan argued that the state government then was not in favour of permitting share autos because it would reduce people’s dependence on public transport. But due to increasing demand for cheaper commutes, three wheeler share autos carrying 5 passengers and a driver were permitted.

There are also new four wheel vehicles manufactured by Tata and Mahindra which are now operating on many of the same routes as share autos.These are called maxi-cabs, and are registered as tourist taxis, and are commercial vehicles that are permitted to carry 7 passengers and a driver.These vehicles ply on routes which have high commuter traffic and complement the inconsistent and overcrowded bus services, especially during peak hours. Because these maxi-cabs are not licensed as share autos but operate as one, they end up paying daily fines of anywhere from Rs50 to Rs 200 to the police.

It was clear from my conversation with Mr. Gunaseelan that these share autos and maxi-cabs perform a much needed service in the city. They step in where the public transport falls short, and are now considered by most of the public as a form of public transport. According to a recent news article, there are now 5,300 maxi-cabs operating in the city, which cater to an estimated 30 lakh passenger trips a day. Surprisingly however, the Regional Transport Offices have stopped registering maxi-cabs for the past few months. It is a similar shortage of auto permits that forces auto drivers to hike up their rates. Will share autos and maxi-cabs soon become more expensive thanks to misguided government intervention?

– Roshan Toshniwal

Though the Ward Councilors and the Chennai Corporation or the ‘Ripon Building’ they represent are prominent enough, information about their duties, or records of their actions are either a hassle to access or are hardly publicized. Though some information has been voluntarily published, it has not been put across widely enough, or in a form which can be easily processed. One example is the Resolutions passed at the monthly Council Meetings, whose copies have been published online (in Tamil) since July 2007 on the Chennai Corporation Website.[1]

These resolutions are plans of action or solutions to grievances pertaining either to individual wards, a group of wards or the whole of Chennai Corporation. They form the bulk of the Councilor’s active involvement in local area development. Decisions relating to the construction or demolition of buildings, implementation of laws which have been passed, processing of schemes which have been suggested and changes in officials or position designations are just a few of the plethora of resolutions passed monthly. A rough translation of the latest set of Resolutions, passed at the Council Meeting dated 31/01/2011, has been put up on the Transparent Chennai site’s data page about Municipal Councilors. (Type Resolutions in the search bar once you click on this link)[2]

The process of passing a resolution begins at the Ward Committee level, where individual Councilors may present concerns about the needs of his Ward or the status of Municipal Works in the area. At the next stage, the Commissioner and the relevant Standing Committees approve the resolutions, which have already been approved by the Ward Committee, unless they are cancelled by the State Government.[3] As directed in the Chennai City Municipal Corporation Act 1919, there are 6 Standing Committees, namely Accounts, Public Health, Works, Taxation and Finance, Education and Town Planning.[4] These Standing Committees are to meet at least a month, and consist of 15 members elected by the Council.

At the final stage, they are discussed at the monthly Council Meetings convened by the Mayor in the presence of other Ward Councilors. If a resolution or order passed by the Council goes against any provision in any Act, by-law, rule or notification or is unjust, the Commissioner may then refer the issue to the State Government.[5] Once it is passed, it is the Commissioner’s and relevant departments’ responsibility to ensure it is carried out. This order of proceedings, which has been directed by the Chennai Municipal Corporation Act 1919, can be seen in the Dates of the Commissioner’s Entry, Standing Committee Meetings and Council Meetings.[6]

From viewing the copies available online, the resolutions appear to have been quite clearly written, with most containing a brief explanation of the issue, descriptions of related issues and officials, a brief timeline of progress, and Ward and Zone details where relevant. The set of resolutions pertaining to a specific project or scheme can give us comprehensive information about it and often, the stage it is or is supposed to be at.

Data presentation prevents accountability

However, it is only in some cases that the details of who actually pushed the resolution are given, making it difficult to judge who is more involved or less involved in promoting works either in their own wards or the city. Also, we observed discrepancies in the dates of the Council meetings at which the resolutions were passed; resolutions passed on certain months are missing, as seen in the ordered list of resolutions presented online available here[7], leaving a lot more to be desired in the attempts to make these public releases more accessible and visible.

Though the raw information itself is quite accessible, the extraction of relevant data proves to be a real task.  Obtaining information specifically relevant to a member of a ward or an employee of a department or organization is difficult. Unless specific information about when a specific resolution was passed is at hand or unless sections of the report relevant to certain Ward Councilors have been extracted and kept at their offices, (as a Councilor we spoke to claimed he did), looking for a particular piece of information means manually sifting through yearly reports (which have all been published only in Tamil) to obtain the required information, a mammoth task.

This leaves us to question: Even though the council resolutions are published online, without this information being as accessible, searchable, and comprehensible as it could be, is the Council truly accountable to the public?

Charumathi Raja, summer intern for Transparent Chennai, 2nd year Economics student at the University of Warwick, UK

[2] Excel Workbook of Rough Translations of Resolutions, as passed at the Council Meeting dated 31/01/2011(Sheet 1)

[3] Corporation of Chennai, “The Chennai City Municipal Corporation Act, 1919.”, Chapter 2, The Several Authorities

[4] Corporation of Chennai, “The Chennai City Municipal Corporation Act, 1919.”, Chapter 2, The Municipal Authorities of the Corporation.

[5] Corporation of Chennai. “The Chennai City Municipal Corporation Act, 1919.” Chapter II, 23.Functions of council.

[6] Excel Workbook of Rough Translations of Resolutions, as passed at the Council Meeting dated 31/01/2011(Sheet 1)

[7] Excel Workbook of Resolutions Available Online (Sheet 2)

As the Municipal elections draw closer and we try to find ways to analyze the performance of the Councilors, let us first assess the data that is at hand and its ability to provide a nuanced analysis of a Councilor’s performance. Transparent Chennai collected information through RTI applications and personal visits to the Chennai Corporation.

We filed RTIs at individual Zonal Offices to their Public Information Officers, the Executive Engineers, to get data on attendance and minutes of Ward Committee meetings and the Councilor-wise expenditure from their Ward Improvement Works Fund. At the Corporation, we approached the Council Department to obtain Council Proceedings Official Report for data on attendance, questions asked and speeches made at the Council meetings. This data was translated from Tamil and manually tabulated for every Council meeting from 2007 to 2011.

Data Collected

-          Attendance at Ward Committee and Council meetings held between 2007-11

-          Questions asked and Speeches made at these Council meetings

-          Resolutions passed by the Council

-          Expenditure from the Councilor Ward Improvement Works Fund

From the mountain of raw data collected, we filled spreadsheet after spreadsheet with information, neatly formatted and beautiful to look at . Our aim was to organize and analyse this data to understand the performance of individual Councilors during their term of 5 years. But a closer look revealed that not everything was flawless.

Analysis of Collected Data-

Questions and Speeches: May not be the best measure of performance

There are around 15 questions asked and 15 speeches made by Councilors in pre-decided order at every Council meeting. The questions asked and speeches made at the Council depend on the allotment provided by the Council department to various political parties on the basis of their strength in the Council and hence, cannot be completely indicative of the Councilor’s own efforts to represent his/her ward at the Council.

Councilor Ward Development Scheme: Incomplete information for accountability

The information about Councilors Ward Improvement Works expenditure tells us how much a Councilor has spent to develop his/her ward but we cannot assess the quality of this expenditure because details of spending were not made available to us even after an RtI request. Moreover, we heard informally that proposed expenditures from certain Council members were blocked because of their party affiliation, so the spending does not always correlate well with the performance of the Councilor.

Resolutions: Incomplete information for accountability

Resolutions are an important measure of the work done by a Councilor. Overlapping data on attendance of Councilors with the number of resolutions they have passed can help us understand whether attendance at these meetings is in any way reflective of the work they do. The resolutions passed at the Council are put up on the Chennai Corporation website. However, the information on this website is not complete. There are several months of resolutions missing. Many of the resolutions available on the website have been wrongly labelled. These gaps in data are difficult to discern from the website unless you are privy to the dates of the past meetings and the number of resolutions passed in each.

Even when these gaps are filled, the resolutions information is kept in such a manner that every resolution cannot be attributed to a single ward or Councilor, making it less useful for understanding an individual Councilor’s performance.

Attendance: May not directly reflect performance

Good attendance at Council is important, but it does not necessarily mean that councillors are active. In our RTIs to the Zonal offices we asked for the minutes of the Ward Committee meetings. Only Zone 6 responded to this request by emailing us the soft copy of their Ward Committee meetings minutes. The minutes contained information on the resolutions put forward by Councilors in each meeting, from 2007 to 2011.

From the minutes of the Zone 6 Ward Committee, we find that while all the Councilors have attended every meeting of the Ward Committee between 2007 and 2011, there is extreme variation in the number of resolutions they have put forward. Almost all the Councilors have presented 5 or more resolutions excepting Ward 92 which had only one and Ward 87 which presented none. Ward 91 and Ward 95 have been very active with 25 and 21 each. Ward 94 has been present at every Council meeting from January 2007 to May 2011 but has passed only 5 resolutions during the same period.

Our assumption that collecting data would be a difficult was not wrong, but it wasn’t the only stumbling block. Attendance, funds and resolutions are the just the first step to understanding and assessing Councilor performance, but each piece of data has its limitations.

Transparent Chennai has started a project on Electoral Accountability where we seek to understand what our elected representatives do, how we can measure their performance and hold them accountable. In the weeks leading up to the Council elections that will be held in October, we will be putting out information on what our local government does and how they function. In this regard, we are starting a blogpost series Chennai Council Elections. Below is the first post in this series:

According to the Chennai Municipal Corporation Act, 1919, a Councilor can bring to notice of the proper authority the neglect of municipal work, wastage of municipal property, communicate the needs of his ward and suggest improvements. A Councilor has access to the records of the Corporation and can peruse them giving due notice to the Commissioner. Councilors can also be held liable for loss or wastage of money or property of the Corporation caused by them.

From talking to a Ward Councilor one understands that they, informally, interact with their constituents and use meetings at the Ward Committee and the Council to give voice to their needs. Requests by the Councilor that are approved at the Ward Committee meetings are presented at the Council meetings and result in resolutions. The Council Department says that around 100-150 resolutions are passed at the Council meetings that are usually held once a month.

In the murky waters of what a Councilor can or cannot do, there is one clear responsibility they can carry out- the utilization of funds provided to them under the Councilor Ward Development Scheme. Every year, each Councillor gets a specific sum to use for the development of his ward. The funds come to the Corporation from the State Government. When a Councillor wants to use these funds, he suggests a work that needs to be done within his ward like road improvement, he tells the Junior Engineer to prepare a plan and draw up an estimate. This is then taken up to the Assistant Commissioner for approval. On receiving his sanction it goes to the concerned department in the Corporation, a tender is called for and the contract is given out. The funds are released directly to the contractor by the Assistant Commissioner at the Zone.

Now, this should be good news. But how are they spending this money? Are they spending at all? An RTI filed by Transparent Chennai shows that during the year 2007-08, from the total allotment of Rs.1085 lakh 70% was used. The allotment for each Councilor was Rs.7 lakh. When in 2008-09 the allotment increased to Rs.15 lakh per Councilor, the percentage of total expenditure fell to 63.5%. With the increase in allotment to Rs.25 lakh in 2009-2010, the spending fell further to 40.6%. It increased to 62.74% in 2010-2011. Were the elections slated for October 2011[1] an incentive?

More pitiful are the figures of the Mayor Special Development Fund, only using Rs. 18.36 lakh in 2007-08 and Rs.12.62 lakh in 2008-09 out of the allotted Rs.50 lakh. Following the downward trend, in 2009-2010, when the allotment increased to Rs.200 lakh spending plummeted to a miserable Rs.9.71 lakh.  No figure was given for 2010-2011.

- Meryl Mary Sebastian

Transparent Chennai is partnering with Chennai live 104.8 radio station to talk about ways in which citizen’s suggestions on traffic problems on Old Mahabalipuram Road (OMR) can used for resolving traffic woes. The additional traffic commissioner of police has promised that best suggestions will be implemented. Following is the information on challenges and recommendations suggested by the traffic police incharge of the OMR stretch from SRP Tools to Semancheri post:

This road is being maintained by TNRDC (Tamil Nadu Road Development Company). The traffic controlling instruments like traffic signals, speed breaker permissions, mid block and zebra crossings including monitoring advertisement hoardings etc which is usually maintained by the Chennai Traffic police in the city is being maintained and permitted by the TNRDC on this stretch.

There are totally 9 policemen and 11 signals to monitor the stretch between SRP Tools upto Semanjeri Checkpost which is about 30km stretch. On an average there are over 1 lakh vehicles passing Sholinganallur and between 20-30 cases of over-speeding cases are booked every day. Apart from this 5-10 accidents are reported every week on this stretch. Following are the signal points and their conditions on these stretches:

Table 1 Signals on OMR

Source: Chennai Traffic Police.

Following are the major traffic bottlenecks and accident prone zones as observed by the traffic police area in-charge.

1. Kandanchavadi: Near YMCA school; this is the most accident prone spot with over 10 fatal accidents last year causing death. Although there is a FOB (Foot over bridge) very few people use it. As TNRDC does not allow speed breakers on the road or a mid block crossing. Jay walking is quite prevalent as the school caters to over 1000 students. There is an unapproved mid block crossing carved out by regular commuters and an unauthorised bus stop at which the buses stop.

2. Life line Hospital signal: It is a traffic bottleneck because of free left and as the turning is a 2 lane road.

3. Span between SRP Tools and Lifeline hospital: This is an accident prone zone due to wrong side driving and jay walking. The discontinuity of service lane from SRP tools towards Mahabalipuram causes the confusion amongst the motorists travelling in wrong direction.

4. Before Toll Gate (Hyundai showroom Perungudi Bus stop): Traffic bottleneck due to heavy pedestrian traffic. There is an unauthorised median opening and during the peak period the road is completely taken over by the pedestrians.

5. Between Perungudi Bus stand and Toll gate: Although there is a Foot over bridge the incomplete service road on one side hampers the access. The FOB is also incomplete and hence pedestrians resort to jay walking. They have created an opening in the median and the crossing is a cause of caution for motorists.

6. Corporation Road (Madras Industrial Gear) Thoraipakkam: The vehicles turn at this junction and as there are no signals or policeman on a regular basis and thus withough proper regulation it becomes a traffic bottleneck and a soft spot for accidents.

7. Seevaram: FOB is not being used and has become a traffic bottleneck.

8. MNM Jain Engineering  College: The median is broken and student jaywalk to cross the roads. During college hours (closing and opening time) peak hours it becomes a traffic bottleneck.

9. Mettukuppam bus stop/ FOB and opposite to ASV Suntech Park: The FOB is not being used and the unauthorised median opening for pedestrian to cross causes a traffic bottleneck

10. Karapakkam PTC bus stop: There are no FOB, no crossing (mid block or zebra) and presence of heavy pedestrian and vehicular traffic. It is an accident prone zone.

11. Between Mahindra Satyam and Accenture at Aravind Theater: There is a FOB and a mid block crossing but due to heavy motor and pedestrian traffic it has become an accident hot-spot.

12. Sholinganallur, between (Kelambakkam and Thoraipakkam): It has become a congestion point lately because the vehicles going towards Tambaram have a close to the turning. Although it was shifted by 100m the clinging of buses together has made it ineffective.

13. Diamond Engineering Company: The road bends and because of poor visibility many accidents occur. As there are few villages in the surrounding people cross randomly and thus it has become an accident prone area.

Recommendations:

1. The height of the median throughout is less than 2feet which eases Jaywalking. As there are several villages, institutions (schools and colleges) and Industrial area on both sides of the IT corridor it cannot be stopped. So increasing the median height will dissuade them to cross at grade and use the FOBs or cross at signals and authorised mid block crossing.

2. Incomplete service roads and limited mid block crossing has forced the motorists to drive on wrong side to the nearest signal or crossing. This is difficult to monitor considering only 9 policemen are manning these roads. The drivers are booked for dangerous driving and every day the traffic police collects 9-10,000Rs for over-speeding and dangerous driving. The police have recommended the TNRDC for putting speed-breakers and giving mid block crossing as per their observations but TNRDC takes a long time to respond.

3. Large number of wine shops in this stretch has caused drink’n’ drive problems. The drunkards also sway on the roads and are victims of accidents. The TASMAC shops should not be allowed to have bars or drinking areas at nights. It needs to be monitored regularly.

4. MTC buses do not stop at their assigned space, causing traffic disturbance as commuters dependent on the public transport cause commotion running all around the buses. In Sholinganallur the bus stop was very close to the signal which became a bottleneck and is now sorted out by pushing the stop by 100 meters away from their location. This was due to heavy traffic and short time gap between arrivals of 2 buses which eventually becomes a chain.

Through this effort we wish to have a better participation of people in resolving the traffic problem of the city. We are soon going to have an OMR layer in which you will be able to placemark the location of the traffic problem and suggest your views to resolve the problem.

Roshan Toshniwal

Manual scavenging is constitutionally banned under The Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prevention) Act. Close to two decades have passed since this Act was passed in 1993, but manual scavenging is still ingrained in the lives of the urban poor in Chennai. Repeated protests by NGOs and civil society have not been able to eradicate this deplorable practice. Why has the government not taken necessary steps to rehabilitate the lives of manual scavengers? Why does a person still have to go 5 feet into the drain to manually clean human faeces? What happened to the promises of full mechanization? None of these questions fetch any answers from city managers.

An interview with Mr. R Anbuvendhan, President of the Sanitary Worker’s Union, shed light on inconsistencies inherent in government policies and practice. According to Anbuvendhan, 9727 sanitary workers were sanctioned by the government in 1996 to work in Chennai. Of these, only 3750 are currently working with the Corporation of Chennai. “Nobody knows what happened to the rest of the employees. While some retired in normal course, many have suspiciously disappeared from the attendance registers and government payroles”, said Mr. Anbuvendhan.

The sanitary workers department is under staffed and incapable of handling the load of work entrusted to them by the Corporation. Chennai’s boundaries have expanded since 1996 to include a number of municipalities. The population has increased from 4 million in 2001 to 4.7 million as per the recent Census. However, these are not accounted for when the government calculates the number of sanitary workers to be employed by the department. As per Central government norms, not less than 2.75 sanitary workers should be assigned to a population of 1000. Currently, each employee takes care of more than 1300 residents. “Unofficial corruption and bonded labour is inherent in the bureaucracy”, says Anbuvendhan. Out of all the processes, only the attendance records of sanitation workers have been computerized. “Attendance is taken at least thrice during the day and even one time absence leads to salary cuts”, he said.

Source: Hindu, File Photo

Nearly all workers are in their mid forties and fifties, and suffer from work induced ailments like cancer, tuberculosis, asthma and other respiratory diseases. However, the medical claims offered to sanitary workers do not cover these diseases. “More than 65 per cent of the sanitary workers are women and their rights and needs should be protected. Families of sanitary workers do not even get adequately compensated when they die during service. Metro Water, a parastatal agency, privately hires workers to manually clean the sewers. When workers die inside these sewers, they are entitled to zero compensation by the agency”, he said.

The Sanitary Workers Union was formed in 2004 to protect the rights of the sanitary workers and help rehabilitation. Have things changed since then? “Not much has changed, but workers are more aware and empowered to fight for their rights now. They no longer fear to exercise their freedom of speech”, said Anbuvendhan who hopes to completely rehabilitate the lives of manual scavengers in the city some day.

Transparent Chennai will be going on a city tour this week to check the conditions in which manual scavengers operate in the city. Transparent Chennai will also be a part of the weekly union meetings to interact with workers. If you are interested in talking about this issue, write to somya.sethuraman@ifmr.ac.in

All views expressed here are based on newspaper clippings and interviews.

Somya Sethuraman

Transparent Chennai’s research on road safety and pedestrian infrastructure has so far shed light on the increasing number of road accidents in the city, and the type of vehicular traffic (scooterists, cyclists, autorickshaws, four wheelers etc) that is affected the most during these accidents. There has been so much hype about the limited space for pedestrians, yet not much of this information has been quantified to say anything meaningful. Transparent Chennai gathered information about pedestrian infrastructure in the city, and through this post we will share some of our key findings. The information was collected from the Corporation of Chennai, the city road division of the Highway Department and the Chennai Traffic Police.

By pedestrian infrastructure we mean any infrastructure that makes walking easier on roads. These can be categorised into pavements, subways and foot-over bridges, traffic signals and traffic calmer (zebra crossing, mid block crossing, speed breakers etc).

The city has a network of almost 830 km long stretches of footpath, the width of these vary from 0.6 meters to 3.5 meters (Table 1). There are 25 subways, of which 17 are maintained by the city road division of the Highway Department and 32 foot over bridges maintained by the Corporation of Chennai.

There are 218 traffic signals of which only 39 facilitate pedestrian movement.There are 29 CCTV camera points of which 12 are localized. There are 425 zebra crossings, 185 bumpy speed breakers most of which lie in the Annanagar division as it has many schools and other institutions. These are being maintained by the Chennai Traffic police.
According to a pedestrian guideline, IRC: 103-1988, the minimum width of a pavement should be 1.5m and unobstructed. However, over 52% of the sidewalks in the city are not even 1.5m wide.

Table 1: Distribution of pavements less than 1 m Zone wise

Table 2: Distribution of pavements 1.5m wide zone wise

Table 3: Inventory of pavements (Zone wise)

Source: Analysis done based on the data provided by individual zone offices collected from all the 10 zones through RTI filed on 27th January 2011

The authorities argue that building more pavements will result in encroachment by hawkers but the analysis shows that hawkers occupy only about 3.5% of all pavements in the city of which 63% lies in zone 8 and 3. Zone 8(Kodambakkam) which is the commercial hub of the city has a little over 5% of its footpath encroached by hawkers, while Zone 3 (Pattalam) has over 15% of its footpaths occupied by hawkers. Zone 2 has about 10% of its pavements encroached by hawkers. North Madras (Zone 1,2 and 3) is the most dense part of the city and has less than 13% of the total pavements of the city which accommodates 29% of the vending stretches in the city.

This analysis is based on the data records available with the zonal offices. Please see the Our Data section of the road safety research for raw data.

Roshan Toshniwal