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

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’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

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

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

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

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

Contact us immediately!

Posted by Somya Sethuraman