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.

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

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

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

-  Somya Sethuraman

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

Thanks to Lalitha for translation.

The Government of India launched the National Urban Sanitation Policy in 2008 to achieve 100 per cent sanitation coverage in Indian cities, through methods that encourage community participation. In this regard, the Ministry of Urban Development also allotted Rs. 13 crore to support cities to prepare their City Sanitation Plans (CSPs). A district level study was undertaken to rate the level of sanitization on 19 broad parameters called the “urban sanitation indicators”. These Service Level Benchmarks reveal that none of the cities in India, including Chennai, are close to achieving complete sanitization. Chennai, in fact, has been rated as a city that needs considerable improvement in its sanitary conditions. Yet we see very little effort and money committed towards sanitation.

While many states have already undertaken the process of writing their CSPs, the state government of Tamil Nadu has been completely irresponsive on this front. None of the cities in Tamil Nadu have been granted any funds to initiate the writing of CSPs for their city. Sources say that the Tamil Nadu government hasn’t been proactive in taking this up. For instance, Chennai which has only 715 public toilets serving a population of approximately 5 million, has done very little to improve access to this very basic public amenity. The informal sector in Chennai, which accounts for 70 per cent of the jobs, goods and services utilized by all, largely depends on the amenities provided by the city for its sanitation needs. 1 million people live in Chennai’s slums and over 1200 declared slums accommodate approximately 23 per cent of the city’s population. They lack all access to adequate shelter and services. Open defecation is still a common practice and women and children feel safer defecating in open fields close to their workplaces or homes rather than having to walk long distances to urinate in dimly lit city toilets. Considering the current status of sanitation, why are sanitation investments so less and programs not pro-poor? Why do sound policies and programs fail to take off in certain regions and states while they do wonderfully well in others?

A recent World Bank study – “The Political Economy of Sanitation: How can we increase investment and improve service for the poor?” discusses operational experiences from case studies from four different countries including India. It shows that the current limited focus on sanitation is driven largely by political motivation in the context of competing demands for resources, and to a lesser extent by technical or economic considerations.

“The case study looks at the political drivers for the success of the Total Sanitation Campaign in rural Maharashtra. Designed as a supply-driven sanitation program, the campaign has a set of defined components that include information, education and communication, community mobilization activities, construction of household toilets and community complexes, and provision of toilets in government schools and anganwadis. The India case study examines why the Total Sanitation Campaign failed to take off in most the states until 2004–05 and provides political economy insights on the Maharashtra success story”

To download the report, click here.

—————–

Somya Sethuraman

Whenever there are any potholes, or water stagnation or any services that disturb the functioning of the road and reduce mobility, the public tends to blame the Chennai Corporation. The Chennai Corporation is to maintain all city roads as per section 203(2) of the Chennai City Municipal Corporation Act, 1919. But is the Corporation really to be blamed? My research for Transparent Chennai indicates that it is actually not the Corporation that is in charge of all the roads in the city.

In the process of collecting data regarding the pedestrian facilities in the city I stumbled across a surprising fact: until 2006, the City road division of the Tamil Nadu Highway Department maintained seven corridors of roads. These city roads were handed over to the Highway Department in 2002 on a special request from the Tamil Nadu State Government as it was far from satisfactory and required urgent attention. This was done to provide good quality riding surface and driving comfort of the highway standards which the Chennai Municipal Corporation could not deliver, as it did not have enough money, man power and technical knowhow to work in this area. The funding to maintain these roads were being given by TUFIDCO (Tamil Nadu Urban Finance and Infrastructure Development Corporation).

Till today, the City Road Division of the Highway department continues to maintain four main roads measuring 65.9 kms in the city and 17 subways on these roads. Following are the roads:
S.No Name of the Road Length of Stretch being maintained in (Km)
1 Anna Salai (G.S.T Road) or NH45 28
2 Poonamalle High Road/ E.V.R.Salai (G.W.T Road)NH4 9.2
3 Wall Tax Road/ Erukkancheri High Road (G.N.T Road) NH5 10.7
4 Jawaharlal Nehru Road/ 100 Feet Road (Inner Ring Road) 17.5

But the bus shelters, street lights and the trees on these roads continues to be maintained by the Corporation of Chennai.
Any subsidiary functions such as laying of pipes (sewerage, water supply, telecom lines etc) which involves digging of roads and abruption of traffic due to these functions, on these roads requires prior permission of the Highway Department. Mr. Duraisamy, (Chief Engineer Planning division, City Road Division, Highway Department) said that the agencies responsible for these subsidiary functions pays the Highway Department for the road digging and relaying.

The question is who should one contact in case of any dysfunction of services which may lead to disruption of the traffic on these roads. As the services are being maintained multiple agencies like the water supply and drainage by the CMWSSB, the transformers and electricity supply by the TNEB, the telecom utility boxes by the various companies, the role of the Corporation and the Highway department is to manage and co-ordinate its repair and maintenance. They further hire contractors either through tenders or through their contacts to finish the job depending on the type and size of work.

The roads deteriorate due to wear and tear because of the traffic, and sometimes because it is not laid properly. The constant digging and relaying parts and stretches of roads creates imbalance and results in uneven surface. Hence, from all the above arguments, it is clear that the services on the roads require special attention, space and a body which manages and integrates these. This will result in better accountability and reduce wear and tear of the roads without disrupting traffic.

- Roshan Toshniwal

Rodriguez (2010) in his paper ‘Claims for Survival’ written on behalf of the Dakshin Foundation observes that one of the major problems that has hindered the articulation of clearly defined rights for traditional fisher folk is the absence of data that explains their relationship with the coast. He notes that most studies on fisher communities often fail to comment on the historical processes through which coastal communities have evolved their relation with particular stretches of coastline that they use, the boundaries of these stretches, the property regime, and the spatio-temporal details and patterns of shore/beach uses.

In Section 2 of his paper he addresses this lack of data by presenting findings from key studies on beach and coastal land use by fishing communities in India. His analysis is useful in that it helps to illustrate how fishing communities use large tracts of coastline space beyond their village settlement.

Absence of such studies have weakened fishing communities influence in their say and control of the coastal space, especially in regards to development in areas occupied and used by them. Proper information on landuse, traditional practices and the like on fishing communities would go a long way in empowering them and their supporting organizations by helping to counter threats from outsider driven development initiatives.

Take for example the strongly contested elevated highway, which is a 6-lane highway proposed by the government from the Lighthouse on Marina to ECR. Currently the feasibility report prepared by consultants Wilber Smith Associates (2009) takes into account only the residential boundaries of project-affected communities. At Urur and Olcott Kuppam, which are two project-affected fishing hamlets, this is a flawed assumption as it fails to take into account the socio-economic and socio-cultural role of the beachfront and the coast to these two communities

In an effort to create data that is locally generated, Transparent Chennai along with the residents of Urur and Olcott Kuppam will be organizing a participatory mapping exercise at Urur and Olcott Kuppam in the month of February 2011. This kind of data collection is important as Brown & Hutchinson (2000) explain that the problem with data obtained on communities by outsiders (say NGO’s etc) is the fact that the consultations are often designed to meet a specific agenda and can be totalitarian at worst and extractive at best. Furthermore, through such methods the ownership of the information generated seldom lies with the local community.

Participatory mapping is a method through which the community’s perspective of the local environment is documented in a number of ways and is an easy way of obtaining spatial information on the community. We are excited over the fact that unlike other data gathering processes, the initiation and ownership of the data will rest primarily in the hands of the local panchayat and residents.

Based on preliminary meetings held with kuppam residents and the panchayat it has been decided that three kinds of maps will be generated- those that provide information on landuse, on local infrastructure and those that provide locally generated demographic information on the community.

We are very excited at the prospect of helping create locally generated maps, and hope to use the mapping exercise at Urur and Olcott Kuppam as a pilot study, so that we can extend this method of data collection to all the fishing hamlets on Chennai’s coastline.

References:

Brown, M, & Hutchinson, C 2000, ‘Participatory mapping at landscape levels: Broadening implications for sustainable development and biodiversity conservation in developing country drylands’, Aridlands, No. 48.

Rodriguez, S 2010, Claims for Survival: Coastal Land Rights of Fishing Communities, Dakshin Foundation, Bangalore.

Wilbur Smith Associates Pvt. Ltd 2009, Link Road from Light House on Kamarajar Salai to ECR Via Besant Nagar: Final Detailed Feasability Report, Highways Department, Chennai.

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- Siddharth Hande: Core Member, Reclaim Our Beaches (Currently interning with Transparent Chennai)