CHENNAI: For almost 40 years now, the families at Neduvankarai Pillayar Koil street have been living on land allocated to them by the Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board (TNSCB), incrementally expanding their houses over this time in the belief that the land belonged to them. Now, however, authorities have concluded that the allotment was a ‘mistake’. Many of these houses, across various informal settlements in the city, would soon be demolished.
The TNSCB has submitted a proposal to cancel the allotments made under the Madras Urban Development Plan (MUDP) after PWD officials recently ascertained that many of these houses come under the Cooum river’s right of way. In the first phase, 36 allotments would be cancelled, said slum board officials.
Residents across the city, who received land allotments from the State government under the slum improvement scheme of MUDP, had paid around `20,000 to `1 lakh towards these lands, in the late 1970s. Interestingly, the MUDP scheme was financed, at that time, by the World Bank.
Rude shock
For 30 years, Sundarammal has gone to bed worrying about a lot of things — debt, her children’s education and her husband’s alcoholism. A house, however, has never been one of them — until now. While, under the MUDP, land spanning around 200 square feet was handed over by the government, several families have invested their life’s savings in their houses — expanding the buildings over the years, adding a storey and in some cases, even two.
When Express visited the Neduvankarai Pillayar Koil street that has now come to be known as Moovendar Nagar, many of the houses marked by the PWD as coming under the Cooum’s right of way, were one or two storeyed buildings. “If they find violations that are beyond what was actually allotted to us, they are welcome to remove it. But, they can’t demolish our houses. We are not encroachers — they have given us this land,” said Sundarammal, who works as a domestic help in Arumbakkam.
Several women in the locality work as domestic helps in the surrounding areas — Anna Nagar, Arumbakkam, Aminjikarai and Koyambedu. The men are daily wage labourers. The prime location has given them access to education, employment and healthcare. Between late 1970s and 1980s, 135 houses in Neduvankarai Pillayar Koil street in Aminjikarai and 297 houses in the adjacent MGR colony were constructed under the MUDP scheme. Apart from Chennai, a total of 77,396 houses were funded across the State including in Coimbatore, Madurai, Tiruchy and Tirunelveli, at a total project cost of `23 crore.
According to a copy of the World Bank report, the slum improvement component was brought in to provide security of tenure and basic infrastructure improvements in 85 slums with about 23,000 households, covering a area of about 185 ha.
According to slum board officials, the residents, whose allotments are to be cancelled, would be allotted a house in the Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board (TNSCB) apartments in Chennai. As for monetary compensation, the amount that the residents had paid towards the house would be returned with a 6% interest, calculated annually. “Whether it would be a simple or compound interest, we have not yet finalised,” said a slum board official.
In case the board decides to calculate the compensation against a simple interest, a resident who had paid `1 lakh in 1975 towards the house, would now get an interest of `2.64 lakh and a total compensation of `3.64 lakh. With this compensation, the families would be in no position to purchase another house in the city, let alone in the same localities.
However, the mere fact that the government attempts to quantify their lifetime investments that have gone into these houses cannot be justified, said residents. “All our lives, we had saved and spent under the assumption that the house and land were ours. For all of us, this is our biggest asset and whatever money has gone into it was considered an investment,” said Vijaya, a domestic help from Moovendar Nagar.
Harikrishnan, another resident, said some of the children from the locality even went to ‘convent schools’. “Imagine the money that we can save here. Schools and places of work are all close by. At the back of our minds, it always brought peace to us knowing that we had this house. So we could spend on other things that we wouldn’t have otherwise — like on education or in expanding the house, in whatever way we could,” he said.
Vanessa Peter, policy researcher at the Information and Resource Centre for Deprived Urban Communities (IRCDUC) said, “The fact that they have security of tenure should be enough to let them continue living there. There is no question of compensation at all here. They must simply not be evicted and their right to live in the city must be upheld.”
How did the ‘mistake’ occur?
According to official sources, the mistake of allotting a land that came in the Cooum’s right of way, was made between the PWD and the survey department. The TNSCB, in order to keep the MUDP scheme area from encroachment, had even empowered an GO 804 under which it could collect penalty and sale consideration amounts from people living as ‘encroachers’ within the MUDP scheme area. “There has been a mistake in the allotment of land, that comes under the Cooum’s right of way. However, considering the larger good of keeping the city free from floods, the houses must be removed,” said a slum board official.
A PWD official said that the work to demolish the houses would begin once the TNSCB gives the go-ahead and cancels the allotments. However, it remains unclear how the Detailed Project Report (DPR) prepared for the Cooum Restoration Project also overlooked the fact that the residents hold land titles here, raising questions on how the DPR was made.
The PWD should not have allocated any land, including at the source of the waterbody, in the approach road to the bank and at its banks, said former Madras High Court judge K Chandru. Referring to the recent Madras High Court order that ordered the eviction of encroachers near the Buckingham canal, Chandru said, “The biggest encroacher of the Buckingham canal is the MRTS station. However, the law that is promptly applied to slum dwellers is not applied to a Central government building.”
Jaishankar, a former councillor, who resides in the neighbouring NSK Nagar, said that the officials have conspired against them in only giving residents allotment orders and not sale deeds. “Six years back, we struggled and got sale deeds for some residents who received MUDP allotments in NSK Nagar. Still, not many here have sale deeds here,” he said.