It could be a scene from a holocaust movie. Blocks of identical buildings stand tiredly in the distance along broken, deserted roads. Heaps of garbage and puddles of dirty brown water break the monotony. Stray dogs lap from open sewers. This is Kannagi Nagar, where over 10,000 families displaced by Chennai’s development projects have been stacked into unkempt rows. You could call it a forgotten filing cabinet for displaced people — just one of the many resettlement colonies that the city has built on its margins.
The tragedy of these colonies — all of them consigned to oblivion — is most telling in the children. In their weariness and cynicism.
Seventeen-year-old Revathi dropped out of school four years ago, exactly six months after moving into Kannagi Nagar from Mandaveli in the heart of the city. She got tired of the few, impossibly crowded buses that run from the colony to her school, the long commute, the struggle to buy books and uniforms for herself and her three sisters, and her mother’s failing health.
“What is the point of studying anyway? There are graduates and post-graduates here who are jobless,” she shrugs. Intelligent and articulate, Revathi too was hopeful once. But that was in the Mandaveli slum. There, her mother Lohambal earned Rs 3,000 as a domestic help in a few houses close by, and the family could afford a comfortable life and the occasional generosity to needy neighbours.
It changed one Sunday afternoon, when the machines rolled in and brought down their houses. Shocked families were packed into lorries and sent to Kannagi Nagar. They were being evicted for the Adyar Poonga eco-park, a Rs 100-crore project for Adyar Creek’s ecological restoration.
Kannagi Nagar was another world. The looming buildings welcomed them in darkness — there was no electricity. The place already housed thousands of families who were resettled to make way for other projects within the city, such as the Adyar Cooum cleaning, MRTS (mass rapid transport system), railway track widening, flyovers and a recreation club for government employees. Lohambal has since then waited helplessly outside the flooded street that leads to the colony, begged for a ration card. More misery was in store as a newspaper report branded the colony “rowdy” and all its girls as “AIDS patients”.
In a tiny one-room apartment, Lohambal’s youngest daughter is curled up under a blanket.
“Everyone says she has chikungunya,” says Lohambal. “But how can I take her to Royapettah (the nearest government hospital, 22 km away)?” The biggest problem these thousands of families face is the distance from any facility. A “good” school is 18 km away, an ‘affordable’ government hospital is 22 km far and for work everyone travels an average of 20 km a day. Bus fares cost Rs 30 a day per person.
The distances have meant broken families.
One man refused to move with his wife and children. A woman chose a faraway hostel to living with her mother in the colony. The weak have been abandoned virtually to their fate.
Frail Ramathayi, 66, lives on the mercy of her neighbours. Her daughter refuses to move from her workplace in the city, leaving Ramathayi as the caretaker for the house allotted to them. She visits her mother once or twice a week. The apartment/room is almost empty; no vessels and few signs of cooking. She mumbles something when asked where she gets her food. Before moving into the colony, she used to earn her keep proudly — Rs 1,500 from working in two homes.
As evening falls, Sathya is hurrying to her next patient. She takes care of elderly and ill people and earns Rs 3,000 a month. Sathya still bears the marks of her prosperous past — four empty ear-piercings. She lived by the railway track in Mylapore and would take contracts to clean the track. But she had to leave her home to make way for a cleaner Cooum four years ago. Ironically, a recent study by the Tamil Nadu fisheries department showed the river is 80 per cent dirtier than sewage. “I came to this colony wearing so much gold,” Sathya says forlornly, fingering a yellow thread that now holds her thali.
The sense of desolation on the streets is broken by the laughter of running children in Mohan’s house. His children and grandchildren live in the same colony. When they were moved from Mylapore for the MRTS station, Mohan, his two sons and a daughter got a house each. In Kannagi Nagar, the PCO booth and photocopy centre that Mohan runs from his house look superfluous, if not ridiculous.
He admits that he does not make much from it — Rs 1,000 a month. Far less than the Rs 15,000 he made as a carpenter in the heart of the city. But he is relatively less bitter about the move. “In the beginning we were apprehensive,” he says. “We were being shifted from Chennai 4 to Chennai 97 (the postal pin codes).
That should explain all.” Further away in Chennai 119 — Semmencherry — are 6,000 families who have been evicted for projects in south Chennai. A few tall pillars mark the entrance to this colony, but all pretensions to grandeur stops there.
The streets are unlit and clouds of mosquitoes infest the waterlogged roads.
It has been days since Selvi’s children have gone to school. They are constantly ill from the mosquitoes that breed in the clogged drainage water that leaks from the faulty pipes. A rash of grass has sprouted in this water and Selvi’s husband recently killed a snake that escaped from it. Ironically, Selvi had to move into this unhygienic nightmare because the cleaner Cooum project took away her home.
In her 35 years, Selvi has been evicted twice in the name of development. The first was when her family, who lived in a roadside slum, came in the way of increased traffic 30 years ago. Then, the authorities shifted them to homes along the river. Four years ago, with the river-cleaning project, Selvi’s family again became an eyesore and had to be removed.
Selvi is among the many whose world has been disrupted because the city needs more room. They have lost their homes, their neighbourhoods, their livelihoods and sometimes their relationships. But the city’s resettlements hold a bigger threat — of being forgotten in a faraway place.