CHENNAI: When the crane warned the frogs of imminent flooding, only one set of them decided to act before disaster struck. Varummun kaappom, they decided. For all that wisdom that Tamil folklore attempted to drop into our young, untainted minds, the moral of the story remains lost on most of us, it seems. “What the government machinery is doing now is flood management — how to get people to safety and offer them food and relief, get the water out, after the city is flooded. We need a permanent solution.”
At a panel discussion that brought together activists from within the city and without, the call to hold the authorities accountable for solutions that will save the people from the next flood — not just tide them through the aftermath — was unanimous. But to do just that, the powers that be and people who put them there would have to confront the elephant in the room: Can Chennai grow without harming itself? It is this question that was placed before the panel that had gathered on the behest of the Madras Institute of Development Studies and Chennai Climate Action Group.
The city that embraced the opportunities brought on by the newly developed IT corridor and found real estate avenues even in the once-secluded areas of Ayanambakkam and Avadi, didn’t stop to question such unchecked growth till it found itself underwater in 2015. Every year since, with each new disaster, we’ve taken turns to blame one government or the other for the city’s misfortunes. But Dunu Roy of Hazards Centre, Delhi, traces such development all the way back to the British Raj and its peculiar needs.
Introducing the permanence of dams on a populace that had learnt to read the fluidity of its rivers and relied on cyclical structures was a means of revenue and control. So came the roads that cut through the rivers and walls to hold the water back. A phenomenon that still holds true across the city. “But the moment you build the walls, you forget that it acts both ways. If it will prevent the river from going out into the flood plains, it will also prevent water from the flood plains coming back into the river,” he pointed out.
Disaster in development
After the shocker in 2015, even as the government slugged through, the people jumped into action. By means big or small, they learnt to focus on disaster management. While some raised their houses by two feet, others invested in waterproof bags and top-shelf storage; stocking up for a rainy day was no longer just an idiom. But the government though, as it always does, labelled the people on the river banks — making do with 100 square feet of land and barely-there lodgings for daily-wage jobs in the city — as encroachers and moved them outside the city.
You would be washed out by the floods, they had told them. Four years down the line, in settlements far from the city in Semmencheri, Perumbakkam and Kannagi Nagar, they are still being washed out by the floods.
“There was no attending to our basic necessities — water, electricity, medical facility or drainage. We are asked if we suffer so much in a single day’s rain. Most of us are daily wage labourers and jobs are in the city (40 km away); there’s no transport facility to get us there. We’ll have to wade through the water to get there anyway. While we’re away, there’s no telling if the things in the house will be swept up in the floods, if snakes will enter the house, if the kids we leave behind will be safe,” pointed out Kanchana, an activist from Semmencheri.
While the 2015 floods should have shocked us into rethinking our town planning, the decisions that followed have indicated otherwise. And there’s more bleakness in store. “The Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority had proposed that creating a Chennai Metropolitan Region and localising its planning (one that bridges the gap between cities and villages, and preserves the natural resources among them). But, instead, it was people within CMDA who opposed the plan and went for expansion and urbanisation in its Masterplan.
The idea of the Masterplan is entirely urbanisation, one that will convert fertile land, forests and marshlands into concrete houses, and accelerate climate change,” explained KP Subramaniam, retired professor and transport engineer. With lakhs of people coming into the city for its jobs, infrastructure and social progress, it is witnessing a demonic development (asura valarchi) that is unsustainable, he added.
Plans: pass or fail?
Yet, this isn’t news to people who have been working in this field. Decades ago, when creating housing had been a major concern and the concept of neighbourhood level planning was already becoming unpopular, the side effects of expansion were readily overlooked, recounted Santha Sheela Nair, former vice chairperson of the State Planning Commission. “I was in the Corporation Commission in 1984 when there was a flood that everybody has forgotten now.
At that time, I was vociferous in my demand that low lying areas should not be allowed to urbanise; particularly all these eris — Velachery, Retteri, Iyyapanthangal (thangal also means lake) — that became urban centres. Now, the water has nowhere to go. At that time, as a member of the CMDA, I had objected to any of these places being reclassified as primary residential areas without providing the necessary infrastructure to ensure that flooding does not take place. The response was that I was removed from the CMDA,” she narrated.
This, again, is not news. Krupa Ge, journalist and author of Rivers Remember, pointed out that though the government’s own commission classified the 2015 floods as a man-made disaster, the then government refused to table the findings for three years. A number of PILs that were filed in the aftermath of the floods still remain unheard of.
Both Santha and Sumbramaniam offered the freezing of development in Chennai — or at least parts of it — as the way out. Further densification of core areas would only exacerbate the need for resources, ones that we don’t have. The CMDA Masterplan that ends in 2023 recognises the need for additional water sources to meet the requirement of the projected population of 2023 but fails to offer clarification on how it plans to arrange for this; or the facilities like distribution and drainage, pointed out Santha.
Subramaniam suggested that the government immediately freeze investments in Chennai and instead divert them to places like Coimbatore, Tiruchy, Salem and Tirunelveli — tier 2 and tier 3 cities. If employment opportunities were created here, the people living tortured lives in the city would only be happy to return to their hometowns. “Another thing to do is change the capital. The government has to be in close proximity to its people to function effectively. So, the least that can be done is the creation of a second capital. Only then can it turn tier 2 cities into alternative destinations,” he said.
Charu Govindan of Voices of People and Karen Coelho of MIDS spelt out the need to involve the people in the planning. For even something as simple as constructing stormwater drains, the people in the neighbourhood who have lived and experienced the vagaries of the place would know if it’s necessary there; for what works for Semmencheri may not work for ECR, said Charu. That all it takes from here is political will was also something that the panel agreed on.