CHENNAI: Bricks, walls, and dust — M Mercy watched her home in Thideer Nagar being razed down to the ground in 2017. That night, she and her family were carted to Perumbakkam’s government housing board buildings with few other residents. Till then, she didn’t know what the words eviction and resettlement meant. “We didn’t know areas beyond Thiruvanmiyur. At night it was like they blindfolded us, put us on a garbage truck and dropped us off in a forest. It was like dumping waste on a wasteland,” the member of the Information and Resource Centre for the Deprived Urban Communities explains.
Far-flung from the city, Mercy and other residents now travel 30 km to sustain their livelihoods. Another resident, M Sandhya, flags the lack of schools, hospitals, buses, and basic amenities like street lights. Last year, as cyclone Michaung inundated the city and eventually drained out, some parts of the city including Perumbakkam remained marooned.
The water refused to drain for eight days and seeped into the first floor of their eight-storey building along with snakes filled, recalls Mercy. “From 2017, till today, our lives are porattam, porattam, porattam,” she says at ‘Namma Chennai Namma Heroes’, hosted at Neelam Cultural Centre.
As August comes around, the heritage of Madras is celebrated but often those who built the city are forgotten at such events, notes Prashanth from Chennai Climate Action Group (CCAG). The event aimed at spotlighting the working class, protests and the vulnerable communities at the forefront of the climate crises. It was organised by Reach the Unreached, Visai, and CCAG, on Sunday.
Development for whom?
How does one grow into an activist? For Sarathkumar, a member of Vyasai Thozhargal, activism is inseparable from the pain of being discriminated against for belonging to Vyasarpadi, the tag carrying stereotypes of being a ‘rowdy’ area. “We are doing what we’re doing because there is no choice and because nobody else will do it. We thought we should safeguard the next generation from such struggles. Ambedkar was an inspiration to us and as first-generation-learners, we realised that education would give us a path and we wanted to teach our area children the education we couldn’t receive.”
These dreams resulted in Dr Ambedkar Pagutharivu Padasalai, a tuition centre in JJR Nagar thriving on a plot of land, formerly a sewage-ridden area. During cyclone Michaung, as the area was inundated with shoulder-level water, this tuition centre provided shelter to nearly 200-odd residents. As officials neglected the area, Vyasai volunteers knocked on doors with food packets, milk and aid, he explains.
“Water is the same in Velachery or Vyasarpadi but the struggles are not the same,” says Sarathkumar. The city is still reeling from memories of 2015, and 2023 floods. Surrounded by Kodungaiyur Canal, Otteri Nala and Captain Cotton Canal, Vyasarpadi, like other parts of north Chennai, face floods during the annual rains. As a child, Sarathkumar recalls his mother holding a banner over him and his siblings, shielding them from rainwater pouring in from all crevices. Every year, deaths during the monsoon rise, and yet official action is sparse, he says. But the fight continues, and Sarathkumar believes that education will equalise society.
Like Vyasarpadi and Perumbakkam, Ennore remains in the peripheries of policy and our collective imagination of the city. The area made headlines after the ammonia leak in December last year, and even as the protest continues, it has faded again. “This is an area with 30 red category industries and with this leak, five years of work is gone completely,” says activist Vishanth. For decades, Ennore has been the epicentre of protests and yet the industrialisation continues, he adds.