CHENNAI: Long before entering the electoral politics, Nithya Raman, the new mayor of Los Angeles, was, one day, walking through the streets of Chennai, asking why the residents, especially the marginalised, had to fight for something as basic as a functional public toilet. Nithya’s work in Chennai offers a glimpse of the civic concerns she would later take into politics.
In 2010, she founded Transparent Chennai, a research and data initiative under the Centre for Development Finance at the Institute for Financial Management and Research (IFMR), based at the IIT Madras Research Park in Taramani. Under her, the team documented public services and mapped their locations so that people had proof of the lack of amenities and could hold authorities accountable.
Somya Sethuraman, an independent water and sanitation consultant who worked with Nithya as lead researcher, recalled she was inspiring and determined to bring about meaningful change, and managed with the bare minimum. “It is lovely to see her win,” she said.
Somya said the team’s public sanitation project, which Nithya led, inspected public and community toilets in various neighbourhoods across Chennai along with research organisations, activists, advocacy groups, residents’ welfare associations and the public.
“We wanted not just usable toilets, but also facilities closer to resettlement colonies, while ensuring residents had safe access to them,” she said. The focus was primarily on slum resettlement colonies, where the team found a shortage of toilets and other amenities.
Kalpana Karunakaran, associate professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Madras, who worked with Nithya on two projects under IFMR, said she is passionate, dedicated and disciplined, and is always involved in issues concerning the urban poor.
Prabu Raja, former IT technical lead at Transparent Chennai, said Nithya consistently advocated proper planning before slum clearances, insisting that relocation should not disrupt livelihoods and that new settlements must have essential amenities.
He said she also pushed the team to use data to understand the issues faced by residents. “When we overlay government slum data with user-generated public toilet data, we can better understand Chennai’s sanitation access issues. Similarly, public toilets vs ward boundaries will show whether any one part of the city has got more attention or it is equally distributed,” Raja told TNIE.
Under her, the team also created an easy-to-search bus route map for Chennai for the first time in 2010, which became a hit among residents. Raja said a dedicated team travelled on MTC buses with GPS devices to build it.
At a time when Google Maps did not offer today’s features, people could search for a starting point and destination to find the relevant bus numbers. The map also carried information on public toilets, accident hotspots and the locations of MRTS and Metro stations. Another initiative that proved useful, according to Somya, allowed residents to map the locations of potholes in their city.
Sixteen years later, Nithya is likely to lead America’s second-largest city, bringing her journey full circle.
