Where’s the money?

A reader writes: Further to what your special correspondent published (MM, Feb. 1st) about plans to spend more money on the City’s waterways, A. Srivathsan has recorded in The Hindu the huge sums allocated for this very purpose over the years. Srivathsan stated:

Had the high-level government committee not intervened in 1960, the Cooum river would have been covered and closed by now. Finding the condition of the river appalling, a proposal was made to divert it near Chetpet and link it with the Adyar. The remaining part of the river, east of Chetpet, was to be filled up. However, the proposal was rejected and, instead, a clean Cooum project, at a cost of Rs.118 lakh, was launched in 1967.

Inaugurating the project, Chief Minister C.N. Annadurai said: “The Cooum will bring Madras city a place of pride like the Thames to London”. The present condition of the river is far from these objectives.

When the river was affected by floods during 1976, the P. Sivalingam Committee recommended projects worth Rs. 22 crore to improve the waterways of Chennai.

In 1991, Severn Trent, a consultancy, was commissioned to look for ways to improve the water courses of Chennai. In 1994, the Mott MacDonald study proposed projects worth Rs.34.8 crore for improving the Cooum. Another project was launched in 1998 and Rs.19 crore was earmarked for improving the Cooum. The Chennai City River Conservation project was launched in 2000 with an outlay of Rs.720 crore. And so far about Rs.358 crore has been spent on various projects, including on the Cooum.

Reader’s Note: What has happened  to the rest of the allocation? Isn’t it enough to clean the river?

Flights of fancy?

Driving around in Chennai is like being in a theme park, with the more exciting ‘rides’ being offered by the numerous flyovers that have sprung up all over. And we hear more of them are being planned.

Flyovers serve the purpose of – or, at least, are supposed to serve the purpose of – easing traffic congestion. We might agree that they have been somewhat successful in doing so, but will they continue to do so in the future? As we know, sustainable development is that “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED, 1997).

From the traffic surveys conducted in 1971 and 1994 at certain points on the Marina beach road (from Napier Bridge to Elphinstone Bridge), the total road traffic was found to have had increased threefold in two decades. It is reasonable to expect a similar growth rate in the coming years too on Chennai’s arterial roads such as Anna Salai, Poonamallee High Road, Radhakrishnan Salai, etc. Would the flyovers that have been built especially on the arterial roads cater to the traffic needs, say, even 50 years from now?

1. Are we not compromising the ability of future generations by constructing a ‘tube railway’ under the arterial roads? In the U.K., the designers of the Victoria Line of the tube railway estimated that the tube’s total capacity on completion, with trains running two-ways, at two-minute intervals, would be 25,000 passengers per hour, compared to a motorway with a similar total capacity that would need no less than eleven traffic lanes. Imagine the width needed for two railway tracks vis-a-vis eleven road traffic lanes!

2. Have we considered that if a tube railway project were to be undertaken in future, it has to go well below the bottom of piles of flyovers, necessitating tunneling, instead of “open cut and cover” which can be at shallower depth and less cost? (Note: All flyovers have pile foundations which go upto 15-20m depth or even more.)

3. Do we have any alternative routes (alignment) for the underground Metro to serve the same locations as well as endpoints on the arterial roads?

Are these flyovers merely flights of fancy or are they a consequence of a well thought out sustainable development strategy? Do we even have one?

Rabindran Vannamuthu
vrabindran@hotmail.com