On October 24th, at a seminar on the Heritage of Madras sponsored by the Madras Metropolitan Development Authority (MMDA) and the British Council in Madras, an announcement of some importance to the City was made – the formation of EPOCH-Madras, the Society for Environmental Protection and the Conservation of the Historical Monuments in Madras.

There are already in existence a number of organisations dealing with noise pollution and such other specialised problems, but it has been felt that we need a co-ordinating body to facilitate citizen participation in the planned growth and transformation of Madras.

The announcement of the formation of the society in itself means very little – the society will be judged not by its aims but by its achievements. EPOCH-Madras will have to prove itself by its work. And that is not going to be easy, considering the general feeling that we, the ordinary citizens, are helpless in influencing the state of affairs. The first task of EPOCH will be to tackle this feeling of helplessness. EPOCH, however, is fortunate to have the enthusiastic support of the Minister for Urban Development, S. Raghavanandam, as well as the top officials of MMDA.

Aside Contributing Editor S. Muthiah who, along with your Editor, Abraham Eraly, Dr. Nandita Krishna, and Prof. Raj of the School of Architecture, is involved with the formation of EPOCH, reports:

EPOCH-Madras was first envisaged by a quartet associated with Aside, whose inspiration was a visiting UNESCO team, Dr. Bawa who had helped with the inauguration of the Golconda Society in Hyderabad, and a British Council exhibition on Conservation in Britain. And encouraging all these attempts have been a trio from the Madras Metropolitan Development Authority, Vice-Chairman Balasubramaniam, Louis Menezes, the Member-Secretary, and Dattatri, the Chief Urban Planner. The planned Society also appears to have the blessings of the go-getting, pragmatic Minister for Labour and Urban Development, S. Raghavanandam.

Whether EPOCH’s achievements will ever be rated epochal will depend not so much on its stated objectives as on its ability to study problems in depth, suggest alternatives that are practicable and get these suggestions accepted. This would mean hard work of a studious and investigative nature, supported by Eminent Expert Opinion, than mere publicity campaigns or presentation of petitions. This became obvious when the group, meeting to form the Society, took up the “Save Moore Market” issue.

Given the necessity to expand Central Station – on which all were agreed, as improved transport from the suburbs was necessary if you were to get more people moving out of the congested City centres – then, did the expanding Railway facilities have to gobble up the Moore Market-Victoria Public Hall complex or could another solution be found to make all those concerned with both issues happy? As architect Pithavadian pointed out, the Railways set about making their plans for expansion without anyone pointing out to them that preserving Moore Market should be a constraint to their plans. If this constraint were to be there, then an alternative suggestion would have to be worked out in consultation with specialist town planners, civic authorities, traffic controllers, railwaymen, engineers and architects. The convincing presentation of such an alternative plan would certainly get a quick-acting Minister like Raghavanandam initiating action to get the Railways to review their plans.

The Railways’ plans themselves have been the subject of various contradictory reports. A statement one day that the Railways had agreed to the Moore Market building not being pulled down but used instead for some other purpose was contradicted the very next day by an equally official statement that the Railways’ plans were complete, the land was theirs and Moore Market would have to go – though not in the first phase. Equally, those most concerned with wanting to save Moore Market were faced with a volley of awkward questions. Is Moore Market to be saved because it is a splendid architectural example of a period or because it is a landmark, a sociological phenomenon and/or a tourist attraction of Madras? Would the Moore Market building mean as much to the public as it does now if, in the future, it were used not as a shopping centre that is a part of Madras’ ethos? Historically speaking, Victoria Public Hall is older and architecturally more interesting than Moore Market, so why agitate to save Moore Market and ignore the fact that some authorities would like to pull down the VPH? If persons are concerned with the impending fate of Moore Market, why are they not expressing the same concern about the sorry state Moore Market is in? And, as the Minister pointed out, if the would-be Society was concerned about ‘historic’ Moore Market, why was it not concerning itself with even more historic Kothaval Chavadi, the wholesale market that’s been with Madras from almost the first years of Our Town?

Discussions on such questions as these, at a series of meetings in the past few weeks, certainly succeeded in focussing attention on the necessity for such a society as EPOCH – all the more because almost none of the Madras media is concerned with the City, but only with gubernatorial and ministerial pronouncements. The MMDA themselves emphasised this by reporting that their individual requests to the local media for views on the Authority’s plans and on the City’s needs, were met with silence in almost all cases. At the seminar on the “Heritage of Madras”, organised by the British Council and the MMDA, the Press stayed long enough to note Minister Raghavanandam’s speech and the proposal to form EPOCH – and left, missing out on one of the most lively seminars in recent times, a seminar that was chock-full of ‘copy’ for a newspaper concerned with the city it publishes from.

The seminar was part of the British Council-MMDA exhibition that was inaugurated by Governor Patwari. At the inauguration, ex-solon and civic leader ‘Chitra’ Narayanaswamy, a pioneer of environmental protection in industrial complexes, pointed out that the urban problems of India today are the result of demographic pressures brought on by industrialisation. These population migrations have defaced and threatened to strangle even such spread-out cities as Madras.

Governor Patwari, inaugurating the exhibition, deplored urban congestion, but he thought that Madras was “not so congested” and was “full of beautiful trees”. However, he did feel that “civic sense that was lacking” needed to be imparted to the citizens by giving them adequate “training,” at least in keeping the city clean and spruce.

Reference was also made both at the inauguration as well as at the seminar the next day to Noise Pollution, Prof. S. Kameswaran of the Madras Medical College warning that, at the rate urban noise levels are increasing, most persons in urban areas were in danger of becoming deaf by 2000 A.D.

Repeatedly mentioned at these meetings was the indifference of various Government agencies to the destruction of the environment and the protection of what is left. Case after case was cited. Such as these:

• Fort St. George, where the City began and where some of the City’s oldest buildings are. Here, old buildings have been pulled down and new ones, completely out of harmony with what is left, built, ‘protection’ notices notwithstanding.
• Historic buildings are the better for being ‘lived in’; in other words, not left as museum pieces, but put to use. In the light of this, if historic buildings are brought ‘to life’, its occupants must be persons who respect the historicity of the buildings. Two of the City’s most historic complexes, Fort St. George and Chepauk Palace, have been so indiscriminately used by successive governments that today they are in disgraceful condition, not even the minimum standards of cleanliness and repair being met.
• The menace of squatters and unauthorised hawkers in almost every busy City centre.
• Guindy Deer Park, one of the last homes of the vanishing Black Buck and now sanctified as a national Wild Life Sanctuary but too late to prevent the depredations that have taken place there despite the Forest Department’s protection notices. This sanctuary has been carved up for a college and hospital, memorials and playgrounds and closet atmosphere zoos, the college alone blending to some extent with the wooded serenity.
• The famed Madras Beach, from the Cooum down to Mamallapuram, has been built over with public facilities in parts, plotted out for private homes in other stretches, reducing to virtual nothingness sandy expanses meant to be enjoyed by those seeking recreation.
• The Cooum, cleaned up, beautified and deodorised to some extent, now left to slowly drift back to its seemingly destined fate: squatters and hutments, defecators on its banks, 130-odd sewage outlets emptying into it, all contributing to that aroma Madras has learned to live with these many years.
• The Veeranam Project from which the City still awaits water – yet abandoned – because pipelines laid leaked the water out into fields, almost converting a drinking water project into an irrigation one.
• The backwaters in San Thomé being filled up with refuse, a reclamation project undertaken with no thought to the hazards to health. This apparently internationally-recognised method of land reclamation has at this late stage got the health authorities interested and the refuse is said to be at last being treated, as it should have been from the beginning.
• The numerous new road toppings laid, only to be broken up at different times by cable and pipe-layers, sewerage workers and drainage men, all because of a sheer lack of coordination.
• Since most Madras slums are true to the village pattern, if only they could be kept clean, true rural pockets would emerge in urban surroundings. But if slums are to be destroyed, are unsightly tenements the solution? Especially tenements with attached bathrooms that are not used because the tenants (1) overcrowded, need the bathrooms for living space, and (2) being unused to indoor toilets still prefer the open air. So why not outdoor community toilets?

To judge from the discussions centring on these and like problems, certain solutions seemed obvious.

In the first instance, if the law was allowed to take its course, if the Government Departments concerned were willing to state their cases boldly, in both instances without political interference, most of the problems pointed out by the conservationists would be solved before they even came to their notice.

In the second place, proper education on civic responsibilities (as opposed to Civics) and hygiene would make the task of law-enforcers easier. But is such education the function of the conservationists? It would seem obvious that such education should be the first thing a Government would want to introduce in the curriculum. But if it doesn’t, perhaps the first campaign of the conservationists should be to get Government to introduce such a course throughout the school curriculum – and such a course could well start with toilet training, as the New China does!

Thirdly, the local media should be induced to take a greater interest in the City’s problems and this can best be achieved if the means of communication between official bodies and the media are improved. If only official bodies would freely air their plans and encourage the media to discuss these plans, there would be implementation that would at least attempt to satisfy all views.

In this connection, it was pointed out that, for instance, the Corporation has a tree-planting scheme that enables householders to get free shade trees for their houses and pavements, the Corporation even planting the trees and providing the fencing; the Agricultural Department has a Home Gardens scheme where free advice and seedlings are provided; and the Khadi Board has a scheme to encourage bee-keeping at home. No doubt many other departments have similar help-the-people projects, but few know of them.

And, finally, granted the necessary priority of all these, the conservationists and the MMDA need to get together on deciding which specific areas of the City need to be tackled from the angle of civic improvement that keeps in mind the view of the protectionists. For starters, such suggestions as these have been thrown up:

• Preserving the Fort St. George and Pantheon complexes, without building any more steel and concrete leviathans out of harmony with the rest of the architecture.
• Clearing the roads around the Mylapore and Triplicane temples.
• Protecting the places of worship and the old homes of George Town, again by clearing the streets of overcrowding. A good project would be to reveal to public gaze once again the historic Chennakesava Temple, now obscured by buildings and crowds in the Flower Bazaar area.
• Incorporating the Moore Market-VPH complex into the new Railway campus.
• Protecting the beach from Marina to Mamallapuram, by permitting no beach-devouring constructions of any sort, be they fishermen’s huts, beach houses and holiday homes of the affluent, or public memorials.
• Saving Guindy Deer Park from any further encroachment and endeavouring to get the present encroachments in harmony with the serenity of the sanctuary.
• Preserving the stately old homes of Madras, like Brodie Castle, The Grange, Leith Castle, Umda Bagh, Amir Mahal and scores of others, not letting them be destroyed like the City’s first Railway Headquarters, a truly magnificent building.
• De-clogging the Buckingham Canal, preventing the Cooum from being used as a sewer, and making the entire waterway navigable for a water transport system carrying passengers...a need all the greater now since the planning for the Rapid Transit System seems to have been shot down.
• Saving Saidapet Golf Course, not for golfers or a housing scheme, but for a zoo. Doubting Thomases who feel the area is too small should visit the splendid Dehiwala Zoo in Colombo, an object lesson in creating a lush green “open” zoo in a confined area.

All these and more are projects any dedicated group of conservationists should get their teeth into. But success could only come with favourable public response to and cooperation with such societies. EPOCH seeks dedicated membership, willing to work towards successful implementation of such conservationist schemes as mentioned above – and any others you would like them to add to this list. EPOCH needs you!

EDITOR’S NOTE: EPOCH came to an end not long after Moore Market went up in flames in 1985. By then INTACH-Tamil Nadu had come into being.