Our city is indeed a gift that continues to keep giving, especially in civic issues. You can keep writing on the same matters repeatedly and yet be sure that there will be more that can be written for years to come. Take for instance the Pallikaranai marshland. These pages carry a report as early as May 2009 titled “Going slow on saving Pallikaranai marsh”, (MM, May 1-15 2009) on how the government’s demarcation exercise announced in 2007 was going on at a tardy pace. More recently, in February 2024 this column had commented on its pathetic state emerging out of details of a hearing conducted by the National Green Tribunal. Earlier this year, the need to restore the land at the earliest, so critical for our city’s ecological and urban resilience had been laid out (MM, May 16-31,2025). The marsh, a RAMSAR site since 2022, keeps appearing amidst public consciousness on a repeated basis, and almost always for the wrong reasons. The latest drama that is playing out is with respect to the alleged illegalities in granting permissions to a private developer to undertake a massive project comprising more than 1,200 flats on land designated as marshland. The Madras High Court has ordered a stay on the construction until the project’s site relative to the marshland is decided and with the matter being sub-judice, this column will not go into the case specific details.
That the number of waterbodies that once dotted our city and its fringes has come down steadily over the decades due to encroachments is no secret. The IT boom in the early 2000s brought about with it an increasing demand for real estate particularly in the OMR area as it started expanding, which in turn gave rise to several layouts and colonies. Many of these came up on erstwhile waterbodies. This writer was witness to one such violation, accompanying a cousin sometime in 2007 to visit a potential layout somewhere in Thoraipakkam. Following the developer’s instructions over phone led us to a small waterbody, which he had grandiose plans of filling up and converting into real estate. As subsequent flooding episodes have shown over the years, the destruction of these waterbodies has come with a huge price.
The ground truthing exercise to demarcate the clear boundaries of the Pallikaranai marsh as mandated by the Supreme Court is yet to be completed. At present, the Tamil Nadu State Wetland Authority has provisionally marked a one-kilometer buffer as the marshland’s zone of influence and the CMDA, acting under directions of the southern bench of the National Green Tribunal, has issued an order not to grant planning or building approvals within the RAMSAR site boundary and its zone of influence. This has naturally created anxiety amongst residents of the populous neighbourhoods, where people have invested in real-estate approved by the authorities. The CMDA has however assured that the halt is only temporary and that it would issue planning permissions following due procedures once the notification of the RAMSAR site and its zone of influence is notified.
Despite so much of uncertainty surrounding the entire administrative exercise concerning the site and its boundaries, one cannot help but think that this is a region that will continue to attract attention in the name of development. While officially the boundaries and the zone of influence will be known soon, whether the region can afford more high-rises anywhere in its vicinity is a question that needs to be debated upon. Can the environment, an ecological hotspot, bear more stress and afford to deal with the attendant problems? Surely, it is time for the state, which boasts of the maximum number of RAMSAR sites in the country to draw up a comprehensive management plan with the well-being of the fragile ecosystem of the Pallikaranai marsh at its core and follow it in spirit. Until then, can we please leave the marsh alone?