Saturday, 22 November 2014

Why living in Chennai’s suburbs is such a nightmare?

The title should not give you a mistaken impression that living in Chennai city proper is as though a wondrous experience! This is intended to convey the relatively more difficult civic life one endures in the suburbs than the city. The difference if at all is in only the degree of severity of the issues involved!

Let us take for example the traffic in suburbs. It might be quite obvious to anyone the interior roads in most of such suburbs are quite narrow (mostly 20ft wide and rarely 30ft wide). This is irrespective of the length of the streets. One of the basic parameters of town planning is that higher the length of the street, broader it should be. Here we have situations where even a kilometer long street is just about 20ft to 25ft wide. With unimaginatively built storm water drains jetting above the ground, encroachments and parked vehicles taking significant space, you end up with one or one and a half lane for traffic. Count on your lucky stars if you have to navigate deep inside such streets as this may be kind of a one way ticket. If you are fortunate enough you don’t encounter some other vehicle in the opposite direction or you have some margin space somewhere to squeeze your vehicle in and let the other one pass. Or else you end up reversing so long you end up back in the main street, that too only if there are no vehicles behind you!

Then let’s take the case of piped water supply and proper sewerage. Are these such luxuries that suburb-walahs should not expect it as a matter of right?; Why is that these poor souls must fend for themselves with brackish water from tube wells that seem to be reaching so deep into the bowels of mother earth that soon our unit of measurement will turn from the present hundreds of feet into thousands of feet, when it comes to talking about the depth of these wells. Are these people not entitled to piped treated water in their door steps?; Is a proper public sewer system that would give them deliverance from the septic tanks and cesspools of waste water which are breeding grounds of tortuous mosquitoes and many a disease, too advanced a civic amenity?

How about power supply through underground cables than the dangerous overhead variety?; Most of the readers in the suburbs will have seen overhead non-insulated power cables so close to balconies that a child can just lean and touch it and pay for it dearly with life. Or what about the dysfunctional street lights , 90 degree turns in narrow streets, street dogs, clogged storm water drains, rotting garbage, crowded and mis-sized apartment blocks in narrow streets, private buildings in the middle of roads, absence of government schools, hospitals, potholed roads that get marooned with the slightest of rains, complete absence of sidewalks and parking space and the battles one has to wage ...Continue Reading


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