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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