The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Green drive in overdrive

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Sep 16, 2005

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Green drive in overdrive

Staff Reporter

Corporation has spent Rs. 14 crores on parks Chennai Corporation has spent a record Rs.14 crores this year on creating and renovating parks, some of which will be formally inaugurated by the Chief Minister today

CHENNAI: Any one looking at the new Chennai Corporation Park on Haddows Road will find it hard to recognise the stretch of land from pictures taken just a few months back. Once part of the clogged Nungambakkam canal bank, that had become a garbage dumping ground of sorts, it is today an eye-candy of a park. The civic agency spent close to Rs.40 lakhs in transforming the place into a jogger's delight. The canal itself has gone underground.

The park at Haddows road is just one of 69 new parks that the Corporation has set out to complete this financial year. It has allotted Rs.14 crores for the creation of parks and another Rs.3 crores for maintenance, the highest ever budget allocation in a year.

Apart from the new parks, Corporation has also taken up the revamp of old parks, Nehru Park on Poonamallee High Road and Independence Day Park in Nungambakkam two examples of total transformation in recent times.

On Friday, Chief Minister Jayalalithaa is expected to take a tour of the city to formally inaugurate some of the parks and also dedicate a cement concrete road in Sathyamoorthy Nagar in North Chennai. It may be recalled that the chief minister had promised to lay concrete road there during the floods of November 2002.

The projects have been taken up under the "Chennai Forever" scheme launched by the Chief Minister last year.

Parks on canal banks

Apart from the parks along arterial roads and the beach road, the Corporation has also taken up beautification projects along canals and riverbanks. In some cases, the civic body has also recovered government lands that faced encroachment, especially in Adyar and Nungambakkam.

Earlier this year, Public Works Department handed over several portions of land along the canal banks to the civic body for the beautification project.

Notification pending

Though the Corporation has used a substantial portion of its funds for capital works in the parks, many green stretches in the city remain to be notified under the government gazette as `parks.' Unless the government notifies the parks, they are liable to be used for other projects in the future.

According to official records, there are only 88 notified parks in Chennai. The last time any park was notified was in 1984. The Chennai Corporation reportedly forwarded a list of 73 parks to be notified last year and another list of 69 parks this year.

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