The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Paying the price for not putting ecological safeguards in place

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Nov 12, 2005

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Paying the price for not putting ecological safeguards in place

Vani Doraisamy

Information Technology highway reels under rain assault

GETTING IT WRONG: Cognizant Technology Solution's state-of-the-art facility at Thoraipakkam on the Old Mahabalipuram Road stands in two feet of water after last week's downpour. — PHOTO: SHAJU JOHN

CHENNAI: The Bangalore syndrome may be catching up with Chennai; all it took was one spell of intense rain to land the city's showpiece IT corridor in troubled waters, literally. Four days after the rains stopped, stretches of the high-profile proposed superway lie in tatters, save for a three-kilometre stretch from Madhya Kailash to Taramani on the Old Mahabalipuram Road.

Chennai, seems to be paying the price for not putting ecological safeguards in place before the monsoon onslaught on the 20 km. environmentally-fragile stretch that extends upto Siruseri which the Tamil Nadu Road Development Corporation proposes to convert into a Rs. 200 crore six-lane superhighway of global standards.

The problem is not so much with the road development itself, urban planning experts say, but with the fact that the corridor is fraught with uneven development: encroachments on water bodies are yet to be cleared on large stretches of the corridor even as many IT majors are reclaiming vast tracts of land that traditionally acted as water sponges.

Though the IT industry itself had not been grounded because of the monsoon, employees of Infosys, Cognizant Technology Solutions, Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro have had to take a lengthy two kilometre detour through the Velacherry-Perungudi link road to reach work everyday, as large stretches have turned unmotorable. A series of unending potholes a little before Cognizant's facility snares motorists, even as a two-feet-deep cesspool of brackish water surrounds the rear of the IT major's existing facility and an upcoming one. Near Sholinganallur, the scene gets worse as water logging persists, turning road margins into slippery slush.

Though authorities responded quickly by starting patch repairs in badly mauled stretches, IT representatives say the monsoons have been a dampener. "The torrential downpour has led to an unusual wear and tear of roads. Globally, wherever such high bandwidth development has happened, there is bound to be some disruption, which we need to weatherproof for the better. Though authorities are doing their best to get the roads back in shape, some parts are still not easily motorable," a top IT executive said.

TNRDC officials say the unprecedented rains will in no way deter the scheduled completion of the six-laning by June next year: "Such a thing (as the recent rains) has never happened till now. We propose to raise water-stagnation prone roads to two-and-a-half feet above the existing level and put in place 29 culverts and a 21-km lead-off drain. Patchwork on damaged roads will be completed in the next 48 hours."

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