Finance panel's special aid for TNSCB

By K. Ramachandran

CHENNAI, OCT. 7. Tamil Nadu's shelter programmes targeting the poor has received a boost with the Eleventh Finance Commission sanctioning a Rs.49 crore special assistance to the Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board (TNSCB).

The Board has sought the State empowered committee's approval to implement schemes for relocating/rehabilitating about 3,200 families living in slums on objectionable locations in Chennai, Madurai and Coimbatore.

In a departure in urban resettlement strategy, officials involved in formulating the schemes hope to attain ``dispersed development'' by resettling the targeted 3,200 families in about a dozen different locations in the three cities.

Already, the TNSCB is implementing two resettlement schemes at Okkiyam Thoraipakkam, south of Chennai, to rehabilitate about 9,500 families, living on `objectionable locations' or those affected by laying of the MRTS alignment. While one scheme to build 6500 tenements is using a Rs.60 crore grant from the Tenth Finance Commission, the other to construct about 3,000 tenements is being implemented with a Rs.37 crore loan from HUDCO.

While as an engineering solution, Okkiyam Thoraipakkam offers great promise, now on hindsight, officials feel that massing thousands of dwellers from different urban slums in a single concentrated point, is turning into a sociological problem. For those living in different settings to come together and start a new life in an alien environment about 20 km away from their original settlement can lead to problems that can be beyond any engineering solution.

Yet another problem is finding large parcels of land free of encumbrances to develop big relocation sites. Officials in development agencies note that one way of getting over this problem is to find smaller parcels of land in different locations to resettle the people moved out of objectionable sites.

On a conservative estimate, Chennai has 8,000 plus families living along the River Cooum, about 15,000 along the Buckingham Canal, over 9,100 along River Adyar, well over 4,000 families living on the edge of Otteri Nullah and about 1,800 along Mambalam Canal. Besides these persons some 32,000 families are literally living on the edge - on pavements and about 3,000 families abutting the seashore.

Madurai has about 60,000 people living in 208 slums and Coimbatore about 20,000 families.

In such a situation, the Board hopes to resettle such families in smaller relocation sites using the lands liberated from development following the scrapping of the Urban Land Ceiling Act. The Government has promised to accord priority to the Board while utilising the old ULC lands.

Development agencies note that of the over 1000 ha of land in Chennai metropolis, only 40 acres of land can be used by the Board because of various constraints. The lands are either encroached upon or their access roads are not upto CMDA norms. Still, the Board is already in possession of land in certain locations in Chennai where it has proposed to use the Eleventh Finance Commission assistance to put up about 2,200 tenements.

In Madurai and Coimbatore, three such sites have been identified for the Board to build about a 1000 more tenements.

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