The logics and consequences of mass peripheral-resettlement in Chennai

The logics and consequences of public housing projects involving mass peripheral resettlement in Chennai, India Divya Chand | Housing (Urban Geography) | Master in Urban Studies

Research Question What are the logics through which agents of the state carry out mass resettlement of the urban poor into housing blocks in the periphery of Chennai, India and what are the observed consequences of these projects?

Introduction The last couple of months of 2015 brought immense amount of rainfall and accompanying floods that wreaked havoc in many districts of the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The capital city of Chennai was critically hit. Due to the overflow and release of a dam, north of the city, the rivers of Adyar, Cooum, and Kosasthalaiyar, and Buckingham Canal, that flow through Chennai, carried this excess water and inundated the city. Worst hit were the precarious informally built housing tenements of the poor, on the low-lying lands at the banks of these rivers. Not only did their inhabitants suffer from a great deal of death and destruction because of the deluge, the state then stepped in and dispossessed them of whatever was remaining of their neighbourhoods and they were displaced to the far edges of the city.

The state government assigned the Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board to resettle all those affected into houses in large-scale resettlement colonies, all located nearly 25 to 35 kilometres away from the original sites of habitation of the flood-affected communities. With minimal regard for peoples’ source of livelihood and children’s education being in the city, the order was to clear the floodplains and move the poor out. The state has a history of using naturaldisaster as a chance to move the marginalised out of central city areas (referring here to rehabilitation programs after the 2004 tsunami disaster). Chennai’s waterways, especially the Cooum river, are popularly regarded as dirty, they stink and are known to be filled with sewage.

Yet, there is a long history of clean-up efforts, starting with the Cooum Improvement Project of 1967, through the central government-funded, Rs 1,200 crore Chennai City River Conservation Project launched in 2001, to the latest project announced with great fanfare in late 2009 (Coelho and Raman, 2010). While these projects have ecological and beautification as their major line of reasoning, they are always carried out in a way that slum eviction and displacing people is one of the foremost steps. Displaced in the name of ecology and safety from environmental disasters, people are resettled to colonies such as those at Ezhil Nagar and Perumbakkam. These themselves are built on swamp lands below sea level, without comprehensive storm water drain network, and were inundated up to neck-level when the 2015 floods happened. (Padmanabhan, 2015). People were, and continue to be, coerced in Chennai into leaving their homes to live in state-built houses, which have been reported to be in awful conditions. Over the years and till today, complaints about lack of electricity, livelihood opportunities, adequate education or healthcare facilities, drinking water and basic hygiene have been reported. (See for example- Coelho, 2016; Shekhar, 2018; Suresh,2018; Mathew, 2019)

Figure 1: A recently evicted settlement at the bank of the Cooum river, the whole built-environment is demolished except the neighbourhood temple-shrine October 2017; Source- Author

If one walks along the rivers of Chennai, even today, you see settlements built by people in all stages of being, some where the forces are yet to come down on, but many destroyed or in the process of eviction. Eco parks are starting to be built, but one also sees large scale real estate development in the form of luxury apartments, or IT offices. This stark disparity in the states’ discourse, actions and effects are felt in very real ways in not just the socio-spatial structure of the city but in the lives of thousands of families. The following paper attempts to analyse the logics through which agents of the state carry out mass resettlement of the urban poor into housing blocks in the periphery of Chennai and to unpack how neo-liberal, growthoriented strategies of urban development are being masked through politics in the form of ecological restoration and social housing provision in Chennai, and what effects this is having on those being displaced.

An overview of housing for the poor in Chennai In 1947, when India achieved independence, in Chennai a City Improvement Trust was set up to cater to the city’s housing needs. This organisation in 1961 evolved to become the statelevel Tamil Nadu Housing Board, to cope up with the increasing demand in housing sector all over the state due to urban growth leading to migration into urban areas in search of employment opportunities. Chennai experienced a massive growth of slums and informal housing in the 1960s, and the then government of Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), with a strong base with the urban poor set up TNSCB, or the Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board in 1971.

Since then a lot of slum-clearing initiatives have followed that have been studied and reviewed over the decades (Coelho and MIDS, 2016). In the 1970s, the state started building tenements in-situ at the site of the slums itself, where they were allotting housing to everyone affected. There was lack of proper temporary housing while these buildings were being built.

When they were ready, they were of poor quality, lacked maintenance, and since residents

had no stake in them, as they weren’t paying rents, there was no sense of ownership. These turned out to be vertical slums, and were deemed to not be affordable, sustainable or costeffective solutions. In the 1980s, there was a push by the world bank for in-situ slum upgradation and for a sites and services program. The people were given titles to their plots and provided with basic infrastructural services. Some of these were studied 30 years later and reviewed to be the best long-term solution. Over the years people slowly and steadily, incrementally built up their houses according to their capabilities and needs. Since the plots assigned to the people were of different sizes in the same site, a mixed neighbourhood of economically week, low-income and middle-income groups emerged. What helped was that people willingly applied for these plots were not forcefully dislocated into them. The 1990s was when land became a scarce resource, and the policies shifted towards state-built resettlement tenements, wherever land was cheap. Even when the government tried to initiate projects within the city, they were of a small scale.

In the peripheries of the city, land was chosen to build large scale housing colonies.

Poromboke, in Tamil, means shared-use community resources like waterbodies, seashore and grazing lands that are not assessed for tax purposes. Over time, it has become a bad word used to describe worthless people or places (Vettiver Collective, 2017). Poromboke land around the city, were government owned commons. Usually lake beds, grazing lands, wetlands etc., they were less regulated and allowed for flexible governance. Completely ignoring their role in the regional ecosystem, they were categorised as ‘wastelands’. This reduced the property value considerably, and hence building housing for poor on here was regarded as a smart financial decision. 3 separate colonies of Perumbakkam, Semancherry and Kannagi Nagar were set up at Pallikarnai, a marshland below sea level in the southern part of the city. Allocation of a large amounts of funds through projects like the Tamil Nadu Urban Development Project (TNUDP) and the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) encouraged the building of large-scale resettlement colonies.

Mass Peripheral Resettlement and New Geographies of Vulnerability The building of these colonies somewhat coincided with metro rail construction in the city and the river restoration projects mentioned previously. The land at the banks of the rivers in Chennai were also government commons, not owned by any private entity. They were open for people and hence a lot of communities ended up incrementally building the largest parcels of squatter settlements here, close to the city centre where they could be involved in all kinds of livelihood generating activities. During the drive for the eco-projects, the residents of these settlements were blamed for the pollution of the waterbodies and were held responsible for passing untreated sewerage into them. In reality, the biggest reason for pollution in these rivers was the large amount of metropolitan sewerage released by the state, construction and existence of large-scale encroachments like metro stations and malls. Anyhow, in the restoration drive of the Cooum river, about 14000 households were removed. Even though it was possible, and suggested by experts, that either the slums be upgraded in-situ or resettlement happens in close vicinity, most communities were relocated because the state already had built about 23000 houses in the peripheries. The TNSCB’s role had shifted from one of protecting slum-dwellers from evictions and improving their living conditions to that of releasing slum lands for ‘development purposes’. (Coelho, 2016) This happened in several phases. In the distant, isolated area of Rajarathnam Nagar, TNSCB tenements were built in early 1990s. Not only were these poorly serviced but were located directly across from the city’s largest garbage dump yard. People were forced to move here and live in toxic unhygienic environments with pollution seeping in constantly. While the residents had waged long but largely ineffective struggles, including petitions, protests, rallies and roadblocks, for redressal of these problems, government agencies, politicians and ward councillors all appeared to have withdrawn from responsibilities for these tenements.

The new generation of mass resettlement tenements were constructed in phases from 2000 on and were and continue to be settled in batches according to various projects in the city.

These are built with funds from various Central and state government schemes, including the Flood Alleviation Programme (1998), the Central government’s Tenth and Eleventh Finance Commission grants and a post tsunami housing scheme. Kannagi Nagar is amongst the first of the colonies built in the Pallikarnai March and even today, perennially surrounded by large pools of stagnant water. It comprises 15,000 units in concrete blocks massed on a 40-hectare stretch of marshland, housing around 100,000 residents evicted from 62 different slums across the city. It is a vast working-class ghetto, located outside the city boundaries until 2011.

(Coelho, 2016) There is great amount of segregation inside Kannagi Nagar as parts of the colony named after areas people were resettled from emerged. Studies also indicated over 70 per cent of residents were from Scheduled Caste (SC), Scheduled Tribe (ST) or Most Backward Class (MBC) categories, highlighting the caste segregation at the urban level being reproduced by these mass resettlement colonies. (Coelho et al. 2012) Being so far out from the city means that large numbers of children commuted to city schools in overcrowded buses due to the inadequacy of schooling facilities nearby. A lot of people lost their sources of income and even through as the IT corridor came up nearby and offered jobs, these were mostly insecure, lowpaid jobs in paid domestic work, housekeeping, security, sales or casual factory labour. The houses themselves were small, electricity and water supply was erratic, the site flooded multiple times and the surroundings and stagnant water caused stench and mosquitoes. This and other reasons forced large numbers to abandon the allotments, sacrificing future benefits, as is seen the findings of a TNSCB survey that found that by 2011 at least 50 per cent of allottees had sold or rented out their units; most had done so in the early days at low prices.

Indeed, state failures in service delivery and maintenance of infrastructure emerge across the board in this study, testifying to the weak commitment and capacity of the state machinery in governance of housing projects targeted at lower classes and castes (Kamath 2012)

Figure 2: ‘Tamil Nadu floods: What next, ask camp inmates’ Source- Deccan Chronicle, Published Nov 19, 2015

Despite such findings, the state continues with its policy of peripheral resettlement.

Gudapakkam village has one of the most recent housing constructions by the TNSCB. This colony lies west to the city, beyond the peripheries, in an extremely isolated and rural area. It was inaugurated about 7 years ago and people are still being brought in from different parts of

Chennai, in the exact same fashion as Kannagi Nagar and other previous projects. The children here have stopped going to school and most people lost their jobs. For the men who still go to the city for work, one shuttle-bus goes a day and it takes 2 hours to reach the city centre. As with the previous cases, women’s employment is one of the great casualties of the forced relocation. The challenges of running households in a poorly serviced resettlement site and the lack of social networks for childcare added to logistical issues of distance, timing and transport to force large numbers of women out of the workforce. Since the construction in Gudapakkam is recent, the inhabitants seem content with the services and quality of houses.

They get regular water and electricity and are still getting a monthly allowance from the state as compensation for displacement. Upon being asked, local youngsters claimed that they felt that the neighbourhood was “75% safe” crime wise, and better than “those colonies” where they could have ended up, when they were randomly allotted a flat in this area in the draw.

The lack of social impact assessment of these projects is clearly evident. The residents of a whole auto-spare market from close to the city centre was resettled here, and people had to close shop. For them to revive business from such a location is extremely tough, and this also affects all allied businesses to the market which are still in the city. A walk nearby shows how in the nearby village, people are using car roof-covers to create fencing for their compound walls.

Rationales The state is being able to continue with such policies as the strong force of anti-eviction struggles that existed in the previous decades has collapsed. There was a push against informality, squatters and encroachment, and people were offered formalisation of tenure in their new flats, which made them more accepting to the idea of resettlement. NGOs which had helped struggle for keeping put in the squat settlements now shifted their models of practice to help around with micro-financing and resettling. The government’s compulsion to demonstrate concern for environmental issues resulted partly from its participation in global platforms such as the Sustainable Chennai Project (SCP)4 partly from the amplified voice that local civil society environmental groups had achieved, and partly from the increased severity of droughts interspersed and alternating with floods, which created unprecedented crises in the city. (Coelho and Raman, 2010). . This pressing demand from parts of the state, legal authorities and civil society organisations for cleaning the city from pollution and waste. The residents of the slum acted as scapegoat for this through their displacement.

This concern of the environment has mostly is mostly just led by greening and beautificationbased projects in central city areas to appease the middle classes. The paradox of the city’s environmental concern is palpable, as parallel to when the river restoration project was announced in late 2009, plans were also announced for the construction of a 19-km elevated expressway on the river at a cost of over Rs 1,600 crore. The environment impact assessment for this project that explicitly stated that it would cause dire effects on the fragile ecology and cause more cases of inundation and water stagnation in the surroundings was ignored. This project too was kicked-off with evicting people from their houses near the river to tenements in the marshes.

These decisions are also deeply embedded in the ideologies of the political parties at the time.

As India opened itself to globalization in the 1990s, the electoral success of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam’s (AIADMK) in Tamil Nadu owe to its claim to competitively demonstrate capacities for a neoliberal transformation of the city. Upgrading settlements in the river banks were a part of the populist, developmentalist politics of the late 60s and 70s, inviting people to make a living in the city and achieve social mobility. The neoliberal vision of the city that wants to be ‘progressive’ and wants to build Information Technology (IT) corridors, hi-tech corridors, metro corridors and elevated corridors needs space to be cleared up for that to happen. The pressure on the governments to monetize land and convert it to real estate to gain profits and investments, made them push an ‘expenditure’ issue like Housing to

supposedly worthless wastelands. Particular kinds of image-driven developments act as ‘idioms’ of the world city, attract global investment, reliant on credit ratings by independent agencies, and lead to the city into being a strategic node for the operations of financial globalisation.

Figure 3: In the name of “development” Source- Chand, D. (2017) Chennai Sooper Beings!

Retrieved from https://issuu.com/divyachand/docs/sooper_beigns_to_upload_issuu

Conclusion In the Financialisation of urban spaces, the alternate space of shelter and community has lost its value and claim in the city. Affordable housing doesn’t play a role in the discourse of attracting FDI, globalising and rising economic growth. An increasing aestheticization of poverty and urban space is made to happen through snatching away the marginalised population of their right to the city and claim to houses and neighbourhoods they have built themselves. This shift is based on representations of the poor as economically unviable, environmentally harmful and criminal, as they are recreated as a homogenous category inseparable from the built environments of the illegal “slums” that they inhabit. It is made possible by invoking a particular set of values – hygiene, environment, progress and growthcentric government, market participation, planning and order, aesthetics, notions of a “world class city” and leisure. (Bhan, 2009) We have seen through the case of Chennai that the reason of ecology was used as a cover for displacing people, and providing housing was projected as a solution. While environments that the poor are made to occupy continue to be unhealthy, it is important to note that reduction of the problem of slums to the problem of housing can perpetuate both slums and poverty. Housing is tied to issues of politics, livelihoods, environmental degradation in not just the discourse at an urban and global level, but in lived experiences of millions of people at a personal level. In this neo-liberal landscape of policy making and urban investments, the material landscape needs to cautiously managed.

References Note- All unreferenced information is from author’s notes taken during an exposure trip to multiple sites in Chennai in October 2017. Many residents of the housing colonies shared information and opinions, and Dr. Karen Coelho (whose work is also cited) and her colleagues at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, shared her insights.

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Mathew, P. (2016, January 26). Ground report: Chennai slum erupts in anger as govt forcibly shifts them to distant colonies. Retrieved 1 April 2019, from The News Minute website: https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/ground-report-chennai-slum-erupts-anger-govtforcibly-shifts-them-distant-colonies-38162 Padmanabhan, V. (2015, December 31). New homes, old challenges: Why a resettlement plan for Chennai’s poor will not bring relief [Text]. Retrieved 1 April 2019, from Scroll.in website: https://scroll.in/article/777243/new-homes-old-challenges-why-a-resettlement-plan-forchennais-poor-will-not-bring-relief Shekhar, L. (2018a, March 20). Perumbakkam Balwadi misses many basic things. Including a teacher who reads! Retrieved 1 April 2019, from Citizen Matters, Chennai website: http://chennai.citizenmatters.in/tamil-nadu-icds-chennai-perumbakam-resettlement-balwadi4056 Shekhar, L. (2018b, April 2). 7600 families, one PDS centre: How resettled slum dwellers buy rations in Perumbakkam |. Retrieved 1 April 2019, from Citizen Matters, Chennai website: http://chennai.citizenmatters.in/perumbakkam-slum-evicted-pds-ration-centre-4300 Suresh, S. (2018, May 28). Resettlement sites plagued by lack of adequate healthcare - Times of India. Retrieved 1 April 2019, from The Times of India website: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/resettlement-sites-plagued-by-lack-ofadequate-healthcare/articleshow/64346610.cms Vettiver Collective. (2017). Chennai Poromboke Paadal ft. TM Krishna. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82jFyeV5AHM