CHENNAI: Deplorable, lamentable, wretched, despicable or retribution-worthy. Take your pick, because all these adjectives effectively describe the state of Tharamani. Roads that have not been laid in over a decade, newly-built storm water drains that don’t serve any purpose and sewage overflowing from underground drains and deluging the streets have all led to an ironic rot in an area that nestles along Chennai’s gleaming poster-child of an IT Highway.
The sorry state of Tharamani was best captured by the greeting this reporter received at one of the institutions on the forsaken stretch. “Thank God you came today! If you had come two days earlier, you would have had to get a swim suit,” exclaimed Wing Commander M Murugesan (Retd), the Director (Education) of the Computer Society of India, which has its national headquarters situated in Tharamani.
“I can’t think of words strong enough to express the state of this area. My car is hammered and each day I worry about the people who work here, who come by two-wheelers or walk. We are in no short supply of dangerous pits that are invisible under the water that is logged along these roads,” Murugesan added.
The gleaming towers shield the eyes from the terrible state of the entire filigree of roads that run parallel to the IT Highway. Right next to what has been designated an expressway lie areas – Tharamani, Kazhikundram and Pallipattu – that either have no roads or the remains of what were roads once upon a time. Even the handful of concrete roads in these localities are cracked up, uneven and covered with a ankle-deep layer of that potent mix of rain water and sewage.
The areas have for long been under the purview of the Chennai Corporation, which locals blame for dereliction of duty. “This is standard. Even the slightest rains will cause this sort of stagnation here. My eight-year-old son has become sick because of the overwhelming stench of sewage,” says Nirmal Kumar, who runs an electrical store in Sriram Nagar.
Kumar points out that a number of affluent and powerful people reside in the area but do nothing about its state. “There are many IAS and IPS officers here. They just come and go in their cars. They do nothing. They don’t care,” he says flatly.
But it was only a matter of time before things came to this, according to 82-year-old Kaliaperumal, a resident of Tharamani for most of his life. “We have to remember this used to be a swamp. So, it is low-lying. But the same is true of Velachery. Look at how many things the government has done to ensure Velachery doesn’t flood. If the people in this area had been slightly richer, we too would have received the government’s attention,” he said.
“They say our IT Highway is world class. On the other side, we have IIT, which they say is a world class institution. We must have sinned in our past lives, because we have fallen into the dark hole between two things that are world class,” he added.
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