Draft plan a blueprint sans green touch, say activists

With air pollution caused by exponential growth of vehicles slowly choking the city's lungs, Chennai needs an action plan on this front. A scene at the Chamiers Road-Nandanam junction. A blueprint sans the green touch. This is how environmental activists and urban planning consultants describe the draft second master plan for Chennai, prepared by the Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA).Not only have environmental concerns been given scant attention, but the draft also relies mostly on dated information, apart from offering only an overview of symptoms and diagnosis, but not remedy, they say.

Though it claims that "[environmental] sustainability is not an option but an imperative," and "environment is not a stand-alone concern," it does not recognise the need for intersectoral operationality of environmental concerns, says Rajesh Rangarajan of the Citizen Consumer and Civic Action Group.What the draft plan does offer, however, is the first comprehensive official statistics of the city's environmental problems: one learns, for example, the exact sweep of the city's air pollution load, distributed between — vehicular (71.28 per cent), industrial (19.78 per cent), commercial (4.66 per cent) and domestic (2.65 per cent) sources. It also divides the city into high (T. Nagar, Saidapet, Choolaimedu, Vadapalani, Royapettah, Egmore, Adyar and Teynampet), medium ( Korattur, Anna Nagar and Velachery) and low impact areas for air pollution.

But there is no looking beyond the data to offer optimal solutions for cleaning up the air. "We should have been told about other options such as green fuels, enhanced mass transportation and forming a supervisorial ombudsman agency. Vehicular pollution has not been linked to the larger issue of transportation," Mr. Rangarajan says.Another area that has been bypassed is integrated water resources management. In a prototype environment management plan for Chennai Metropolitan Area submitted to the CMDA, the Citizen's Alliance for Sustainable Living (SUSTAIN) has expressed concern over the absence of any investments from either city planners or State authorities in conserving or regenerating "near extinct water resources."

"The narrow 20 km coastal stretch between Tiruvanmiyur and Muttukadu, along the East Coast Road, is a shallow water table aquifer, with a potential of 4.5 million gallons a day. Not only is this stretch totally degraded and salinated, it is further being plundered by development activities along the coast. Unless this ecologically fragile stretch is restored with critical priority, south Chennai aquifers may be lost forever. The draft master plan, however, is silent on these aspects," points out M.G. Devasahayam, Managing Trustee, SUSTAIN.The draft plan draws attention to the multi-crore Chennai City River Conservation Project, which has been panned by various agencies, including the office of the Comptroller and Auditor General, for achieving little. It is also silent about protecting tree cover in the face of development.Though the draft plan says the declared forest cover in the city is about 24 sq km — two per cent of the total area of the Chennai metro area — it lays out no comprehensive plan for increasing the green cover.