Governance

For Sowndharya Gopi, a trans person who grew up in the housing unit of the Tamil Nadu Urban Habitat Development Board (TNUHDB) in Royapuram, those tenements constituted the centre of her life.  "I have faced discrimination for being a trans person all my life but the people in those housing units, who were my kith and kin, were the first among the few people who accepted me for who I am," says Sowndharya. Recalling the days of her family moving from the thatched huts to the housing unit, Sowndharya says that as many as 240 families living in the nearby…

Chennai Mayor R Priya’s Makkalai Thedi Mayor scheme was launched in May this year. Under the scheme, the Mayor is to visit all 15 Zones of the city every 15 days to meet with residents and address their grievances.  The meeting that took place in Zone 6 highlighted some key issues with how the residents have been able to engage with the Mayor.  We spent over two hours waiting in various queues before the audience with the Mayor. The poor planning left us wondering if the event was indeed Makkalai Thedi Mayor or Mayorai Thedi Makkal. Read more: In a…

The growth of Chennai has been fuelled by the construction of new buildings and the expansion of the city in all directions. The mandate of the Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA) is to keep erring builders in line and control illegal construction. However, collusion by builders with officials of the CMDA and civic agencies results in unauthorised construction mushrooming across Chennai. Recognising the need to regulate such development and prevent illegal construction, a Monitoring Committee was appointed by an order of the Madras High Court almost two decades ago. But in all these years of its existence not even a…

Indian National Congress’ election campaign hinged on five guarantees to the public: 1) Anna Bhagya, which guarantees 10 kg rice per head every month to families below poverty line (BPL); 2) Gruhalakshmi, where every woman head of the family will be given a monthly allowance of Rs 2,000; 3) Gruhajyoti, where households consuming up to 200 units of power will have free power supply; 4) Shakti, where every woman resident in Karnataka can travel free in all but luxury, AC buses; 5) Yuva Nidhi,  a scheme providing unemployment allowance of Rs 3,000 for graduates and Rs 1,500 for diploma holders…

On May 25, the Maharashtra government cleared the decks for the first-ever departure from Mumbai’s free rehousing scheme for residents of informal settlements since its inception nearly 28 years ago.  With elections due to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), and also to the state Assembly and Parliament next year, the state government announced that slum structures built between 2000 and 2011 would now also be eligible for rehousing under the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) projects—only, this category of slum structure owners would not get free houses, but would pay Rs 2.5 lakh each. Until now, structures built after 2000 were…

"I was inspired to start my political journey after looking at the political life of my father and uncle. So, I cannot say that I am completely new to politics," says Mayor Priya Rajan, who belongs to Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK). Her father, R Rajan, has been a functionary of DMK and her uncle, Chengai Sivam, was a DMK MLA. It has been a little more than a year since Mayor R Priya assumed office. As the youngest Dalit woman Mayor of Greater Chennai Corporation, she has overcome many hurdles to find success. We catch up with her to know…

In 2000, as many as 96 families who had been homeless and residing on footpaths in and around Chintadripet were provided with a new lease of life under the Permanent Shelter Scheme of the Housing and Urban Development Corporation (HUDCO). But two decades on, the families residing in the Ritchie Street Home for Homeless Cooperative Housing Society find themselves in varying degrees of debt and uninhabitable living conditions.  What were the promises made to the families on resettlement? Where did the project fail? Debt owed by families in Ritchie Street housing The 96 resettled families were provided with one-room flats…

The appointment of P K Sekar Babu as the Minister-in-Charge of the Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA) in February 2023 was seen by the real estate sector as a focused attempt by the DMK to get someone with core knowledge of the city to help steer its expansion. The Chennai Metropolitan Area is now spread across 5,094 sq km, a giant sprawl encompassing four revenue districts. In his policy note for the CMDA, presented for 2023-24, Babu has serialised the plans to pump significant resources into development priorities for various locations. These include a grid of roads that will provide easier connectivity…

An old saying goes “it is better to side with the devil you know than the devil you don’t”. To me that seems the only reason for Bengaluru’s voters resisting whatever wave swept the rest of the state. Only in Bengaluru did BJP retain the 2018 number of 16 seats, even as it got washed away everywhere else. There are analyses aplenty in the media and the internet on how and why the BJP lost the state so badly. You can draw your own conclusions from them. Maybe India needs a new Long March revolution to get out of the…

Anyone who has visited a government office to obtain certificates or documents is aware of the daunting process it entails. With the aim to cut out long queues of disgruntled visitors, e-sevai centres were launched across the state in 2006 to provide IT enabled-services to the public. This came long before the formulation of the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP). Despite the pioneering move, government-run e-sevai centres in Chennai face myriad issues that prevent their effective functioning.  Working of public and private e-sevai centres in Chennai According to the Tamil Nadu e-governance agency, around 92 different kinds of services are provided…