SWD Watch: On the alert

There may be lessons from how Gandhi Nagar residents are responding to the challenges arising from the stormwater drain work

VS Sukumar is standing a hair’s breadth away from his gates, his eyes fixing an emerging stormwater drain with a pointed stare. The PVC sewage drain pipe needling through the skeletal frame of the stormwater drain “weeps” around a joint. The discharge is slow and mild, but the size of the leakage is not the focal point. It never should be. A sewage pipe has to keep its contents and sorrow to itself, and not pass them on to a stormwater drain, even in trickles.

Sukumar thinks the pipe developed the leak as Greater Chennai Corporation’s stormwater drain work hustled through B Ramachandra Adithanar Road — earlier Fourth Main Road — in Gandhi Nagar, Adyar. Sukumar himself reports the workers’ view in the matter: “The leak predated the SWD work”. The discussion is amiable. The leak should get fixed, soon. In relative terms, Sukumar finds himself in circumstances notches better than those prevailing in many other neighbourhoods, where sewage connections have gotten entirely severed in the course of SWD work.

Sukumar’s eight-unit apartment occupies a corner plot this road shares with Gandhi Nagar Canal Bank Road. Both the drinking water and sewage connections to the address next to Sukumar’s are also intact.

Sukumar reveals a good part of the previous day was consumed by an SWD-work “monitoring” exercise. He continues the vigil, parking himself on a handy, light plastic monoblock chair he has carried to the gates.

Tree watch

It illustrates why residents need to be gimlet-eyed. Meera Ravikumar, also a resident of B Ramachandra Adithanar Road, is undertaking a count of trees lost in the SWD work in Gandhi Nagar.

Meera notes that at the threshold of the SWD work, in a meeting with GCC officials, residents’ fear about loss of trees were allayed. She reveals a two-sided promise was made: The goal is no loss of trees, but if a tree has to be felled, by some unfortunate chance, even transplantation would be carried out.