
Photo via mckaysavage via Flickr Creative Commons
Chennai
India
In the 1970s, this city on India’s Coromandel Coast, famous for its madras prints, touted a progressive policy for slums: the government would only intervene for the purpose of improving them. But since 1985, no new slums in Chennai have been officially recognized, cutting them off from improvement efforts and threatening their residents with imminent eviction. When the government does put resources toward its newer slums, it’s usually focused on emptying them out and scattering the residents to the city’s fringes, where it builds large resettlement ghettos.
This process persists despite the fact that the residents of Chennai’s slums heavily contribute to the city’s prosperity. Rag pickers, for instance, extricate a large portion of recyclable materials from the municipal waste system every day, decreasing the city’s total garbage mass. But in 2000, the city partially privatized its solid-waste management, leaving many rag pickers without their primary source of income.
Such decisions aptly illustrate the city’s conflicted relationship with its informal side, which it sometimes seems to wish would simply disappear. While the Indian government has been committing more money to its urban poor, it remains to be seen how much of that funding will be used toward improving slum-dwellers’ lives in-situ or toward increasing informal workers’ chances of prosperity.
MEET OUR BLOGGER
Shalini Umachandran
Shalini writes and edits for The Times of India in Chennai, where she is an assistant editor. She’s been a journalist for 12 years, working for The Hindu and The Economic Times. She also writes a lot of bad limericks and plays the piano occasionally. She is working on her first book.
Featured Entries
-
Forefront Intro: Waving or Drowning?
Who do Chennai’s waterways belong to — the slum-dwellers who currently live along them, or the richer residents who may soon make their homes there? Kavitha Rajagopalan investigates in the sixth and final Forefront of the Informal City Dialogues.
Chennai Entries
-
Two Weeks in Photos
From iPhone salesmen in Accra to healers in Nairobi, our fortnightly roundup of photos from our bloggers.
-
Sellers of Pirated DVDs Struggle to Stay Relevant in the Digital Age
Burma Bazaar has thrived for decades as a place to buy illegal electronics. But police raids and the rise of video streaming has left its traders at a crossroads.
-
Rich or Poor, Inclusive or Dysfunctional, Chennai’s Future Hangs in the Balance
Will Chennai in 2040 belong to everyone, and how well will its government function? Read a summary of the futures scenarios created at that city’s Informal City Dialogues.
-
Forefront Intro: Waving or Drowning?
Who do Chennai’s waterways belong to — the slum-dwellers who currently live along them, or the richer residents who may soon make their homes there? Kavitha Rajagopalan investigates in the sixth and final Forefront of the Informal City Dialogues.
-
With Municipal Sewage Overwhelmed, Makeshift Pipes Channel Filth to the Sea
In Chennai, a city famous for its beaches, an ecological disaster is festering as the official sewage utility fails to provide service and residents jerry-rig their own solutions.
-
How Strict New Rules About School Bus Safety Are Putting Kids at Risk
As schools in Chennai reduce their fleets of formal school buses, children are being packed into private vans that sometimes operate unsafely and without permits.
-
Two Weeks in Photos
Our fortnightly roundup of photos from our bloggers. This week: Beer-brewing in Accra, juice-squeezing in Bangkok, slum-touring in Nairobi and water-hunting in Chennai.
-
In a City Desperate for Water, Tanker Drivers Hold All the Cards
With its reservoirs nearly 90 percent empty, Chennai relies heavily on the drivers of private water-tanker trucks — and sometimes finds itself powerless to defy them.
-
Two Weeks in Photos
Our fortnightly roundup of photos from our bloggers. This week: A mountaineer’s commute in Lima, urban gardening in Manila and a teachers’ strike in Nairobi.
-
Inept Regulation Leaves Autorickshaw Drivers and Passengers in a Jam
Haggling for an autorickshaw may be an art, but a lack of meters and standardized pricing means customers often feel ripped off, and drivers short-changed.