Dumped in darkness

• Over 24,000 families have been relocated to Perumbakkam in the last 10 years without a functioning blueprint for the life-changes that would follow. ARUN PRASATH visits the place and explains how that void leads to derailment of the social, domestic and mental fabric of the people, and the high price they pay while trying to fill the gaps that were never meant to be in the first place

Thirteen-year-old Raghul had stopped speaking months ago. The boy had gone silent, almost nonchalant on any matter, spending too much time indoors and on the phone. Despite repeated attempts to talk to him, he did not make eye contact.

His mother Vasuki had brushed it off as adolescence initially.

What she did not know was that he had not gone to school for more than seven months. It took her that long because she has to leave home by 7 am for her job in Nungambakkam, at least 30 km away, the same job she held before the relocation to Perumbakkam several years ago. She returns only after dark.

The single mother in her 30s had suffered domestic violence, which she believes is the beginning of Raghul’s current state. His reinstatement in school did not help because he was described as ‘non-cooperative’. With the intervention of teachers, NGOs and the police, he is now one among the 80 children enrolled for counselling in the area.

This is not an isolated case in Perumbakkam. Walk through the blocks on a weekday and similar patterns appear regularly.

Welcome to Perumbakkam new tenements, one of Tamil Nadu’s largest resettlement sites that’s spread across 250 blocks and housing more than 24,500 homes. It is a township sitting on a marshland amid the fast-growing IT corridor of Chennai, surrounded by high-rises, gated communities and office towers.

Ironically, the families who began arriving in phases from 2015 to 2016 were relocated from riverbanks, canal edges and inner-city settlements across Chennai due to floods and the subsequent encroachment removal drives. A decade later, Perumbakkam looks, from the outside, like a completed government project.

Rows of pastel-coloured apartments, wide main roads with shops alongside, buses running through the lanes, a hospital and schools give it the appearance of a planned neighbourhood. But step inside the blocks and almost every government department, including police, health, social welfare and education, is running intensive and continuous interventions to keep the settlement functioning as a liveable community.

Children drift away from school, adolescents spend long hours without supervision, mothers leave before sunrise for work, and civil society workers such as doctors, teachers, police personnel and counsellors try to fill gaps that were never meant to be theirs. Much of this strain shows up first in the schools.

School drop-outs

According to civil society officials, the purpose of such interventions is to provide continuous support and counselling to them.

“Children going to school on a daily basis itself is a big thing here,” said an official.

At least 99 children in Ezhil Nagar

are out of school, some for more than three years, according to the Information and Resource Centre for the Deprived Urban Communities (IRCDUC). The NGO sampled 771 students in 2025 and found that nearly half of all schoolchildren (381 of 771) travel more than 5 km one way to reach their schools.

A chunk of them covers 11-25 km and spends up to 90 minutes each way on government-arranged buses to Chintadripet, Adyar, Santhome,

Thousand Lights and other parts of the city so that they can continue studying in their previous schools.

“The enthusiasm of going to school has decreased among the kids. Partially due to resettlement issues but mainly due to peer pressure,” noted an IRCDUC worker. “One kid drops out and starts to earn money and the others follow. With money and very little oversight, they tend to slip. We cannot put in such concentrated effort to pull all of them back,” said a primary school staff member, who has been teaching there for four years.

Inside the tenements there are five primary schools and one high school. But, that’s far too low for a resettlement site of this scale. A class in a primary school often has more than 50 students. Teachers say it sometimes reaches 70.

“We’re heavily short-staffed. There are only some permanent teachers and most others are temporary. They come in, see the workload, and get transferred,” she said.

If schools reveal the early cracks, adolescence exposes the full weight of the system’s absence.

Thalaraadha Thalirgal

Teachers, counsellors and police officers say the teenage years in Perumbakkam have become a pressure point that often turns into withdrawal, early experimentation or conflict, as teenagers here grow up with very little institutional or familial cushioning, and that is where many later crisis begin.

“You have seen the place right?” a top police official responded when asked about the need for an initiative like Thalaraadha Thalirgal, taken up by the Tambaram Police. It aims at protecting and providing care and rehabilitation for vulnerable children. It does not stop at that.

The initiative conducts job fairs for residents. The police themselves knock on doors to put children into schools and colleges, follow-up on them, and conduct outreach programs for crime prevention. It is an experiment at a place named ‘Perumbakkam experiment project’.

“We initially started it to focus on girl children,” the top police official continued. “They are more mentally vulnerable, should be identified and given proper counseling.”

According to several government stakeholders, teen pregnancy remains a critical concern for the doctors, counsellors, police and social workers involved in the neighbourhood’s welfare. “While dropouts are very common in counselling along with some drug abuse, this issue is receiving significant attention,”

lamented one of the stakeholders. “Under-age sexual relationships are common and often result in child marriage. These teenagers, mostly minors, have sexual relationships. When they begin fighting within a few years, they separate and go their own way. Young girls get pregnant, and that’s the end of their education. There are many such cases.”

These issues exist elsewhere too, but officials admitted that relocating thousands of people from different localities into a single settlement intensified the pressures, especially for women. “Parents also need to be counselled,” said the counsellor from the One Stop Centre.

The centre, under the Department of Social Welfare and women empowerment, offers crisis support, legal guidance and psychological counselling for women and children facing violence or distress. With only a counsellor and support staff, the centre handles a growing number of domestic abuse and mental health emergencies.

“Men and alcohol have made a greater stain in their lives. Couples spend less time together, leading to trust issues, extra-marital affairs and even small fights escalating. We provide counselling as much as possible with the current manpower,” the counsellor explained.

With men staying in the city for work and women travelling long hours every day, family life has become fragile, often falling apart and leaving adolescents to fend for themselves in an uncontrollable, less safer environment. And all culminates in accountability.

Stakeholders often argue that residents too should take more responsibility for their families. “They do not care what goes on in their children’s lives and make their own lives messier,” one said.

However, experts counter that such judgments rarely account for what families are navigating.

Limited work opportunities

Kavitha takes the 19C bus from Perumbakkam at 7.30 am for her 10 am shift in Anna University.

Relocated from Adyar in 2016, the 51-year-old found no work in Perumbakkam and was forced to continue at her old workplace. “Earlier, the buses were not frequent, but now it is fine,” her daughter said.

Kavitha returns around 9 pm every day. She cannot afford to lose her job because completing 10 years will make her a permanent staff member. Many women face similar disruptions. Before relocation, most worked as domestic workers or conservancy staff. Some have found such work around Perumbakkam, but the opportunities are limited.

“Even in Semmenchery, which has been here for 20 years, women still find it hard to secure jobs in apartments and office premises because of trust issues,” said an NGO worker from Thozhamai.

Thilaga works in Virugambakkam as a house help. “The family supports my daughter’s college education and always helps with small loans,” she averred.

Such support systems are crucial as many families here remain tied to informal loans with high interest.

No basic amenities

Take its healthcare needs. A settlement of this size still has no hospital. Only one Public Health Centre functions here, with a single doctor and one ANM (Auxiliary Nurse Midwife) but no staff nurse.

The PHC mostly treats common ailments and diverts other cases to the UPHC in Semmenchery, while pregnancies are sent to GHs in Medavakkam and Tambaram. The absence of round-the-clock care leaves residents struggling for timely intervention and places immense pressure on the limited staff.

Basic civic systems also remain incomplete. There is no definitive count of how many people live here, with official estimates ranging from 61000 to 1 lakh. Even after 10 years, several stretches still do not have functioning street lights, leaving large pockets dangerously dark after sunset. Newly relocated women say they fear stepping out at night.

Improper sanitation and patchy drainage networks continue to burden residents and conservancy workers, with incomplete storm water drains in many parts. And manual labour continues to pull more weight on maintaining it.

“People were shifted first and the systems that should have supported them arrived years later, and in fragments,” said Vanessa Peter, founder of IRCDUC and policy researcher. IRCDUC’s findings show that in most evictions, no Social Impact Assessment was carried out; meaning the government had no data on livelihoods, schooling or vulnerabilities before relocating them.

Now, a decade later, officials admit that such a large relocation should have been accompanied by proper support systems. Though well intentioned, it takes afterthought interventions from various government departments and the efforts of frontline workers from schools, hospitals, police and NGOs to hold the settlement steady.

Families who were moved here have stitched their lives together with whatever systems have arrived, compromising heavily on access to primary education, safe childhood and adolescence, stable jobs, strong family units, and physical and mental health. The longterm model that was put in motion to relocate the urban poor living in the city’s fringes into another, even more underdeveloped locality continues to hang on to initiatives like the experiment projects.

One Stop Centre

Before relocation, most women were domestic or cleanliness workers. Some have found similar jobs around Perumbakkam, but the opportunities are limited.