Corporation told to remove commercial encroachments from water bodies

The move comes in the wake of long standing complaints by activists who had pulled up the authorities for wiping away the informal settlements, without a rehabilitation plan, while the commercial encroachers have been left untouched. 

The directions, given out for better monsoon preparedness, will now see commercial establishments encroaching the waterbodies evicted. A senior Corporation official said that PWD owns the land around the waterbodies and Corporation can act only based on PWD’s direction. “Some of these establishments have been given out on lease by the PWD, a common practice. In some places – like Auto Nagar – the shop owners have filed a case, which is still ongoing,” said the official.

An official from the PWD said that they have maintained a list of commercial establishments that encroach upon Cooum and Adyar rivers. They, however, cannot act because most of these illegal establishments have approached the Madras High Court. 

“Many of the owners have teamed up to form an association and many of the encroachments are embroiled in litigation. Even if we decide to remove those encroachments which are not involved in a court case, they are interspersed between buildings which have gone to court. The only option is to wrap up the litigation at the earliest and proceed with the removal of the commercial encroachments,” said the PWD official. 

But, activists have lambasted the authorities for selectively targeting the informal settlements and pushing hundreds of families on the suburbs of the city, almost 30-40 kilometres from their current livelihoods and children’s schools. Vanessa Peter, a social activist, called this discrimination. 

Pointing out further discrepancies, she said that the biggest concern is the data. “What about the land tenure and legality – because most of these buildings have a patta! How are the authorities going to sort this out? The only worry is that smaller commercial encroachments will be removed while the bigger ones are left behind – which should not be the case,” said the activist.