CHENNAI, India—Beula was used to floods. The 30-something former garment worker and mother of two lived on the banks of the Cooum River, which snakes through the heart of Chennai—a booming manufacturing hub in South India. Rains from the annual monsoon regularly swell the Cooum beyond its banks, inundating surrounding neighborhoods and sending families like Beula’s in search of higher ground.
For generations, thousands of poor families built simple, makeshift, mud-and-brick homes with thatch or corrugated metal roofs along the river. The riverbanks were vacant because the water had become polluted from industrial runoff, sewage and illegal dumping. As the city’s population exploded in the years after independence, the Tamil Nadu state government gave land rights to many slum residents.
But in 2015, things started to change. A record-breaking flood that winter killed over 400 people and damaged an estimated 100,000 structures in Tamil Nadu. The devastation highlighted how decades of population growth and infrastructure development had destroyed the landscape’s ability to absorb and store water. A study by the National Institute of Disaster Management recommended the government could address the water crisis by removing buildings that “encroached” on waterways, floodplains and marshlands and dredging the silt and debris that had been dumped in lakes and ponds.
Life was predictable, even the floods were manageable. “We barely felt like floods happened because we’re all chatting and eating and laughing together as a group,” Beula says in Tamil, the regional language, describing the process of cleaning and rebuilding after flooding.
The Tamil Nadu government has funded tens of thousands of resettlement units on the outskirts of the city, but marginalized residents say they feel trapped and they no longer have access to work. Photo by Jules Feeney
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Riverside slums and their poor, low-caste residents bore the brunt of the government’s response, even though studies’ listed corporate buildings, high-end resorts and middle class apartment buildings among the “encroachments.” Since 2015 some 18,000 families, including Beula’s, were forced from their homes along Chennai’s waterways and relocated to government housing on the outskirts of the city where crime rates are high, education can be hard to access and jobs are scarce.
Beula, who uses only a first name, now lives in Perumbakkam, one of those government housing projects. In 2016, the Tamil Nadu government forcefully evicted her. She remembers the day she was forced to leave the Cooum.
Beula says she pleaded with government officials to give her at least a couple of days so she and her neighbors could collect and pack up their belongings. Instead, she said, each family was allowed to bring two days’ of clothing, a gas stove and fuel, plates and a few trinkets. “The rest of the items that we managed to hold onto were thrown on the side of the road,” she said. Demolition began as they pulled away, she said, 15 families to a truck. “It was really heartbreaking,” she said.
After the move, Beula says she tried to keep her job at the garment factory that had been a short walk from her home by the Cooum. But the roughly 20-mile commute from Perumbakkam to downtown Chennai took four hours, and meant that Buela had to leave at 5 in the morning to arrive on time. Public transportation was also expensive. She now has a fellowship with a housing advocacy organization where she earns about $100 per month.
Beula’s experience is not unique. A 2021 survey by the same organization where Beula has a fellowship, Information and Resource Center for the Deprived Urban Communities, found that nearly half of respondents lost work after relocating to Perumbakkam. More than 40% of women who headed their households lost income and were out of work at the time of the survey.
Other options
Environmentalists who have long advocated for restoring rivers and water bodies in Chennai and across India see the evictions as a win. But some advocates worry the slum clearances have hit poor and marginalized communities the hardest.
G. Sundarrajan is the coordinator of Poovulagin Nanbargalone, an environmental collective based in Tamil Nadu. He supports restoring the city’s waterways, but says the government should remove all encroachments, not just the slums.
“Have you got the guts to go and remove those IT parks and malls that have been built over marshlands and water bodies?”
“Have you got the guts to go and remove those IT parks and malls that have been built over marshlands and water bodies?” Sundarrajan asks rhetorically. He says the government “only sees the huts and the small dwellers. It’s very unfortunate.”
Sundarrajan and other advocacy organizations say the government needs to provide housing within 2 miles of where informal settlements used to stand. Despite similar recommendations by the government, many of the states’ public housing projects have been built outside the city center. And residents who are forcibly evicted rarely have any control over where they end up.
In 2022, The New Indian Express reported that a slum clearance on one section of the Cooum had gone smoothly after residents found out they would be relocated to a favorable resettlement site about 2 miles away built in 2017.
G Sundarrajan is an environmental activist. He says the government should relocate slum residents to government housing within 2 miles of their riverside homes.
Sundarrajan says the reason there aren’t more examples like this is not for lack of space. “Why do you need a golf course inside the city?” he said. The Tamil Nadu Golf Federation owns a course in the heart of Chennai. “You can go and play golf somewhere else.”
In response to questions about constructing nearby housing projects, Chennai’s mayor, Priya Rajan, said the government has many public housing schemes in the works “all over the city.” A review of the Tamil Nadu Urban Housing Development Board’s list of public housing schemes found fewer than 550 vacant tenements near the heart of Chennai.
Rivers or roadways
Anna Lakshmi and her husband, Sendhil Vel, a gas station attendant, look south from their stoop in Anna Nagar, a neighborhood adjacent to the Cooum in Chennai. Across a short expanse of plastic waste-littered grass, they can see the river. A handful of water buffalo graze nearby.
Before November of 2017, the couple’s bright blue, two-story concrete house was at the center of a densely populated neighborhood. During that month, the Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance board evicted more than 400 families who had lived between Vel and Lakshmi’s house and the river.
The couple says they had family and friends who lived in those houses. Many of them were relocated to Navalur, about 20 miles southeast and Perumbakkam, 13 miles south.
The MGR Colony, a neighborhood along the Cooum in Chennai, was demolished in 2017.
Thunderous sounds from two construction sites are audible from the stoop. And a few hundred yards upstream a rickety drilling rig takes core samples from the river bed. The government is moving ahead with the construction of a double-decker highway exclusively for trucks that will connect Chennai’s port with inland areas. The so-called “flyover” will follow the path of the Cooum.
It’s unclear how this infrastructure project fits in the Chennai Rivers Restoration Trust's plans for “preservation of ecological and natural resources such as flora and fauna, water ways, water bodies” in Chennai.
Vel and Lakshmi say the government owns the land where their neighborhood is built. The recent construction and infrastructure projects in the area have made them nervous about whether theyll be evicted next. “We kind of felt threatened,” Lakshmi says in Tamil.
Watching floods from above
In Perambakkam, a small crowd gathered under a tent to recognize Beula and a dozen other women for their leadership in the community. The community has won some changes over the past years. After two children fell into a light shaft, grates were installed. In 2018, the Slum Clearance Board, which oversees Perumbakkam, designated land for burials of residents. And women living in the resettlement blocks had mapped and lobbied for better street lighting in critical areas of the site and increased police presence.
But Beula and another award recipient, Maha Lakshmi, say without hesitation that they still want to leave. When she lived on the Adyar, another river that flows through Chennai, Lakshmi says she leased four houses to other residents. Now, she says, “I’m the one renting.” Several years ago, she says she tried to rent a house, but couldn’t afford the rent. She moved back to the housing blocks.
The Perumbakkam resettlement site is about 20 miles from Chennai. Zoom out to see more.
Despite the government’s plans to alleviate the impacts of flooding, Beula and Lakshmi say floods are common here, too. The main difference, Beuala says, is that by the Cooum “water floods into the houses. Here, we see it happen below us.”
One flood in recent years filled the entire ground floor, the power went out and it took eight days for the water to recede. It also meant food rations were scarce. But Beula says the sense of community is lacking here. “We can’t even see or take care of each other because everyone is looking out to save themselves and no one is helping each other.” ⟐
