Chaos in the city

Chennai, One of the biggest Indian cities is slowly becoming the home for different categories of industries. With more enterprises in each industry establishing their base or branch in Chennai, city keeps offering more jobs and keeps attracting more youth from all over India. Lack of proper Infrastructure for these mass immigrants to the city makes “Life in Chennai little miserable.”

Development of residential area when compared with that of jobs being created is very meager and this creates a situation where people get clogged only to those few (developed) areas where all the amenities are available. Most of the residents are renting the home as only few have the affordability to buy home (because of the huge real estate prices). All these create a huge demand for good rental apartments (in good residential place) and rental values are already increased many folds.

Road infrastructure over the years has been improved a lot with fly-over being erected in parts of Chennai (which had traffic congestions) to ease and regulate the heavy traffic. The increase in the personal vehicle is too huge and its projection increase in the future is alarming. City buses services are expanded and frequencies are increased yet there is still lot more demand. Autos and Share Autos rather than servicing the people actually play a big role in creating traffic congestion and accidents. There is a huge demand for other transportation modes within the city as the city keeps expanding its border every year.

Affordable schooling and hospitals are few and becoming rare. Restaurants have become the kitchens for most of the bachelors and almost every family wants to dine out at least twice a week (or more than that), All these puts the demand for good quality restaurants at its peak and there is an increase in the waiting time, food prices at these restaurants.

Needless to point out the demand for trains, buses and flights going to out station cities and people even cancel their trips to native places if they are NOT getting their tickets in advance. Also there is a huge demand for hang out places other the existing malls and beach.

There is a huge demand for everything in Chennai with more and more people entering the city and trying to use its limited infrastructure. Chennai city planning and development by its authorities has been improved a lot over the years yet it is way below its needs and its need projections in the future scars the metro development authorities. The growth at which city’s population is growing is way higher than its infrastructure growth.

Solution to this demand VS supply gap cannot be easy and will be difficult. Few solutions that I think:

• Far more strong governing bodies with greater vision can make the mess look better.
• Moving at least half of the government administration out of Chennai will give more space for proper infrastructure developments
• Government should mandate any new industry establishment to provide few basic amenities to the neighborhood of their new establishment.
• Moving few jobs to tier two cities
• Schools, Colleges and industries can probably adopt different timings for their daily routines
• Creating self sufficient townships could be solution in restricting the movement of people over the whole city
• Limiting the usage of personal vehicles and increasing the usage of public vehicles is the need of the hour but implementing this would be difficult unless public transportation modes are available with more choices.

Metro development authorities can probably analyze select few developed cities (which mirror Chennai in terms of industry establishments) on their infrastructure developments over the past 40 years and can probably work on the developments. Finally the residents of the city should co-operate well with any new laws/changes to bring in better infrastructure. Do better things today and hope a better society tomorrow!! :)