Urban News

The Hindu 13.09.2009

Allocation of sites on water bodies will attract action, says Corporation Commissioner

Special Correspondent

COIMBATORE: Commissioner of Coimbatore Corporation Anshul Mishra has warned of stringent action against engineers of the civic body if they were found to be issuing forms for allocation of sites in water bodies for slum dwellers.

The Commissioner’s warning at the Corporation Council’s emergency meeting on Friday was in response to a charge by Independent councillor P. Balasubramanian that some officials in the rank of Assistant Engineer were distributing forms to slum dwellers by saying that they could apply for sites on water bodies.

The Commissioner said: “I had already stated in the Council that patta cannot be given for anyone to build houses on water bodies. Those living in slums on water bodies now will be re-located in multi-storeyed tenements at Ukkadam and Ammankulam,” he said.

This issue came up for discussion when the Council took up a proposal for land use conversion of 22.16 acres to build houses for the slum dwellers.

In the third phase of the Basic Services for Urban Poor scheme under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, the Corporation planned to build 9,600 houses.

One component would have 143 blocks in a ground floor plus three floors arrangement. The other would have 38 blocks in a ground floor plus five floors arrangement. Of the total 80.66 acres for this phase, the Corporation fell short of 22.16 acres. Therefore, the move for land re-classification.

As for the phase under which more than 12,000 houses were to be built in areas where the people already resided, the Commissioner said only 4,300 deserving cases had been identified so far and the work orders for the construction of the houses had been issued.

“There were errors in the detailed project report. Many people did not have pattas. Now, the State-level committee on the scheme has said that if cases in the project report are found unsuitable, the Corporation can look for alternative, deserving cases in other areas within the city and include these people in the scheme,” the Commissioner said.

Mr. Mishra called upon the councillors to identify such families. But, he warned that only deserving cases must be included in the scheme.

If the Central committee were to find undeserving cases, it would initiate action, he said.

The Commissioner called upon the Councillors to ask the slum dwellers in their wards to co-operate in the survey being done to prepare a list of beneficiaries.

When Mr. Balasubramanian said people were being misled into believing that they would get displaced, the Commissioner said he would look into this problem.

“As many as 2,583 families, consisting of 5,518 members, will be re-located. They are being issued with bio-metric cards as part of enrolling them in the scheme,” the Commissioner said. Mr. Mishra also clarified that only one house would be provided to one set of beneficiaries.

“Two houses cannot be provided if an elderly person and his wife are shown as one family and his son and daughter in-law living in the same house now are shown as another,” he explained.

The Hindu 13.09.2009

Online mapping of MTC routes

Ajai Sreevatsan

CHENNAI: A group of students have come together to map Chennai’s bus routes and make it available online, an initiative aimed at helping commuters, particularly those new to the city.

You no longer have to go to a bus stop to find out if there is a bus available from there to a particular destination. Just log on to the Internet and type a few characters to get all the information. The online project (http://busroutes.in/chennai/) which is completely open-source, provides a virtual public transport network of the city.

“There are plans to integrate the suburban train network and share autorickshaw routes,” says Arun Ganesh, a student at the National Institute of Design, who is coordinating the initiative.

“There is a need for a centralised database of public transport. Taking private vehicles off the road has been the aim for a long time. Owners of these vehicles are mostly the ones with access to the Internet. Provide them better information so that they can shift to a public mode of transport with ease,” he says.

A lot of data about public transportation system is available, but it is all personal. The idea behind the project is to ‘crowd source’ information from people who use the bus routes and make it easier to visualise and browse through all that data.

Rabin Vincent, who has worked on the site, says, “The Metropolitan Transport Corporation website has stage-wise route information, but it is inaccessible to search engines and not user-friendly. Information needs to be more easily available to search engines, and by extension, to the people looking for it.”

Solutions for issues that the community faces are best dealt through open collaboration, feel the students who were involved in the mapping project; which is why the OpenStreet mapping protocol was used.

Arun Ganesh admits that five to 10 per cent of routes have errors. “The primary data from the MTC has bus stops with names such as ‘tea kadai’ and ‘water tank.’ It is difficult to map these stops. But then, the code is entirely open-source. Anybody can take it and work on it.”

The way forward for the project, according to Yuvaraj Pandian, a second year engineering student, is to incorporate frequency data and multi-point routes which would give switching points from one bus to another. “But timing data would be reliable only if they are strictly followed,” he adds.