CHENNAI: Duck race? Fishing competition? River taxis that will take you from Spencer Plaza to Marina? Boatrides on a moonlit night? These may be like asking for the moon, considering this is Chennai and not Singapore. But on Tuesday, deputy chief minister M K Stalin will formally kick off an ambitious clean-up of one of the city’s biggest eyesores, the Cooum, on the lines of the restoration of the Singapore river.

“This time you will see the results. You will sense the difference soon. We won’t go in for a piecemeal engineering solution but for a comprehensive integrated solution by treating the Cooum not just as a water body but as a river basin,” a top government official told TOI on Thursday, when the delegation led by Stalin that visited Singapore last month briefed chief minister M Karunanidhi about what they learned and how they plan to implement it in Chennai. “This time we have moral pressure to deliver, because people have lived with the dirty river for long,” the official said.

At the meeting with the chief minister, it was decided to set up a Chennai River Water Authority that will address issues related to not only the Cooum but also the Adyar river since the “problems faced by both are the same.”