Tank Bund Road: maintain the new pavement

 The images were taken on January 31, 2025.
| Photo Credit: PRINCE FREDERICK

If anyone visiting Chennai now were to clap their eyes on a section of the pavement on Tank Bund Road, the one starting from Valluvar Kottam High Road, they are likely to register its presence with eyebrows unraised. To these fresh set of eyes, it is just another pavement comparable to most others in Chennai. In contrast, eyes that have seen the pavement only a few months ago would now do a hurried tour of the forehead in bewildered amazement. What existed earlier was a parody of a pavement. The new pavement is the offshoot of Greater Chennai Corporation’s Integrated Stormwater Drain Project. Prior to the work, what passed off as a pavement was just a series of unevenly placed slabs, so huge that they seemed more appropriate for the land of the Gigantes than here. Hardly aligned, the slabs would sport gaps between them. A misstep could send a pedestrian to an orthopedician — in all likelihood, it would have sent some on an ortho consultation.

Though the incumbent pavement now is ineffably superior to its predecessor, it could still present a neater picture. In the same way dead flies spoil an ointment, the good work is marred in one place by a criss cross of cables pole-vaulting across the pavement (another clear case of lack of coordination between two government agencies); in another, by an old Tangedco junction box, its contents emptied, but lying on the pavement forgotten. And what is probably the worst of all, a patch that is the focus of open urination — so nauseating it can knock a corpse dead all over again. On the wall towering over this patch of the pavement are words painted in Tamil ordering that people not to paste posters on the wall. It should be accompanied by an injunction not to use what lies under the wall as if it were a urinal.