Abstract
This article analyses the politics of environmentalism revealed in struggles over the land–water boundary of an urbanising tank in Chennai. In contesting this boundary, property-less settlers on its banks called into question the tank’s ‘nature’ and functions in its urban milieu, and demanded a redrawing of boundaries to reflect the socio-natural transformations that had turned parts of it into land. Simultaneously, propertied residents, in concert with state eco-restoration schemes and court rulings, fought to restore the tank to its ‘original’ dimensions. In foregrounding the liminalities of the urbanising tank, this article suggests the limits of the contemporary property-determined eco-restoration discourse, premised on a return to pristine pasts and original boundaries. It proposes that the stand-off between water body restoration and the defence of working-class housing rights necessitates recognising the tank as an artefact assembled over time by socio-technical and natural processes.
Introduction: The Urban Tank as a Boundary Object
The urban tank, a mutated relic of the pre-modern irrigation tank known in India’s Tamil region as the eri, is a boundary formation par excellence. Eris were constructed across the landscapes of central and southern India in the early centuries AD, as part of an interconnected infrastructure designed to trap flow of monsoon or river water for irrigation, and to mark the power and status of local elites or kings (Morrison, 2010; Mosse, 1999; Ramesh, 2019; Shah, 2008). Their operations were embedded in local relations of rule, with low-caste landless communities contributing (sometimes unpaid) labour for their construction and maintenance (Shah, 2008). Determined by and dependent on unpredictable flows, the eri embodies a long history of uncertainty and change in form and function.
This article analyses the environmental politics revealed in struggles over the official land–water boundary of an eri in Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu state. Property-less settlers on the eri banks contested this boundary, calling into question the ‘nature’ and functions of the urban eri, and demanding a redrawing of these boundaries to reflect the socio-natural transformations that had turned parts of it into land (and settlements) over time. Simultaneously, propertied residents on the opposite banks fought to restore the eri to its ‘original’ dimensions, in concert with state eco-restoration schemes and court rulings. In foregrounding the liminalities and uncertainties of the urbanising tank, this article suggests the limits of the contemporary property-determined eco-restoration discourse, premised as it is on a return to pristine pasts and original boundaries.
A growing body of writing in the urban political ecology (UPE) tradition has shown how urban systems—rivers, beaches, municipal water and transport—can be analysed as socio-natural assemblages of human, more-than-human, technological and natural processes (Coelho, 2018; Heynen, 2014; Swyngedouw & Heynen, 2004). But eris are especially hybrid given their engineered origins and their subsequent embedding in matrices of contested social uses. A crucial marker of this hybridity is the eri’s fluid boundaries that are continuously reshaped by state policies, climatic and seasonal changes, topographical and hydrological shifts, technical interventions, social uses and the built environment.
The urban transition further undermines the eri’s integrity. With the dwindling of its irrigation functions and associated local systems of management, 1 the eri becomes even more liminal, subjected to changing urban land-use imperatives and figuring at different moments as land or water. In Chennai, as the march of urbanisation from the early twentieth century sought to systematically eliminate wetness from the landscape (Bremner, 2019), seasonal water bodies began to figure as land-in-the-making (Coelho & Raman, 2013). Steep population growth from the 1960s eliminated hundreds of tanks in the city, partly through unregulated private encroachment, but more significantly through planned state action citing public interest. The Madras Metropolitan Development Authority (MMDA) and Tamil Nadu Housing Board (TNHB) drew up large-scale plans called ‘Eri Schemes’ in the 1980s to supply land for housing and infrastructure through filling ‘defunct’ tanks across the city (Coelho & Raman, 2013).
The Era of Restoration
Although wetlands continue to be appropriated by state and private agencies as cheap land for development, the meanings and values associated with water had undergone a profound change by the late-1990s. Rivers, canals and tanks began to figure as valuable assets, impelled by the increasing frequency of floods and drought, growing public demands for environmental accountability, and an increasing trend of judicial intervention to protect water bodies. Urban eris are now seen as precious ecological endowments affording water security, flood mitigation, biodiversity and lung-space to the city, and as infrastructural markers of a world-class city. 2 Chennai, like other Indian metropolises, is remaking water in the urban image through a financialised real estate rubric emphasising waterfront development, beautification and recreation. 3 Numerous tanks across the city have been marked for renewal under schemes of the Public Works Department (PWD) or the Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC). The latter has announced plans to restore 210 water bodies across Chennai with funding from the Smart City project or from corporates. 4
Alongside state initiatives, numerous non-state actors—NGOs, corporations, environmental organisations and RWAs—have entered the fray to restore tanks in neighbourhoods across the city. Their approaches vary: some groups favour direct intervention to clean and desilt the water body, remove garbage, strengthen bunds and plant trees; others employ citizen audits to document effluent discharges or land-use violations and demand redressal from the state. Some collaborate with state or corporate bodies, bringing technical expertise in hydrology, biodiversity or design.
Three conceptual commonalities weave across this spectrum of actors. First, all emphasise the criticality of citizen participation in tank restoration. This emphasis is underlined by an emerging body of scholarship which explores the politics and determinants of community engagement with tanks. Nagendra and Ostrom (2014) highlight the importance of local resident involvement for lowering the transaction costs of monitoring/managing the water body and fostering successful ecological outcomes. Sundaresan (2011) and Maringanti (2011) explore its implications for building commons on/around the tank.
Second, these approaches tend to valorise the tank and its boundaries as given and fixed, representing the inherited cultural legacies of the past. In contrast, historical scholarship (Morrison, 2010; Mosse, 1999; Shah, 2008;), along with ecologists and farmers interviewed for this study, emphasise the contingencies and variabilities that have dogged the career of tanks through time, rendering them vulnerable to ongoing anxieties and failure as irrigation infrastructures. Contemporary eco-restoration projects erase these uncertainties in their insistence on restoring tanks to their original extent and boundaries, bolstered by firm and conspicuous barriers against encroachment.
A third consensus is the boundary drawn around the category of ‘encroachment’ in contemporary eco-restoration practice. Even the more socially attuned perspectives and scholarly works that recognise diverse public stakes in tanks—typically livelihood activities such as grazing, fishing and farming—stop short of including informal settlers as stakeholders. While state eco-restoration plans and some civil society environmental initiatives prioritise the removal of encroachments as their top line item (Coelho & Raman, 2013), others resort to an uncomfortable silence. As an environmental activist working on water bodies in Chennai explained,
Poorer sections and informal settlements do not [participate in restoration]. They are afraid… At any point, they can be cleared out by the government. In our work, we make sure that we do not talk about the encroachments of these people on the banks…
What happens when this seam of silence is unravelled? This article examines the case of a group of informal settlers who voiced claims on an urban eri in Chennai.
The Question of Settlement
The urbanisation of eris commonly induces a spread of informal settlements along their foreshores. Their indeterminate land–water boundaries, their designation as poromboke 5 and the bare needs (water and drainage) that they provide—in combination with systemic shortage of affordable housing—draw working-class migrants to occupy their banks while staking out a livelihood in the city. Many ‘purchase’ these fragile and flood-prone lands, often in collusion with local politicians and revenue officials. These occupancies, typically spanning several decades, acquire over time a degree of official legitimacy, both through the state’s provision of essential services, and through periodic regularisation (Baviskar, 2011; Bhan, 2016; Raman et al., 2016).
Such modes of producing urban space are not marginal or deviant. Raman et al. (2017), describing the struggles of settlers on a tank in Villupuram which won them titles in 2009, note that a majority of urban localities have grown through the periodic regularisation of occupancies on poromboke lands and through special schemes to grant lands to underprivileged communities. Such regularisation has often resulted in the active re-drawing of eri boundaries in official records. However, these forms of legitimating occupancies have been discredited in the eyes of courts and civil society in the new era of ecologically inflected real estate urbanism, giving way to a regime of property-determined environmentalism on water bodies.
Property-led environmentalism is premised on the boundary of the formal title. It fetishises the legality of land ownership as represented by the patta (a title document issued by the Revenue Department), erasing the negotiations that go into securing this document. It insists on unambiguous categories (land and water), erasing the indeterminacy and mutability of ecological systems. Urban waters are defined and delimited here by terrestrial propertied interests of creating/expanding ‘public space’ (parks, walkways, food-courts), which, in contrast to commons, are envisaged as formally regulated, firmly bounded and free of encroachment.
The term ‘encroachment’, a keyword of contemporary Indian urban environmentalism, signifies a selective stigmatisation of property-less settlers on water’s edges. It takes its meaning from the legal order and boundaries of property rather than from ecological principles. As Jayaraman (2017, p. 32) argues, ‘survival encroachments’, typically small, fragile structures, pose ‘a threat to themselves more than … a flooding threat to the rest of the city’, while more egregious appropriations of wetlands and water bodies by highways, institutions and SEZs, although they may have obtained licenses to encroach, ‘endanger themselves and others by blocking and diverting floodwaters’. 6
The article outlines two countervailing campaigns that unfolded on either side of the Korattur tank: an eco-restoration campaign by propertied residents in the east (discussed in the section ‘Local Environmentalism on Korattur’s Eastern Edge’) and an anti-eviction struggle by informal settlers in the West (Section ‘Occupancy Struggles on Korattur’s Western Edge’). It sets the stage for these accounts by describing (in the Section ‘The Korattur Eri and Its Boundaries’) how the ambivalences and compromises inscribed on the tank’s boundaries through historical land-use patterns, hydrological changes, and state policies were wiped out by the assertion of a singular, hard, originary boundary-line by state eco-restoration schemes and judicial rulings. This forceful assertion spelled the demolition of two generations of working-class urban achievement and aspiration, turning homes, neighbourhoods and livelihoods into rubble. The tragedy of eco-restoration, reproduced across Indian cities, systematically scapegoats property-less urban settlers while failing to ensure the ecological health of the water body.
The rubric of boundaries captures the claims, contestations and exclusions that eri restoration efforts provoked here, and the strategies adopted by campaigners to assert or dismantle those boundaries. But the article also uses the heuristic of boundaries to open up and address (without necessarily answering) a number of vexing questions that are evaded by the hegemonic regime of eco-restoration. First, it poses ontological questions about the urban tank: what is it now, what is it for, and how can/must it be physically/socially bounded? It interrogates how tenurial categories of usufruct, occupancy, commons and property play out on an ecological entity that evades being fixed as land or water. It asks how the concept of encroachment can be conceptually and practically nuanced to distinguish small-scale survival installations from powerful, speculative profit-oriented appropriations. The article also questions what the much-vaunted citizen-engagement in tank restoration signifies when it ignores, silences, or erases long-standing stakeholders on the criterion of property title? How can the false stand-off between environmentalism and social inclusion be dismantled to refigure housing and habitat within an environmentalist rather than a property-oriented rubric? In a more programmatic vein, how can pre-existing settlements be included in a re-imagined restoration design that conceives of eri boundaries in new ways? The case study, while offering no definitive answers, raises these questions as crucial provocations for bringing environmental justice into the eco-restoration paradigm.
Methodology
This essay is based on 18 months (July 2017–December 2018) of intensive qualitative fieldwork around the Korattur eri. We interviewed 20 residents on the eastern side, plus leaders (ex-councillor, panchayat leaders), and prominent members of the eri restoration group. From September 2017 to October 2018, a member of the research team became a participant-observer with this group, taking part in its weekly discussions and its eri-related activities, accompanying members on court visits, and helping with maps. On the Western side, we interviewed 21 residents and leaders of the anti-eviction struggle. Here too, our research team member participated in strategy discussions and accompanied members on their visits to local officials and public consultations. We also interviewed key officials in state agencies responsible for the Korattur eri and other water bodies in Chennai, including the PWD, the Revenue Department, the Chennai Rivers Restoration Trust (CRRT), and Chennai Smart City, and analysed judgements and government orders (GOs) pertaining to water bodies and restoration projects in Chennai.
The Korattur Eri and Its Boundaries
The Korattur eri, situated in Northwestern Chennai, is part of a system of three cascading tanks (Ambattur–Korattur–Retteri) that drain into the Kosasthalaiyar River. Originating as an irrigation tank with an ayacut (irrigated land) of more than 4,000 acres, and maintained by the PWD, it was incorporated into Chennai Corporation limits in 2011.
The two sides of the tank embody distinct and contrasting socio-natural assemblages. Like all eris, the Korattur tank is bounded on its downstream (here eastern) side by a strong curved and elevated earthen embankment which impounds water to release for irrigation through surplus weirs, sluices and channels. The upstream (here Western) foreshore is unbounded, and stays open for seasonal inflows of water from the catchment, the ‘boundary’ here marked only by the water-spread which varies with seasons and with downstream water-use.
Land-use around the Korattur eri was predominantly agricultural into the 1970s (see Figure 1), and its eastern ayacut comprised a collection of old rural settlements dominated by the Vanniyar landholding caste. Oral histories obtained through the course of our study attest that although agricultural activity continued into the 1990s, urbanisation had commenced in the 1960s with the establishment of the Ambattur Industrial Estate (AIE) south of the eri, and accelerated in the 1970s with the construction of the planned upper-middle-class neighbourhood of Anna Nagar nearby and improved connectivity to the city via a highway and railway line. Housing demands of industrial workers in AIE led to the conversion of farmlands into private residential layouts east of Korattur eri. These, along with state-built middle-class housing projects built on large tracts of land (and water, as in the Ambattur Eri nearby), radically altered the eri’s social landscape. By 2000, the eastern side sported sprawling middle-class urban neighbourhoods (including a multi-storied luxury apartment complex), with a diverse population comprising retired bureaucrats, corporate executives, and entrepreneurs. As the ayacut farmlands here were privately owned, they were more easily (although not always legally) 7 conveyed into titled urban real estate, although many of these neighbourhoods lacked urban amenities such as underground sewerage.
The Western foreshore, on the other hand, comprised large tracts of inalienable poromboke (as they fell within the eri boundaries). These open floodplains, seasonally alternating between land and water, had long been used by farmers or landless families in dry seasons for grazing, harvesting silt, or cultivation. In the 1980s, local politicians in partnership with developers (illegally) created plotted layouts here for sale to working-class migrants who could not afford housing in approved layouts. Seasonal (and contested) usufructs were thus turned into permanent occupancies. By the mid-1990s, the Western foreshore was transformed into a string of working-class neighbourhoods housing daily-wage labourers, auto drivers and vegetable vendors. By 2017, as Figure 2 shows, the eri was tightly ringed by settlements on all sides.
As its irrigation function declined, the Korattur tank became part of new urban imaginaries, provoked by its substantial size and depth (GoTN, n.d.). At several points—in the mid-1970s, 1980s and in 2004 8 —proposals were made to turn it into a drinking water reservoir for Chennai. However, these plans failed owing to pollution of the eri’s water by industrial effluents released into inlet channels on its southern side by the Aavin milk factory and the AIE, and by the release of raw sewage from settlements on both sides.
Struggles on the Eri
These urban trajectories sparked the formation of two ‘communities’ with distinct social characters, histories and eri-related aspirations. In the late-2017, resident-activists on both sides of the tank were engaged in radically contrasting struggles with state agencies. Propertied middle-class and upper-caste residents in the east had been agitating since the 1990s to halt the release of effluents from industries nearby and to restore the eri. Their campaign was reactivated from the late-2000s by two convergent state interventions. First, in 2007, the Korattur eri was listed in a Madras High Court (HC) ruling as one of 20 water bodies in Chennai to be restored for water conservation and flood mitigation, starting with the eviction of encroachments. Second, in 2014, the PWD launched a Rs. 20 crore restoration initiative on the three tanks, in fulfilment of the late Chief Minister Jayalalithaa’s Vision 2023, which envisaged desilting of water bodies, along with ‘beautification and appropriate recreational activities … (including jogging tracks, landscaping and water sports)’
9
. Both these initiatives were premised on notions of the eri as a clearly bounded entity, to be restored ‘to its original shape, size, and capacity’
10
. Resident-campaigners on Korattur’s eastern side echoed this perspective:
What we are saying is: You put up the original boundary. You do not have to build a bund there (but) there should be a clear boundary… It should be a strong and conspicuous structure that cannot be removed in a day…
These urgings were specifically targeted against the informal settlements on the eri’s Western banks, whom they consistently condemned as illegal encroachers deserving of immediate eviction. A campaign leader said:
…those who encroach must be immediately evicted, only then preservation is possible… All this happens with government support …you can buy anything with money. If concerned people like us complain to the PWD about these encroachments, they inform and give sufficient time to the encroachers … and those people get stay orders from the court.
Another campaigner claimed that the encroachers were violent.
[D]irect dealing may end up in arguments. So, in court, we specifically ask for bunds/boundaries to be put up; without this nothing can be done.
Meanwhile, residents of the Western settlements were engaged in a decade-long struggle to retain their homes. Their campaign centred on the demand that the eri boundaries, always shifting and indeterminate, be redrawn to recognise their long occupancies and the new socio-spatial and hydrological realities of the water body. As we show below, their claims of the eri’s indeterminate boundary are borne out in three empirical registers: the tank’s shifting ‘natural’ waterlines, official records, and state policies.
Ambivalent Boundaries of the Eri
Eris are edge systems that defy stringent classification as land or water. They reveal a constantly shifting balance and no clear demarcation between these two aspects, especially on their foreshore tracts, where the land–water interface remains dynamic and dependent on numerous socio-natural factors. A walk around the Korattur eri captures the uneven contours of this interface. The eastern boundary is well-marked, bunded and paved, bordering three Hindu temples and middle-class residential neighbourhoods. A walkway and bund (constructed by the PWD as part of its restoration scheme) end at the northeastern point, and the walk Westward becomes more difficult. This stretch is choked with thorny bushes, and the visible demarcation of the waterline soon disappears, forcing the walker into the tank-bed. Here the water-spread is erratic, with puddles and wide stretches of marshy land. There are settlements with concrete houses, thatched huts and mud roads. In short, while the eri’s eastern boundary is orderly, legible and definitive, the Western edge is unclear and messy. Except in the monsoons, the eri appears to comprise more land than water. Four satellite images showing the eri at four different moments, in December 2000, in the drought year of 2004, in 2010 and after the floods of 2015, illustrate the seasonal/temporal dynamism of the water-spread and boundaries (Figure 3).
Historically, eris were valued as both land and water in acknowledgement of this shifting interface. Conflicts between foreshore cultivators and downstream command-area farmers were common (Sreenivasan, 2014): the former wanted water drained out to avoid flooding of their crops, while downstream farmers wanted the water stored as long as possible. A definitive ‘official’ eri boundary was imposed by the British colonial administration. The water-spread extent was surveyed and recorded in Field Measurement Books, and eri lands, customarily designated as poromboke, became classified as wastelands in revenue records. The Revenue Department periodically updates these official boundaries after field surveys, the last of which was carried out in 2006–2007 on the orders of the Madras HC.
The state has not held this ‘official’ boundary sacrosanct. As mentioned above, state agencies periodically altered tank boundaries to accommodate the construction of residences, institutions or infrastructure. The TNHB defended its construction of a middle-income housing complex over more than half of the Ambattur eris in the late-1980s by claiming in court that the tank was ‘defunct’. When 1,550 working-class homes on this eri were demolished in 2008, this complex was spared (Coelho & Raman, 2013). A retired PWD official interviewed for this study acknowledged that the largest encroachments on Chennai’s eris are government infrastructures (roads, pipelines or utility channels) that are rarely, if ever, removed during restoration.
This de facto redrawing of boundaries is evident in Korattur. The PWD’s Detailed Project Report (DPR) for the Korattur eri restoration notes that the railway line and highway across the tank constituted ‘linear intrusions… [that] have contributed to the fragmentation of the wetland and a decrease in the habitat integrity’, and that ‘…areas close to…the…intrusions [are] losing the character of a water body and becoming terrestrial patches’ (GoTN, n.d., p. 25). A comparison of Korattur eri’s revenue maps for 2007 and 1970 (see Figure 4) reveals that large swathes of the 1970 eri below the railway line, which had been turned into industrial/residential real estate, were written out of the 2007 map. These differences officially portray the eri as a historically altered, dynamically engineered body, and suggest that the ‘original’ boundaries, deemed fixed and inviolable in policy and public discourse, are no longer the official boundaries.
Third, while the rigidity of the imagined natural boundary is matched by rigid concepts of property rights, state policies towards informal settlements on watercourse poromboke have long been marked by vacillation and ambivalence, In rural contexts, landowners routinely extended their cultivation onto eri lands (Shah, 2008), paid a fine to the panchayat and/or a tax to the revenue department, and were often granted ownership rights in due course. This periodic redrawing of property boundaries to reflect use patterns was carried out through a process termed jamabandi. Table 1 outlines the series of GOs passed in Tamil Nadu from the 1970s, that alternately allowed and withheld the grant of titles to settlers on water bodies, sending conflicting policy-signals to settlers.
Government Orders on Water’s Edge Settlements
It was these shifting boundaries of legitimacy drawn by state policies that residents indexed to make their claims to remain. While the Western settlements varied in size, age, tenure and amenities, some possessed registered sale deeds, and had achieved an advanced level of state services over the years, including paved roads, electricity and even formal water and drainage connections. As one resident demanded: ‘Why would they take the registration money from us? Why not remove us immediately? Why let us register the property?’
Hardline Moral Boundaries: Court Rulings on Water bodies
In contrast to the government’s ambivalence and intermittent acts of regularisation, the judiciary had, since the mid-2000s, adopted a hard, morally-inflected stance on water’s edge settlements. 11 A Madras HC judgement in 2005 12 held illegal construction on tanks as the prime cause of flooding and drought, and ordered state agencies to identify all natural water sources across the state and remove encroachments ‘by unscrupulous persons’, ‘so that the suffering of the people of the State due to water shortage is ameliorated’. In 2007, a petition filed by the Anti-Corruption Movement in Chennai sought to ‘highlight the maladministration and prevalent corrupt practices because of which almost all the water bodies and watercourses in and around the city of Chennai were allowed to be encroached upon’. The petition ‘sought to declare all encroachments in water bodies as illegal, unconstitutional and a crime against mankind’. The court’s ruling in 2007 concurred with these arguments and invoked the newly enacted Tamil Nadu Tank Protection and Eviction of Encroachments Act (2008) to direct the PWD to submit a programme of eviction toward restoring 29 water bodies in Chennai by May 2008.
In December 2008, the PWD used these orders to serve demolition notices to thousands of homes on tanks across the city, including 1,200 houses on Korattur’s Western banks. The settlers vigorously contested these orders. Before describing their struggles, we turn to the eastern banks, where resident-activists had begun to mobilise for protection/restoration of the tank.
Local Environmentalism on Korattur’s Eastern Edge
Activism by the propertied residents of Korattur eri’s eastern banks exemplified the active local stakeholder engagement for tank-protection advocated by contemporary scholars of urban tanks (Nagendra & Ostrom, 2014; Sundaresan, 2011) as well as by policymakers and environmentalists. This section traces how their efforts were stymied by divided local stakes in the water body, conflicted relations with state agencies, and a restoration imaginary preoccupied with bunds and boundaries.
Oral histories from our study reveal that local initiatives to protect the tank date back to the 1990s, when village youth sandbagged its inlets to block effluents from nearby industries. These efforts were sternly countered by the industries, their political supporters, and the police. Around 2012, a more concerted front formed to campaign against pollution in the eri. Its efforts were driven by deepening water stress from rising population, declining groundwater levels, and inadequate supplies from Chennai’s water utility, metro water. Residents believed that the restored eri could ensure local water self-sufficiency, a perception underlined by the state’s numerous (aborted) plans to turn it into a drinking water reservoir.
The campaign repeatedly petitioned revenue authorities and the state Pollution Control Board (TNPCB), generated media publicity, and held street demonstrations. Receiving no satisfactory response, a group of residents formed the Korattur People’s Welfare and Awareness Trust in 2016 and filed a case at the National Green Tribunal (NGT) against TNPCB, Metrowater, GCC, PWD, and several industries from AIE, seeking to halt the discharge of effluents from industries and domestic sewage from ‘illegal encroachments’ on the Western foreshore. The trust had 10 members, all male, middle-class and upper-caste. Some could trace their ancestry back four generations in these villages, others were recent arrivals, including young professionals, entrepreneurs and a local newspaper editor. The trust supplied the NGT with substantial documentation, including a history of pollution from the 1980s, with maps and photographs of trade effluents, construction debris and sewage being discharged into the eri. Two other appeals were included in the petition: first, permanent marking of the eri boundaries and removal of encroachments, and second, conversion of the eri into a tourist destination with boating facilities.
The trust won a favourable judgement from the NGT. In 2016, the court ordered the GCC to plug the eri inlets to stop effluent inflow and the PCB to revoke Consents to Operate for industries violating pollution norms. It also ordered the erection of boundaries around the tank. In April 2017, the southern inlets were plugged and the sewage diverted to adjacent stormwater channels. This measure, however, encountered resistance from residents of DTP Colony, located next to the closed inlet, which faced severe flooding during the 2017 monsoons. The president of the colony’s resident association explained:
When a family’s house is flooded, you cannot think about pollution in a lake…My first priority would be that house… But the eri group did not understand that.. They were harping on about pollution…That just leaves a bad taste. Let them come to us during summer and we will support their efforts. We also want a clean eri, but that does not mean we want flooding.
In response to the DTP Colony’s protests, the GCC re-opened the inlet to drain out floodwaters. The trust approached the NGT again in January 2018 for orders to close the channel. The NGT re-ordered its closure, chastised the GCC for leaving the inlet open after the monsoons, and urged it to expedite the construction of stormwater drains. The inlets have since remained closed.
In 2018, the trust was reconstituted with several new members, including residents of the new luxury apartments on the eastern bund, and rechristened as the Korattur Lake Protection Trust. The new association was a loose conglomeration of individuals and small groups under the eri restoration banner. Its activities were threefold: public engagement for awareness-building, efforts to acquire information on state eco-restoration plans, and pursuit of judicial action against pollution and encroachments. The public engagement, comprising clean-ups, tree-plantation drives and eri festivals, built liaisons with state agencies (for e.g., GCC to clear the accumulated garbage, PWD and Forest Department for support in tree-plantation drives). The eri festival, organised around the Tamil harvest festival of Pongal, and funded by members from the elite apartment complex, included religious ceremonies at three temples on the eastern bund, a walk along the eastern walkway, and a painting competition. Field officials from the revenue department, the PWD and the Corporation were invited as chief guests.
Other campaign planks were relegated to smaller sub-groups. Judicial action was largely abandoned, partly because the group was satisfied with the inlet closure and sewage diversion, and partly because the NGT was awaiting the appointment of new judges. The sub-group that had focused on judicial action turned to securing and studying records (including expense statements) of the state’s restoration plans, identifying encroachments by accessing revenue records, and using this information to petition the Collector and Tehsildar for action.
The sustained struggle of Korattur’s eastern residents mark a relatively rare instance of local environmental action to protect a neighbourhood tank. Our interviews reveal the extraordinary commitment with which the campaigners pursued their goals, while their relations with the state veered between the collaborative and the combative. Trust members uncritically supported the PWD’s goals of transforming the tank into a nature reserve and recreational space, despite its inconsistency with their own ambitions of turning it into a drinking water reservoir. As a trust leader put it:
We should use this as both a drinking water source and a revenue-generating source for government through tourism. We can appoint a watchman for security [and charge an entrance fee. This would] stop unauthorised people from entering the lake. Now, with no boundaries, people come and drink liquor and break bottles, which becomes hazardous for people walking here. So, we should have entertainment, boating etc. in this lake and if we can make it a drinking water source…it will help people for many more years.
Yet, they faced consistent blocks in their efforts to secure information or action from state agencies. They had to use the RTI Act to obtain a copy of the DPR for the Korattur eri eco-restoration. One member described his difficulties in obtaining information through the RTI Act:
We should receive a reply within 90 days, but we sometimes have to wait 9 months. And in the final hearing, the [Information] Commissioner may try to corner us, interrogate us and deny our query to help government officials. They close the enquiry saying there is no need to answer the query.
Another activist described the inter-departmental buck-passing they faced in response to complaints about pollution:
The source of wastewater is disputed. The industrial association says it is all domestic waste, the Corporation says it is all industrial waste and the PCB blames the Milk Cooperative for dumping waste into the lake.
When trust members complained about sewage dumped by two colleges located within the lake boundaries, they received similar responses:
When we complain to Metrowater, they refer us to CMDA since they gave the building approvals. …The CMDA says that the approved plans included septic tanks and they are not responsible if the owner did not build them…They [also] accuse Metrowater of giving illegal connections. So, these departments make us run around.
In sum, local environmental activism on Korattur’s eastern banks was circumscribed by a set of boundaries that limited its achievements in restoring the tank. First, the initiatives, constrained by inadequate human, technical and financial resources, focused on short-term goals limited to the geography of the Korattur eri, rather than investing in a long-term strategy encompassing its wider catchment and drainages. The activists acknowledged these limitations. One said:
I understand that the long-term solution should be treatment of wastes from the industries before releasing. This is not practically possible for us to demand…there are too many hurdles. Also, they shut us up saying: ‘you have filed a case at the NGT, now leave it to us to implement the order’. Even the NGT order to block the inlet was blatantly violated by the Corporation. What could we do?
Second, the campaign was limited by its somewhat incoherent restoration imaginary, which conceived of the eri as a pristine water body rooted in cultural/religious legacies associated with local temples, yet converged with state environmentalism in its orientation toward recreational and real estate values.
Third, not only was the campaign’s membership socially restricted to men of middle/upper castes and classes, its focus was spatially limited to the eastern banks, clashing with other eri stakeholders such as the southern neighbourhoods affected by flooding from the closed inlet (as detailed above). Firmly excluded from its ambit were the working-class settlements on the Western banks, which figured not only as eyesores but as corrupt and unscrupulous. These exclusions index the campaign’s failure to build a commons on the water body.
Eco-restoration emerges from this grounded account as a bricolage of actions and aspirations, convergent and contentious, that cross the scales and boundaries of the local and the city. As tank restoration projects proliferate across Chennai without a clear guiding framework, local eco-restoration regimes take shape through a patchy and power-laden circulation of protocols and proposals across state schemes, expert reports, and the desires and demands of resident-activists. Yet the regime remains incoherent and incomplete: beyond the standard measures of desilting and boundary-construction, the more challenging eco-systemic interventions such as pollution-abatement, rehabilitation of inlet/outlet channels, and linkages with the wider watershed are rarely achieved.
We turn now to the Western settlers’ campaigns to defend their homes, livelihoods and the right to remain, showing how the boundary question was central to their claims.
Occupancy Struggles on Korattur’s Western Edge
The demolition notices served in 2008 to 1,200 households on Korattur eri’s Western side galvanised a protracted resistance over a decade (2008–2018), which centred on challenges to the fixed physical tank boundary asserted by the state, and the concomitant legal and moral boundaries that deemed their housing illegitimate. The campaign unfolded over two phases, one beginning in 2008 and a second in 2018.
In 2008, residents from across the Western settlements coalesced to form an association despite different levels of vulnerability to eviction. Association leaders quickly learned state vocabularies related to land zoning, titles and water body regulations. Their primary strategy was to assert that their neighbourhoods were occupied land despite being inside the survey boundary of the water body. Invoking Metro water’s declaration in 2003 that the Korattur eri was unfit for drinking water storage, they argued that it no longer retained the characteristics of a water body and hence could be diverted for other uses. They assembled documentary evidence of their long-standing occupancies, from sale deeds to state-issued identity cards, property-tax receipts and utility bills. They highlighted the selective targeting of their homes while state-built housing for better-off sections remained unaffected. They pointed to the state’s arbitrary privileging of one land–water boundary for the Korattur eri from a multiplicity of state-defined boundaries (1970, 2007, unofficial boundary of 2008, current), arguing that each could produce different (il)legalities, as illustrated by the two official maps of Korattur eri for 1970 and 2007 (Figure 4). They also repeatedly drew attention to the distance of their settlement from the actual land–water interface, contrasting it to the eastern side where they claimed one could ‘actually see the water’.
The activists strove to break through the boundary of the court judgement by canvassing support from executive and legislative state personnel. They petitioned the DC, the local MLA and councillor, and the Human Rights Commission, organised street protests, hunger strikes and road blockages, and used political, professional and caste-based contacts to arrange meetings with legislators from different political parties. The protests built up to a massive scale, bringing over 2,000 people from across the Western settlements into the streets with a strong sense of common cause. Most residents had sunk their life’s savings into these homes. As a protest leader explained:
With the small monies I have saved over the years, I have built this house. It is now an investment for me and my children, it is part of their future…We are trying to progress but when this house is taken away and we are pushed back, the next generation is also affected.
The visibility of the protests won them a meeting with the state’s Chief Minister, M. Karunanidhi, who appointed a committee under the Irrigation Minister to study their case. In July 2008, the minister conducted a site inspection with PWD, revenue, and municipal officials to explore a compromise solution. According to the protest leader, ‘The minister said in an interview that both the public and the lake are like his two eyes, both are needed…’.
In December 2008, about 300 homes within the watershed area were demolished. For the remaining 900 families, this was more than a reprieve; it represented a legitimisation of their settlements and a new boundary line. As the leader put it: ‘The remaining plots were slightly away from the waterline and were not a hindrance to the eri, so officials decided that they need not be affected, and we were allowed to remain here after the inspection…’.
Seeking to consolidate this achievement into a long-term solution, some residents petitioned the High Court in 2009 for titles. They challenged the 2008 court order on the grounds of the length of their occupancies and the defunct condition of the eri. Pointing to the state’s periodic regularisations of settlements on poromboke lands, they highlighted a GO that granted patta to over-10-year-old settlers on unused lake poromboke. They argued that this GO had been used to regularise educational institutions and other large establishments but not individual house-owners or common people.
The case dragged on for over six years, and in November 2015, a ruling was delivered by a full bench of the Madras HC, marking a legal halt to further petitions on the issue. It flatly denied the petition and invalidated earlier GOs as violating the public trust doctrine. It chastised the state government for allowing the use of communal natural resources for private housing, and urged the state to ‘hold such water bodies in public trust for the welfare of this generation and all succeeding generations’ ensuring their protection from ‘unscrupulous persons’, who have ‘illegally encroached’ and whose acts could not ‘be treated as pardonable and be rewarded … in the form of regularisation/accommodation…’.
This order, like the 2008 judgment, consolidated a post-2000 ethos of uncompromising defence of urban water bodies and criminalisation of informal settlements. Yet, these orders remained selective in their ambit, excluding large-scale state encroachments like roads, bridges, or TNHB housing layouts, and they did not address industrial and sewage pollution in the tank. The rulings thus held scant promise for restoring either the water-spread area or the water quality of the eri. But the 2015 judgement crafted an official convergence between the PWD’s eco-restoration efforts and its program of eliminating informal settlements on Korattur eri. It also effectively absolved the PWD of its legal responsibility for carrying out a social impact assessment and holding a public hearing on its restoration and eviction plans. Armed with this judgment, the PWD issued new eviction notices to Korattur residents in 2016 and 2017.
This launched a new phase of struggle in 2018. Residents found that their earlier strategies had lost traction in the environmentalist ethos that had gripped Chennai after the 2015 floods. An overwhelmingly negative public view of any form of construction on eris made political support harder to mobilise. State officials were unwilling to entertain housing demands on eri poromboke due to a claimed shortage of land in the city and the large number of eris earmarked for restoration. Even local political leaders in Korattur had to balance the demands of informal settlers with those of the more vocal eri protection group.
The new phase of struggle thus took recourse to delaying tactics such as non-acceptance of eviction notices, refusal to provide biometric information, and the thwarting of public meetings intended to distribute resettlement tokens. The leaders approached housing activists and researchers in the city, and consulted a retired high court judge on legal options. They were advised to shift strategy to demand proximate resettlement rather than in situ titles. But the residents were reluctant to alter their demands, as they saw scant possibilities of being allotted land nearby, and because the loss of their homes outweighed prospects of proximate resettlement. And unlike the last struggle, cracks had appeared among residents based on differences in their real and perceived vulnerabilities as determined by tenure documents and geographic location vis-à-vis the eri boundaries.
But their strategy deliberations were short-circuited by the arrival of bulldozers on 13 October 2018. The PWD, assisted by the GCC and the police, demolished 1,000 odd houses in Korattur, as people protested, blocked streets, and threatened to immolate themselves and their children. Homes built over decades were turned to rubble in a few hours against the cries and shouts of children, women and men in the background. The leader of the protest called us on the phone, saying:
This is all happening today…now… They have come… The first house is being demolished in front of our eyes…There is still stuff inside…They just broke half of the house..and have moved to the next…
He cut the call, sobbing.
The settlers were forced to restart their lives. Despite the HC order recommending in-situ rehabilitation as a ‘better …solution, of course, subject to availability of land’, the evicted households were offered tokens for tenements in a resettlement colony 40 km away. Most households were unwilling to move there. At the time of writing, some had rented accommodation nearby and others were waiting it out at houses of kin. Here then, once again, the tragedy of eco-restoration laid waste to the future of a thousand families with little guarantee that this would restore the water body.
Conclusions
This article seeks to unsettle the moral and practical certainties of the contemporary eco-restoration discourse with questions about the ontology, functions and futures of an urbanising tank as a dynamic socio-natural body embedded in new urban values, institutional relations, and technical regimes. Tank restoration has taken on a hegemonic force in urban governance. It has become the favoured mode of citizen activism, a touchstone of civic, corporate and governmental virtues in the contemporary disaster-framed city.
Boundaries and bunds, emblems of enclosure, constitute the bedrock of these efforts. Property-led environmentalism, impelled to fetishise boundaries and categories, turns to a valorisation of ‘original’ eri boundaries. Yet the practical protocols of eco-restoration counteract these calls by building bunds all around the tank, violating its functional morphology of a foreshore open to inflows of water. Ecologists interviewed for this study claimed that bunds were built primarily to secure the tank’s territory against encroachment, and that they often had to push for a small inlet to be left for water inflows. Property-led environmentalism thus prioritises the policing of land–water boundaries over the ecological imperatives of fluidity and flow. It refracts ecological values through the prism of property and its accessory, protected ‘public’ space.
The reification of original boundaries has given rise to an overdetermined distinction between legitimate and illegitimate claimants to the eri. The discursive criminalisation of informal settlers delegitimises their perspectives as stakeholders of the water’s edge, allowing them to speak only for their housing rights. As Baviskar (2020) notes, ‘the power to define … a problem as an ’environmental issue’ is unequally distributed’. Legal ownership of property confers powers to frame the terms of the discourse, its conditions and its silences. Such a framing represents the question of working-class housing as disconnected from, if not inimical to, the environmental question.
The power to inscribe boundaries, as this article shows, is determined by conjunctural moments in UPE. Korattur’s Western settlers were caught in an era when planning values had switched from land to water and the balance of state power shifted from the political calculus of regularisation to the judicial repudiation of unpropertied occupancies. The tragedy of eco-restoration is thus in part a tragedy of anachronism, of being in the wrong time.
In seeking to dismantle the stand-off between protection/restoration of urban water bodies and the defence of working-class housing rights, this article opens up further questions: How can the revival of commons on water bodies be reconciled with the protection of fragile, painstakingly built urban occupancies of marginalised populations? What are the conditions for articulating an environmentalism of habitat? How can environmental justice frameworks contribute to integrating social reproduction and vulnerability into the praxis of conservation and restoration? And in a more programmatic vein, what ‘third way’ can be imagined for settlements on water bodies, beyond in-situ upgradation on the one hand and resettlement in distant and dismal floodplain-ghettos on the other?
This article showed how the stand-off is constituted by a misrecognition of the ‘nature’ of the urban tank and an overly literal ‘restoration’ framework based on romanticised myths of the traditional eri. It proposes that the stand-off can be resolved only by recognising the eri as an artefact variably assembled over time by socio-political, technical and natural actions.
We argue, with the squatters of Korattur, that the interrogation of boundaries offers a key to reimagining the water body. Revitalising an urban tank calls for a constructivist eco-social approach that designs the eri for new conditions rather than ‘restores’ it. As an ecologist experienced in tank restoration interventions in Chennai said:
…To restore tanks to their original or near-original state will not be valid. Because then they will be cascading water downstream. The ayacut is fully constructed, the upper catchment is fully compromised…So restoration needs to be redefined for urban scenarios.
In conclusion, then, can new ecological design approaches (based on soak and sponge principles) allow for nesting ecological services within settlement spaces and for rejuvenating urban water bodies in ways that include vulnerable settlements?
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This article would not have been possible without Pradeep Kuttuva’s dedicated fieldwork and writing. I thank Lalitha Kamath, Amita Bhide and Aditya Ramesh for insightful suggestions on an earlier draft. I also thank the residents of Korattur for generously sharing their time and struggle stories with us.
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.