Chennai corporation’s plans to beautify Marina hit a roadblock – Times of India

CHENNAI: The ambitious Marina beach beautification has come to a halt, with the corporation and police citing law and order issues. Setting up of 900 smart carts and removal of encroachments and fish vendors from Loop Road are stuck and Greater Chennai Corporation officials say they will act only after a court direction.
“Of the 900 smart carts allotted, only 52 have been set up on the service lane near Light House. The rest are stacked at the corporation playground on South Canal Bank Road, Mandaveli. The fishermen and vendors have submitted representations to the government and we can act only based on a court order,” said an official.
The civic body allocated ?200 crore under the Union home ministry’s Nirbhaya fund and ?11 crore from the tourism ministry’s Swadesh Darshan project for various beautification and infrastructure programmes on the Marina and Elliot’s beach. The corporation planned to improve the beach by setting up a walking path, a children’s play area, a jogging track, benches, toilets, landscaping and access for disabled among other amenities such as smart marking, better lighting and beach cleaning. Most of these have been completed, but Smart City projects such as smart parking are still only on pilot basis.
In 2019, a Madras high court bench of Justice Vineet Kothari and R Suresh Kumar had ordered the corporation and the city police to work together and make the Marina a world class beach within six months. By 2020, vendors were issued ID cards, vending committees formed and proposals to get coastal regulation authority’s clearances for setting up pathways and fish markets on Loop Road sent. This year, however, there has been little development, with the allotted 900 carts yet to be placed on the beach and the 2,500 regular vendors alleging that about 40% of those allotted carts were from other areas of the city.
The Loop Road beautification project is stuck in the Madras high court as are proposals to build an elevated flyover linking Adyar and laying of a wider road. K Bharathi of the South Indian Fishermen Association said there were eight fishermen settlements along the Marina and about 298 shops in Nochikuppam. “The civic body hasn’t even constructed the fish markets. This area is the basis of livelihood for the fishermen folk and evicting them would be disastrous,” he had told TOI in an earlier interaction.
A senior corporation official said that all the previous court orders had been challenged. “We began the entire project as a court monitored one. We await the court’s direction on further course of action,” said the official.