On January 24, during the annual bird race organised by the Madras Naturalists’ Society, we set out to count birds in the Great Salt Lake stretching between Kelambakkam and Mamallapuram — an ecologically rich wetland complex now in the process of being recast in official maps as the Mamallan Water Reservoir.
As Chennai’s sixth reservoir, the Mamallan facility is proposed to be constructed in the Kovalam sub-basin of Chengalpattu district at a capacity of 1.65 TMC, spanning across 5161 acres of the Great Salt Lake, with a promise of securing water for the growing population of the Chennai Metropolitan Area.
The same promise was given when the Nemmeli Desalination Plant was commissioned in 2013 and expanded in 2016 at the expense of hydrologically critical sand dunes on the East Coast. A new—and the largest—plant is now being constructed in Perur under the same assurances.
Our group’s plan was simple: document the avian presence and walk the terrain marked for transformation. Entering through hamlets such as Nemmeli, Pattipulam, and Krishnankaranai, we moved across a landscape that quietly unsettles the idea of ‘vacant land’ or ‘water body’ often invoked in the project report.
From the Kovalam–Kelambakkam connecting road to the Tiruporur–Nemmeli road, expansive, water-filled wetlands and dense congregations of water birds were seen. Most of these migratory birds from the Central Asian flyway find refuge in this wetland after the developmental pressure crushed the Pallikaranai Marshes with its real estate expansion and dumping yards.
Beyond this stretch, the terrain opened into a broad sweep of grasslands, marked by marshy soil that engulfed our feet and occasional patches of stagnant water, until the Buckingham Canal cut across the horizon. As we walked on, we passed people moving in the opposite direction, herding goats and carrying fish and nets — reminders that this was an actively used and lived-in landscape.
Along with these, we saw boundary stones etched with ‘WRD’ (Water Resource Department), disturbing the landscapes. This was not an empty site awaiting development but a 'living commons'—hydrological, ecological, and social—formally ‘owned’ by the Tamil Nadu Water Resources Department.
In the language of the state, land is classified only into three categories: privately owned ‘patta’ land (including both settlement areas and croplands), forest land, and what is variously termed wasteland, barren land, or poramboke.
Framed as empty, underutilised, or surplus, poramboke landscapes are increasingly positioned as ideal sites for reservoirs, solar parks, industrial corridors, and urban infrastructure.
This celebrated classificatory scheme, rooted in colonial governance, continues to structure how land is perceived, valued, and governed even today. Strikingly absent from this archival vocabulary is the idea of the commons.
'Commons' refer to landscapes and resources that are collectively used, accessed, and sustained through shared practices by a community, like the wetlands, grazing grounds, hills, mountains, beaches, sea, rivers, and fishing grounds. These lands and resources exist without any specific name outside the society of private ownership.
There were no separate names, classifications or categories before the British. But, for a colonial eye, everything is a commodity and profit. They classified everything to streamline and channel extraction and exploitation. It is sad that the post-colonial government of India borrowed the same extractive ideals of the colonial government. For decades, large developmental projects in India were planned primarily in forested landscapes.
These interventions were met with sustained resistance from grassroots mobilisations such as the Silent Valley Movement of Kerala and the Narmada Bachao Andolan of Central India, which not only challenged specific projects but also reshaped environmental governance in the country. The enactment of national legal safeguards, including the Wildlife (Protection) Act and subsequent environmental regulations make forests increasingly difficult terrain for unchecked infrastructural expansion.
As forests became legally and politically contentious spaces, developmental attention shifted towards privately owned lands. Large-scale land acquisition of private lands for dams, highways, industries, and urban expansion provoked equally intense opposition, as communities resisted displacement and loss of livelihoods.
In Tamil Nadu, mobilisations against projects such as the Parandur greenfield airport and the Salem–Chennai eight-lane expressway revealed the limits of private land acquisition as a politically viable strategy, exposing the social costs embedded in the language of public purpose and compensation.
It is against this backdrop that the state’s gaze appears to have turned decisively towards what it calls ‘wastelands’ or poramboke lands — the only category that remains relatively unprotected, politically expendable, and administratively pliable.
The proposed Mamallan Reservoir thus marks not a new frontier of development but a familiar pattern of enclosure, where commons are rendered invisible to be appropriated in the name of public good.
For example, in 2010, The project reports of the proposed India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) offer a revealing illustration of this same logic. After being pushed out of the protected national park landscapes of Singara in the Nilgiris, the project was relocated to Pottipuram in Theni district.
The reports justified this shift by claiming that the land proposed to be acquired was neither cultivated nor part of a protected wildlife sanctuary but merely “barren land” located in the foothills of the Bodi West Hills, which is owned by the Revenue Department of Tamil Nadu.
The project authorities were well aware that these so-called barren lands and surrounding hills functioned as grazing commons and sacred spaces for the Kattu-Naickers — a pastoral Adivasi community.
Yet, these lived claims carried little weight in official decision-making. It ultimately took nearly two years of legal struggle—invoking the proximity of the Mathikettan Sholai National Park and the Mathikettan–Periyar Tiger Corridor—to challenge the project’s environmental clearances.
The local assertion that these were common lands central to everyday life and cultural practice found recognition only when translated into the language of wildlife protection and legal boundaries, not when articulated as claims over commons.
In India, legal and political understanding of the commons has largely developed through the study of forests. After decades of mobilisation, limited rights over forest resources were partially restored to Adivasi communities, most notably through joint forest management arrangements.
But these models remain uneven, often sidelined when forests are deemed commercially valuable or strategically important. What remains underexplored, however, is how the framework used for commons applies beyond forests — to grazing lands, wetlands, arid landscapes, coastal commons, and fishing waters.
These spaces rarely see the legal visibility or political protection accorded to forests, despite being equally central to livelihoods and ecological stability. As development pressures intensify and forests become harder to appropriate due to legal safeguards and public scrutiny, it is these non-forest commons—frequently labelled as wastelands or 'poramboke'—that increasingly emerge as the preferred sites for large-scale infrastructure and extractive projects.
Understanding contemporary environmental conflicts, including the proposed Mamallan Water Reservoir, requires extending the lens of the commons beyond forests to other landscapes where acquisition proceeds with far less resistance and recognition.
A close reading of the project reports of the Mamallan Reservoir raises more questions than answers. The proposal to construct a freshwater reservoir barely a kilometre from the sea, with minimal assured freshwater inflow and no perennial streams, making it dependent completely on the claimed floodwater of the nearby lakes, sits uneasily with the technical rationale offered by the state of Chennai’s future water security.
The presence of coastal vegetation in the wetland ultimately proves the possibility of contamination of the proposed freshwater reservoir. And it also threatens critical ecosystems like mangroves and mudflats in both the Kelambakkam and Manamai estuary regions by blocking the natural sediment flow that sustains them.
The unusual urgency surrounding the foundation-laying ceremony further deepens unease. What appears to lend coherence to the project, however, is not hydrological logic but administrative convenience: the land is already under the control of the Tamil Nadu Water Resources Department.
The state’s control of the site allows the project to bypass the messy and politically costly processes of consultation, consent, and negotiation with local communities — processes that have recently backfired in projects such as the proposed Parandur airport.
In this sense, Mamallan appears less as a carefully deliberated water solution and more as a shortcut: a development imagined on paper, made feasible not by ecological suitability or public participation but by the administrative ease in changing the land use, as it is ‘owned’ by the government.
The fact that the state holds documentary ownership over these lands does not erase their long history of use by local communities. For generations, such landscapes have functioned as commons, which supported grazing, fishing, mobility, and ecological balance, well before they were reduced to entries in government records.
The construction of the East Coast Road (ECR) along the sand dunes of the Coromandel Coast offers a telling precedent. In the name of public good—invoking connectivity and the promise of a scenic coastal drive between Chennai and Puducherry—the dunes were reshaped and flattened as the ECR.
What disappeared in the process was not just sand and terrain but also a shared ecological commons that had long supported coastal livelihoods. The dunes’ underground freshwater lenses silently contributed to Chennai’s own water security.
If projects such as Mamallan point to anything, it is the urgent need for robust legal protections for common property rights beyond forests. While forest commons have gradually entered the legal imagination through decades of struggle, non-forest commons—wetlands, grazing lands, and coastal dunes—remain dangerously exposed.
An efficient and accountable state cannot rely on administrative ownership as a substitute for democratic processes. If eminent domain is to be exercised, it must be done transparently, through open consultation and legal scrutiny, rather than by sidestepping affected communities.
Any development model that claims growth with social justice, such as the DMK’s Dravidian Model, will ultimately be judged by how it treats its commons and by whether it chooses convenience over consent.
Our stroll through the marshes came to an end with the sighting of White-bellied ‘Sea’ Eagle, a rare presence in Chennai and a species found only in healthy coastal ecosystems — affirming our claims about the landscape.
T Hari Bharathi is a PhD scholar in Sociology at the University of Hyderabad, studying the environmental movements of Tamil Nadu.
Views expressed are the author’s own.