Along the west edge of Chennai’s Villivakkam Lake, Anna Sathya Nagar sits pressed up against an old grey compound wall. When this reporter visited the sub-locality in March this year, there were a few families sitting on the narrow concrete roads outside their homes, doing their laundry and catching up. Some of the houses had numbers and dates painted on their walls in bright acrylic pink, a few faded with strikes across them. A man named Selva explained that the numbers are part of the government’s usual marking system, identifying homes ready for demolition on the poramboke land. “The owners of those houses gave all their information to the government and vacated the buildings.”
The eviction notices started to arrive around 2018, when big groups of 20-30 people began entering the neighbourhood to verify documents. “It’s usually a mix of police, rowdies, and corporation people,” said Selva. They take thumbprints, headshots, and Aadhaar card information to register the families for a house in a resettlement colony in another part of the city, like Pulianthope, Ambattur, or Vyasarpadi.
Out of 50 families, 25 have been withholding their biometrics, hoping to stay on in Villivakkam. “The flooding issue was one of the reasons they cited for eviction, but their reasons change every time. Now, I’ve heard they’re going to make the area a car park,” Selva said.
The houses are all located along two small roads that intersect in a cross. Pointing to a number on an empty, rectangular blue house, a woman said, “They left out of fear. The family was told their house would be demolished if they didn’t provide their information immediately.”
Houses marked with numbers in Anna Sathya Nagar
On the other side of the compound wall, construction for the upcoming ‘Kalyan Amusement Park’ was progressing rather slowly. A few workers polished the railings of a giant glass bridge that cuts over the water, while security guards strolled around a walkway bordering the lake. The rest of the site was merely dug-up mud mounds. A small office in a far corner had a poster on it — “CK Entertainments Pvt Ltd”. “It is owned by a big-shot Telugu movie producer,” one of the workers told me. “It is going to be the next MGM. Rides, boating, movies, glass bridge, everything!”
After the Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC) completed the restoration of Villivakkam Lake, they leased the land to the newly formed ‘Parks wing’ of the company for a period of 25 years. One report from 2022 mentioned how the company would be paying Rs 1 crore to the GCC every year in rent. Over time, development around the lake resulted in the issuance of eviction notices in the surrounding neighbourhoods, and many families were displaced.
Today, the residents at Anna Sathya Nagar, the last of the notified areas, are caught between two options — to stay and advocate for land titles or to uproot immediately so they can acquire ‘good’ public housing in a desired neighbourhood. However, most families are unable to make an informed decision due to abrupt eviction notices, coercive tactics of the police, and unclear information about resettlement benefits.
Construction of the amusement park is underway
“Over the last six years, 19,000 families and 83 settlements have been evicted,” said Vanessa Peter, founder of Information and Resource Centre for Deprived Urban Communities (IRCDUC), referring to a 2022 report by the IRCDUC on the rate of eviction and relocation in the city. “There has been a steady rise. If you look at the past four decades, our fact-finding report shows that 60,000 families have been moved around Chennai.”
She explained that a majority of evictions have taken place in settlements along water bodies and government lands. “These were cheap lands that no one wanted, given that they flood extensively. Now they’re conducting restorations of water bodies and building eco-parks and beautification drives around the lakes and rivers, displacing these settlements in the process.” Often, the new infrastructure that is built is via private-public partnership (PPP).
In her book titled Landscapes of Accumulation, Llerena Guiu Searle provides a historical account of how, after the liberalisation policies of the 1990s, the influx of international and private capital into state-dominated urban development has led to a change in the role of state governments in the country. “Indian municipal and provincial governments — like governments around the world — have used urban space as a tool to attract international investment.” As a result, urban land is reconfigured and kept aside by the state for infrastructure development, often via PPPs or for middle/high-income real estatejaya development. Areas that were considered peripheral, untenable, and wastelands are inevitably prospects for such urban development.
Many of the city’s informal settlements have been set up in such areas, with the government even having provided services to accommodate those living there more permanently. In Villivakkam, residents pointed to the construction of the compound wall 10 years ago as the ‘all clear’ sign for them to build concrete homes in the place of their thatched huts. Sewage and water connections, electricity provisions, and concrete roads were built-in over the years, and residents paid taxes towards their development and maintenance. The abrupt eviction notices and biometric rounds delegitimise these informal yet enduring agreements between the state and the working-class settlers, who have been encouraged to construct their homes and neighbourhoods on previously ‘cheap’ lands in the city.
The compound wall alongside Anna Sathya Nagar
The Adyar and Cooum river restorations are being carried out by the Chennai Rivers Rights Trust, a subsidiary of the Tamil Nadu Urban Infrastructure Financing Services Limited (TNUIFSL) — a PPP involving private Indian and multinational banks such as ICICI Bank, and by Chennai Smart Cities Pvt Ltd. The project aims to de-silt the rivers, provide eco-walkways, cycling tracks, and entertainment spots along the banks.
Thousands of families had been previously displaced to far-away resettlement sites in Perumbakkam and Kanagi Nagar in previous years. Recently, the homes of around 25 Scheduled Tribe (ST) families along the Cooum were destroyed without provision of further accommodation, despite them having lived there for around 45 years.
In another order issued by the government in 2020, around 15,360 families were to be resettled in the Buckingham Canal restoration carried out by the Water Resources Department and TNUIFSL. According to a policy note by the Tamil Nadu Urban Habitat Development Board (TNUHDB) for 2020–21, the number of evictions along the canal stands at 17,564, accounting for those living in Lock Nagar, Sivarajapuram, Sunguvar Street, Mettukuppam, Rotary Nagar, and Neelam Basha Dargah. In some of these areas, residents are withholding their biometrics out of fear that they might be resettled to unfavourable locations. In April, 40 families received eviction notices in Chengalpattu for the construction of a bus terminus, being built under a private-public partnership.
Such partnerships have changed the course of urban development in the last few decades. Along with the increased privatisation of land and consequent evictions, the scale for government housing and land acquisition has considerably reduced in the past decade or so. Karen Coelho, in an article published in 2022, mentions how, prior to the 1990s, Tamil Nadu governments and Dravidian parties made it a core political agenda to provide social housing to working-class migrants coming to the city. This was done largely through the acquisition of huge tracts of land, the provision of serviced plots for state-built or self-built housing, and tenure security.
The provision of serviced plots and focus on ‘self-improvement’ in the 1970s, financed through World Bank (WB) loans, were especially successful in creating a set of “mixed-class and mixed-use” neighbourhoods in the city, such as the centrally located Arumbakkam. The self-help approach was based on the premise that “slum-dwellers would invest in improving and building their own housing if they were provided with tenure security, adequate infrastructure, and low-interest credit.”
Despite being labelled as a ‘failure project’ by the WB, the impact of the scheme was rather impressive, covering around 76,000 slum households between 1978 and 1988. Karen Coelho explains that these approaches were abandoned in the 1990s due to financialisation of land, land-intensive infrastructure building, and ‘slum-free ’ city beautification schemes. This made way for the construction of mass peripheral tenement building to house the working classes.
This trajectory of creating a favourable market for land and buildings has created a ‘rule of land titles’, where people all over the city living on government-serviced lands are made to arrange for their own pattas (title deeds). Settlers are forced to go from government official to official seeking favours to expedite the process, throwing them into an arena of political advocacy.
In Villivakkam, the group of 25 families who wanted to stay had spoken among each other extensively, hoping to present a united front on the question of keeping their homes. They took letters to different higher ups asking for pattas. In defence of their right to stay, they highlighted the ways in which the neighbourhood had been serviced over the years, as well as how they effectively handled flooding as a community.
“We’ve sent petition after petition to all these people,” said Dhanalaxmi, a resident. “We even blocked the road when both the father and son, MK Stalin (Tamil Nadu Chief Minister) and Udhayanidhi, came to a school nearby for that Nidhi Udhavi scheme.”
Eventually, they handed their letters to their MLA A Vetriazhagan, a figure that many of the residents resented for allegedly “not having left his flat in SIDCO Nagar after asking for votes in 2020.” They even approached the commissioner of the GCC, who apparently told them he had no idea there was any such order of eviction for their area. “When we heard that, we started suspecting some private body had paid the zonal office people to come into our area. Otherwise, the GCC would know about the eviction orders.”
However, the fight for pattas doesn’t seem to be a uniform demand among all of the residents, as the other half had decided to sign the documents. When residents were asked for the contact information of anyone who has given their biometrics, the silent distance between the two groups was evident. “We don’t really know them that well,” Jaya, a woman living near the compound wall, said cautiously. “We can’t tell you much.”
View of the Villivakkam Lake from Jaya's terrace
Different groups interacted with the residents in an effort to obtain their consent, and these methods seem to have contributed to the deepening divisions in the area. For instance, Dhanalaxmi and Jaya remembered the police asking people to sign away their biometric information quickly. “For those who did, they told them they would get a good place in Ambattur if they convinced the rest of us to consent to the eviction. ‘Otherwise, we’ll send all of you to Pulianthope!’” Much like the reasons for the eviction drives, the benefits of relocation were never clear. This made it harder for all residents to predict their next steps in the relocation process.
Jaya also described “rowdies” going in and out of the neighbourhood, offering their advice and opinions. She seemed suspicious of their intentions. “The decision is split right now — some people want to leave and others want to stay. Now, let’s say I’m a rowdy. I speak to some 30 people, convince them, and get them on my side. Given our total strength is 50 people, out of which you have ‘mind washed’ 30, the rest of us look less powerful in comparison. What they are doing is politics using rowdies.”
As of now, the residents at Villivakkam aim to continue resisting any future eviction drives. While Jaya washed her vessels, she struck them together and remarked, “We will protest when it happens, and you better be there to help us when we call.”
However, the atmosphere in the neighbourhood is tense and uncertain. Residents are vocal about their fear of any confrontation, yet many have to continue with their jobs and daily lives with no clear way forward. But this is not entirely unique to Villivakakam. As one moves through the city, the future is uncertain for several other informal settlements.
Nonetheless, despite this looming threat, there are successful attempts at addressing this housing crisis. Be it through government action such as integrated state/self-built housing, or collective action such as the recent protests and stalled evictions along Marina Loop Road, Chennai has a working history of effective avenues to mitigate this crisis.
All images by Savita Ganesh.
Savitha Ganesh is a writer and journalist interested in housing and urban planning. She is currently living in Chennai, and hopes to learn more about the housing landscape and politics of land use in the city.