The plan is to build 20,376 units in 158 blocks with 8 floors each. About 6,000 units have been built so far. (By October, 2013) Though the project was officially inaugurated in March 2014, the majority of the tenements remained unoccupied till a few months ago (written in April, 2016) as people in the slum areas refused to move in. As per the norms, the density of a housing project cannot exceed 150 dwelling units for 1 hectare of land. Accordingly, the Perumbakkam project site planned on 81.20 hectares of land can have only 12,180 dwelling units; but shockingly TNSCB proposed to construct 23,864 dwelling units with a density of 294 dwelling units per hectare, close to double of what the norms permit.

       The report titled ‘From deluge to displacement: The impact of post-flood eviction and resettlement in Chennai’, released by the Information and Resource Centre for the Deprived Urban Communities (IRCDUC) and Housing and Land Rights Network (HLRN), talks about the various violations of law and the rights of the flood-hit. The report states that of the 9,687 families residing on the banks of Adyar river, 3,464 were shifted to the TNSCB resettlement tenements in Perumbakkam by June 2016. Later plans were announced to relocate an additional 2,519 families by May 2017, and they were evicted two months later. Over 90% of the resettled families claimed they were forcibly evicted.

RELATED MEDIA COVERS