Flooded homes, poisoned air: Tiruvottiyur residents demand a flood-free, pollution-free neighbourhood

TIRUVOTTIYUR — The residents of Tiruvottiyur are asking for something that should never have been a demand at all: a neighbourhood free of floods and free of pollution. Ahead of the northeast monsoon, their message to the administration is simple — fix the flooding, clean the air, and stop treating north Chennai as the city's backyard. The Kosasthalaiyar river is the neighbourhood's oldest tormentor. The 136-km river, which originates near Pallipattu in Tiruvallur district and drains into the Bay of Bengal, breaches its banks every time there is heavy rain. Container freight stations along the Thiruvottiyur–Ponneri–Pancheti Road are inundated each monsoon, work is suspended, and water pours into homes and lanes. Then there is the pollution. Tiruvottiyur sits in Chennai's industrial belt, and residents live with the consequences daily — foul air, contaminated surroundings, and the memory of the ammonia gas leak that followed the floods. Complaints about drinking water and basic cleanliness have been raised year after year. The neighbourhood has seen what neglect costs. The December 2015 floods and Cyclone Michaung in December 2023 both devastated these streets. "The government did not help us when things were really bad," a Tiruvottiyur resident told reporters after the cyclone — a sentence that still hangs over every promise made since. The contrast with the rest of the city is what stings. A short drive away, areas like Kolathur and Perambur are well developed, with good roads and large commercial and residential buildings. But the coastal belt of Royapuram, R.K. Nagar and Tiruvottiyur — home to a large working-class and fishing population — complains of the same things election after election: no drinking water, no cleanliness, and industrial pollution nobody cleans up. Tamil Nadu now has a new government, and the TVK administration inherited these grievances along with the chair. The test is not whether ministers visit after the next flood, but whether stormwater drains are desilted, encroachments on waterways are cleared, and industries are made to answer for what they put into the air and water — before the monsoon, not after. Tiruvottiyur's residents are not asking for charity. They are asking for the minimum a city owes its people: dry homes in the rain and air their children can breathe.