Corporation slow to act on parks

CHENNAI: All is not well with the city parks as the Corporation has been sluggish in increasing the number of parks. In the past three years, only 134 new parks have been developed against the civic body’s target of 300.

The Corporation’s proposal was to develop hundred parks in Chennai every year. But so far the city has only a total of 394 parks out of which 260 are existing parks.

Now that the Corporation is aiming to improve green cover in the city, its officials say that the thrust is on speeding up creating new parks within a short time.

“Though the Corporation planned to create 100 parks every year, the figure fell short owing to several reasons including problems in acquirement of Open Space Reserve (OSR) lands,” said a Corporation official.

“Now we are aiming to create the remaining 200 parks within March next year by productive conversion of acquired OSR lands,” the official added. “Encroachments must also be cleared in several of the OSR lands to pave the way for new parks.”

According to the data provided in the Chennai Corporation’s official website, the Corporation has taken over 575 OSR lands from several private landowners in the city. Meanwhile, the Corporation is planning to privatize maintenance works in its parks to preserve the existing ones.

Currently, there are 220 gardeners working in all the parks. Privatizing the work will replace the Corporation’s staff with contractors who will be responsible for the entire range of maintenance inside the parks.

Former mayor M. Subramanian said that privatizing park maintenance works would result in commercialization of the park area. “This will once again lead to hoardings and banners promoting the contractors for commercial purposes,” Subramanian said.

“It has been three years since the new government has taken over, but the Corporation still stagnates in the feasibility test level and is failing to materialize any new park project,” he added.