City development plan soon

Chennai: The Chennai city corporation will soon come out with a City Development Plan (CDP), covering all parts of its 426-sq km area. Inaugurating a session of the 63rd National Town and Country Planners’ Congress in the city on Saturday, Chennai city corporation commissioner Vikram Kapur said that six years ago, the Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA) released its second master plan for the city.

“We (corporation) have an outdated city development plan. Considerable work has taken place based on it and we draw inspiration from the Chennai master plan, but it did not have intense stakeholder consultation as we will now with the new plan.” Pointing out that CDP would make Chennai the most liveable city in the country, Mr Kapur said that the city corporation would need '26,000 crore for a 10-year period for capital assets.

“The corporation’s area has extended from 174 sq.km to 426 sq.km. In the past two years we have been spending more money to put in infrastructure in the newly added areas. Cities, like London, raise money for infrastructure through bonds,” he said.

Listing out the major projects that the corporation had implemented as part of its non-motorised transport (NMT) policy, the Commissioner said that the local body had redesigned footpaths in several places and would soon come up with cycle tracks. “We have to increase the share of public transport from the present 30 per cent to 70 per cent,” he said. Mr Kapur also said that the city corporation, as part of the Chennai data portal project, had mapped areas where water-logging occurred to clear the stagnation immediately.