Centre`s nod for Chennai metro project soon

Chennai: The Centre will soon give its nod for the Chennai metro rail project and help the Tamil Nadu government introduce a bus rapid transport system in Chennai and tier II cities like Coimbatore, Tiruchi and Madurai, according to S Jaipal Reddy, Minister for Urban Development.

Addressing a CII conference on Infra 2007- MAP Tomorrow’s Chennai, Reddy said the Delhi metro has been very successful and helped reduce pollution in the national capital.

The Centre is in touch with the Tamil Nadu government and the Rs 10,000-crore metro project for Chennai will be sanctioned soon, he added.

Reddy said the development of towns and cities around Chennai and CII's proposal to promote Marakkanam, Arakkonam and Pulicat (MAP) Chennai Region, would help absorb the shock of large-scale migration of people to Chennai from other parts of the country.

The MAP Chennai region will act as a counter-magnet to the wave of migration to the metropolitan area, in the same way the National Capital Region comprising cities such as Gurgaon and Noida has reduced the net migration rate to Delhi, he added.

'Urbanisation, which is the single largest contributor to tremendous employment, will continue to happen rapidly but the question is whether we have the will and vision to provide proper direction to it,' he said.

He said that India can draw inspiration from the ‘miraculous’ success of planned urbanisation in South Korea, which achieved economic progress only in the last 35 years, unlike countries like Japan and Germany that have a long history of industrialisation and modernisation.

'If urban infrastructure can happen seamlessly in South Korea, there is no reason why it cannot happen in India,' he remarked.

The Centre is asking state governments to scrap the Urban Land Ceiling Act, bring down stamp duty rates and reform urban local bodies, especially urging them to adopt double-entry accounting systems – measures that are expected to fillip infrastructure development, he said.

R Sellamuthu, secretary, housing and urban development, Tamil Nadu government, said the state government is taking measures for orderly and planned development of cities.

It will target to make Chennai free of slums by 2030. The government is planning to build around 50,000 tenements within a 15-km range of Chennai.

GRK Reddy, chairman, Infra 2007, said that the population of Chennai is expected to increase from 7 million to 10 million in the next ten years and the vehicle population will continue to increase by 10 per cent every year, as it has been in the past.

The main challenge lies in creating affordable housing, which is currently less when compared with the investment that has gone into creating commercial and industrial spaces.

There is also the need to upgrade the soft skills of people migrating to Chennai from tier II cities so that their employability in software and BPO firms can be enhanced, Reddy said.