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| Greams Road Thideer Nagar Today |
As a recent transplant to Chennai, my curiosity has been aroused every time I passed this road sign 👆tucked into a little corner of Greams Road. Greams Road is a long road that begins at the intersection of Anderson bridge and College Road and ends at Anna Salai. A quarter of the road runs parellel to the Cooum River but a wall of blue screens completely block the view of the river from the road. For the rest, small businesses, eateries and banks dot both sides of the road. It even has an art gallery. (A google query “Greams Road Chennai” will bring up several videos of Greams Road at various points in time.)
Now coming to Thideer Nagar. Thideer means sudden and nagar means a town or a neighborhood or a human settlement. In the present day Greams Road Thideer Nagar one doesn’t see any sign of human settlement. Google search revealed that Chennai has a number of such thideer nagars—they are unplanned settlements formed when migrants from outside come into the city and settle on the banks of Cooum and Adyar rivers and other waterways. These are shanty towns consisting of several hundred families. Men and women worked locally and children went to neighborhood schools. Because Thideer Nagars are illegal settlements, they could be razed and families evicted without due process. That was the fate that fell upon Greams Road Thideer Nagar. Between 2015-2018, despite stiff resistance, all the families were evicted and resettled in a different location by the Greater Chennai Corporation as part of Cooum river restoration project. A number of thideer nagars by the Cooum river have suffered a similar fate.
Eight years later, what remains of the old Thideer Nagar is a cluster of cars parked where there used to be auto mechanic shops. Based on newspaper reports, it seems that the municipal corporation has not been able to evict them because they had proper patta to their property. So, even if humans have been disappeared, Thideer Nagar still lives.
As for Cooum river restoration, that project supposedly started sixty years ago. The river is still as dead as it had always been. Even the dead would not want to be dead there.
