Blame it on Climate Change
The crippling Chennai floods in December 2015 were blamed on climate change. it was, instead, the fault of short-sighted engineering interventions and land-use change, specifically the conversion of fragile wetlands into real estate, that had caused the floods.
Four years later, Chennai once again made headlines. This time, it had “run out of water.” Once again, international media looked for climate angles to frame this crisis.
While climate change is sure to play an increasingly significant role in worsening the problem in coming years, it has little to do with the city’s current predicament. Chennai’s vulnerability to both floods and droughts is historical folly rooted in destructive land-use changes and its drive to pave over its wetlands in the name of growth. Between 1980 and 2010, the built area of the city increased from 47 to 402 square kilometers, while wetlands decreased from 186 to 71 square kilometers.
In successive waves of urbanization and industrialization, wetlands, grazing commons, and even waterways were repurposed as residential layouts, industrial estates, and urban infrastructure.
Before the British East India Company set foot on this part of the coast, the region was a vast patchwork of agrarian settlements bound on the east by a long stretch of sandy beaches. The monotony of the beaches was broken by mangrove-studded estuaries formed by seasonal streams and rivers that drained these lands. The flat terrain was not amenable to retaining water except in the sprawling Pallikaranai marshlands in what is now the southern part of the city, and the much larger tidal wetlands of the Ennore-Pulicat region to the north. To make water stay and enable agriculture, medieval engineers carved out gravity fed irrigation tanks called eri, and drinking water bodies called ooranis and kulams. Settlements were built upgradient of the eris and agriculture and grazing grounds were located downgradient. Eris not only had their own catchments, they also received water through specially designed inlet canals from upstream tanks. They then discharged their surplus through canals that filled other eris downstream as they cascaded down to the rivers and the sea.
The urbanization that began with the arrival of the British in 1639 valued buildable land that could serve the purposes of colonial extraction and urban expansion over everything else. Water, the one element for which earlier agrarian cultures transformed the landscape, began to be viewed as a nuisance and a health hazard inside the city. This was used as a justification to pave them over and develop them as real estate. What the British colonial government began, the state-level administration in independent India continued with added vigor. The result is an urban sprawl that converts natural events like heavy rainfall and seasonal droughts into national disasters. This will only get worse with climate change. But what ails the city, and indeed the planet, is not merely excess carbon in the air, but what has been done to the land, particularly the commons, and the people dependent on it, in the name of development.
The Battle for the Poromboke
Poromboke is a Tamil revenue category of medieval agrarian origin that denotes lands set aside as commons for the shared use by communities. These lands posed a curious challenge to Britain’s obsession with turning land into property and roping them into the colonial project of yielding value to the economy back home. Poromboke commons were governed by two rules: they could not be purchased or sold as they were communally held, and they could not be built upon. These lands were untaxed and yielded no revenue to the crown.
From a capitalist perspective obsessed with private property and the act of building, digging and paving, the poromboke commons were worthless. It is no coincidence, then, that the entry of the British into Tamil Nadu signaled the erosion of the meaning of the word poromboke. In contemporary colloquial Tamil, the word has degraded in meaning to a pejorative, used to refer to worthless people or wastelands. The term wastelands, used in the Bloomberg article to describe the bustard’s habitat and the pastoralist’s grazing grounds, was and continues to be used as a weapon to devalorize the commons and dispossess its human and non-human users. The making of the city of Chennai, and its continued growth, is an ongoing history of such enclosures and erasures.
Chennai Floods and Poromboke Extracted from Peril of Climate Activism: https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/survivance/410014/the-perils-of-climate-activism/