When foreign tourists google Chennai, they find loads of information about how the city has a wonderful culture, mouth-watering local food and a beautiful beach, and they immediately make plans to travel to Chennai. But when they arrive here, they get a rude shock.
Chennai sure has mouth-watering local cuisine and a wonderful culture but along with that, it also has filthy roads with overflowing garbage strewn on the streets, and an odour of rotting food. Some roads don't have traffic signals that work and it's a life or death situation to cross main roads because of the mad traffic.
The Corporation does a wonderful job of repairing sewage pipes and cables underground but if they dig up the road to do the job they seem to forget to place protective barriers so that people don't fall into the holes and also seem to forget to re-tar the roads. This makes walking on a Chennai road almost feel like trekking on Mount Everest!
Let's take a trip to the market place. The roads or rather a muddy slush during the monsoon leads to a mad rush of sweaty people that it almost feels like half of Chennai's population is here to delay your shopping for groceries. Finally if you manage to navigate your way to the seller who is sitting on top of a plastic sheet on the ground, you are greeted with the vegetables swarming with flies on top of the sheet and a cowslip right next to the vegetables outside the sheet where hundreds have trodden on. Well, my family works for 10 hours a day and a portion of this hard earned money goes to you. So you better do a good job and make tourists want to visit Chennai for its cleanliness!
- A humble school student
V. VAISHNAVI, Sri Sankara Senior Secondary School
