Until a year ago, this green space drew people — especially its banyan tree; providing enough shade, it was just right to laze under.
Now, this space, found behind the Sri Ananda Vinayakar temple at Madhya Kailash junction, draws curious looks. For, it seems to be in a midway house between a park and a dumping ground. It retains much of its greenery, but the green space is marred by an assortment of discarded materials.
Interestingly, the discarded materials seem to have once belonged to the traffic police and Greater Chennai Corporation.
A huge traffic post, uprooted by cyclone Vardah, is still lying here unattended. The traffic police seem to have dumped portable barricades. Recently, broken sculptures of a traffic island were left on the pavement outside the open space.
Of course, taking the cue, the public have also dumped items that are past their sell-by date.
This space, which is located opposite the Madhya Kailash bus stop on Rajiv Gandhi Salai, spreads over over two grounds and comes under the maintenance of the State Highways department and the Tamil Nadu Road Development Company (TNRDC). When cyclone Vardah whistled through the city, the banyan tree at this green space took a bad hit and since then, it has been shedding its branches, one after the other.
The messy look that this has imparted to the space encourages various entities to leave damaged objects there. The grass requires trimming. In some place, it has turned brown. Heaps of dry twigs and a chaos of fallen tree branches wait for months to be cleared.
After The Hindu Downtown brought the condition of the once-beautiful green space to the notice of the TNRDC, it was cleared of litter. The place however needs a facelift.
“Two traffic booths lying unused on the pavement leading to the temple has led to the further deterioration of this space. People urinate and devotees coming to the temple have been complaining of the stink,” says Murthy, a temple priest. This green space is among the early spaces that TNRDC focused on as part of its beautification drive. A sculpture in black of Ainthinai still stands tall as a tribute to the women of Tamil Nadu.
In October 2015, students from the School of Architecture and Planning, Anna University, spruced up the place as part of a design competition. The unused concrete blocks on the vacant plot were painted in blue and yellow and turned into seats. Paper tubes used for rolling flexi banners were decorated to give the park a pathway and tyres were hung on the tree as a swing. They even named the place ‘People’s Tree Park’. Now, very little remains of it. According to a TNRDC official, they have been requesting the police to help remove mendicants who litter the place. A personnel from the Kotturpuram police station agreed to ensure their belongings were removed from the park.
