Facelift for Corporation parks soon

The city’s walkers may soon have a lovely road ahead.

The Chennai Corporation is planning to begin work on improving infrastructure for walkers in all 260 existing parks in the city.

Minister for municipal administration and rural development K.P. Munusamy, at a review meeting on Thursday, directed senior Corporation officials to study the deficiencies in civic amenities in all 15 zones of the city and rectify them.

The civic body has already finalised tenders for the development of 63 of the 100 parks proposed to be developed at an estimated cost of Rs. 22.26 crore in the city’s eight newly-added zones.

These eight have 265 pieces of land that are suitable for the development of parks. Many of the parks are being developed on OSR (open space reserve) land.

The Corporation will finalise tenders for the remaining 37 parks by this month. Work on all the parks will commence in December, Mr. Munusamy said.

Parks with aesthetic landscape features and herbal gardens will come up on pieces of land, some of which are as big as 96 grounds in some areas.

Mr. Munusamy stressed the need for better facilities for morning walkers in all the parks in the seven zones under the old city limits too.

Mr. Munusamy also asked the civic body to hasten work on the first and second phase of the development of the grid system of roads in the city. Many of the road grids in the city are being delayed because of road cuts by service agencies.

The Corporation will also install additional street lights in added areas. Of the proposed work on 2,548 additional streetlights, 960 have been completed so far.

The city has 2.2 lakh streetlights. There is a need to create at least one lakh more streetlights for the expanded city limits.

According to the Corporation norms, a streetlight has to be installed every 25 metres on a road.

At least 50 per cent of the new streetlights are likely to be LED and solar fittings.