By Gopal Ethiraj, Chennai
CHENNAI, 11 July (asiantribune.com): Cleaning Cooum river, one of the two rivers running through the Chennai city, will again kick start soon. The Buckingham canal running through the city is also being desilted and cleaned. PWD Minister Durai Murugan told the State Assembly on Thursday the project report is getting ready to clean the stinking Cooum river.
He was replying to a query by AIADMK member R Sekar Babu. The Minister said the Central government had approved a mega plan for cleaning up Buckingham canal at a cost of Rs.1,447 crore. Rs.633 crore had been sanctioned for the first phase and the work on desilting the canals in North Chennai areas was already underway. Precautionary measures to prevent flooding during rainy seasons were also being taken, he said.

The Buckingham Canal is a 420 km long salt water navigation canal, running parallel to the Coromandel Coast of South India from the Vijayawada in Andhra Pradesh to Villupuram District in Tamil Nadu. The canal connects most of the natural backwaters along the coast to the port of Chennai (Madras). It was constructed by the British Raj, and was an important waterway during the late nineteenth and the twentieth century.

Apart from this, a plan for repairing waterways in the city had been submitted to the World Bank and the bank had advised the State government to take up the cleaning of Cooum river as a separate project, he said. Following this, a Special Officer has been appointed for preparing the plan for cleaning Cooum.

A river akin to Cooum was cleaned up in America, Durai Murugan said, and a team of experts would visit the place to know how the project was achieved there. The State government was paying special attention for cleaning Cooum.

Cooum River is one of the two rivers of Chennai, the other being the Adyar River. It originates from a place called Koovam in Tiruvalluvar district. It is one of the shortest rivers draining into the Bay of Bengal. This once fishing river and boat racing ground has borne the brunt of the city's unplanned explosion.

Several attempts have been made over forty years to clean up the river, once a fresh water source. But more stinking and a big eye and nose sore it is. It looks like just another big sewerage, collecting surpluses of 75 small tanks in its course. The length of the river is about 65 km, of which 18 km, fall within the Chennai city limits. By different names projects were launched but to no avail.

In 1967, it was the then Chief Minister C N Annadurai who first launched a clean Cooum project at a cost of Rs 118 lakh. In 1973 Chief Minister M Karunanidhi wanted pleasure boat services on the Coovum river and made some effort to improve, but it could not be maintained.

In 1976, P Sivalingam Committee recommended projects worth Rs 22 crore to improve the waterways of Chennai and in 1991 a consultancy firm was commissioned to look at ways to improve the water courses in the city. A study by Mott MacDonald proposed projects worth Rs 34.8 crore for improving the Cooum in 1994.

Finally the River improvement project was launched in 1998; Rs 19 crore was earmarked for improving the quality of Cooum water. In 2004 Chennai City River Conservation Project was launched with an outlay of Rs 720 crore. In 2008, the state government sought World Bank aid to clean the river. And the project was to commence in March 2009 and finish in 2010.