ShareThisLike a man/woman waiting under the moonlight for his/her lover many of us have been waiting for the TNEB team to turn up and start moving the utilities to the designated Utility Strip. (Most of the time we have been waiting under the hot sun is a different story). Finally the EB team arrived.
As you would expect from all such projects on Indian streets there has to be some comedy. To give you the context -
LB footpath will have concrete driveways and ramps in many locations – establishments where vehicles will enter, end of footpaths, etc. In few critical areas EB boxes as in the way and the contractor can’t do his job. There are many chickens and eggs in such projects, and most of the time, the chickens are missing. So you wait for them to arrive and lay the eggs. But when the chicken arrives the eggs are missing and the chickens end up waiting for the egg to arrive. This would be funny if it weren’t frustrating, even for the Corporation officials.
Same applies for the people who are supposed to move and upgrade the traffic lights, remove a dead tree that was right in the middle of the famous traffic island of ours. There are also the private property owners who are supposed to do their part and end up delaying.
Anyway, the EB men arrived on Saturday last. The comedy was that they arrive and start shifting the box to the wrong location. I was in a meeting in another part of town. Our site engineer calls and says, “Saaar! they are putting it in the wrong place”.
Like the lover I mentioned above, we were both excited and irritated, with the news. Excited because finally the EB team had arrived. But turned up only tell you that he/she is now in love with someone else.
After some back and forth, and quick thinking on the part of our site engineer Mr Veeraraghavan, (who has been appointed by the SSPDL and CREDAI, as part of their contribution to the project, both organisations are members of Chennai City Connect), the effort was saved. Luckily and otherwise, EB guys started moving the easiest and the least significant. Luckily, we got the opportunity to explain to them the locations of other boxes in that stretch. Unfortunately, moving the urgent ones will take few more days.
FYI. Corporation team has to write to TNEB requesting the move of the boxes. In this case Corporation is paying TNEB to cost of moving. As you can imagine, lots of public policy/urban street management improvements to be made here. That is, in many other cities of the world, Corporation owns the street. No utility can be placed without its permission and approval of the locations, etc. In Chennai though some some this exists, there is some confusion. From what I know, Corporation in its drive to improve pedestrian facilities in Chennai is paying TNEB the cost of moving these boxes. It is all tax payer money anyway, I guess. As far as people can walk on proper footpaths who cares…. at least for time being.
One more piece of comedy. To our surprise and a bit of shock (no pun intended) the two sides of the LB Road, east and west, are the responsibility of two different offices of TNEB. East side EB man was joking that he is from the “Sodukadu” (cemetery in Besant Nagar). West side comes under Indira Nagar team. This shouldn’t have come as a surprise to us since we found out during the tendering of the LB project, the two sides come under two different Wards. Hence two different tenders and two different contractors. Can the Gods of Footpaths play any crueler pranks on us?
But now there is huge momentum. Prepare to walk on a decent piece of LB footpath soon.
Finally, I must say this. Funny and tedious all this may sound, I must say that every official, no matter what his/her title, have been extremely courteous and supportive of the project. This shouldn’t be a surprise yet it is. Each of these officials are in fire fighting mode. They put in very long hours, have to manage the almost impossible, yet they never lose their cool. Even under all this pressure and delays, many a times from our end, they are decent.We have changed designs slightly every time we realised that ground reality is different from what we thought, or when we realised that there was a better way to solve the problem, etc. Basically we the ivory tower intellectuals and designers pondering, standing in the middle of the project, 
, they have been patient. Neat guys!
As I have always maintained, it is not the staff, it is the system, stupid! (My apologies …. after Bill Clinton’s team came up with the “It’s the economy, stupid” there has been various versions of it. This is mine).
