Four ponds coming up inside recovered race club premises

Chennai: Two weeks after a National Green Tribunal (NGT) directive, the Greater Chennai Corporatoin (GCC) started works to create four waterbodies inside the 160-acre land parcel recovered from Madras Race Club (MRC) in Guindy.Digging work for the first waterbody began on Monday and three more waterbodies are in the pipeline, said officials. Each of these ponds will be 3,000 square metres in size, totalling 12,000 square metres with a depth of 10 feet. "It will cumulatively have a water holding capacity of 1.5 lakh cubic metres," said regional deputy commissioner (south) M P Amith.The ponds will help in better flood management for the Guindy, Velachery, and Adyar areas, as drains heading to the Raj Bhavan Canal can be redirected to these ponds and diverted to the Adyar River in the future. The Raj Bhavan canal is also too narrow in size to carry floodwaters."The first pond will be ready soon, and the remaining ones with SWD will be taken up in the future," Amith said.The Madras Race Club already has three ponds, but they were not desilted. Officials said the race club had been letting excess water into GCC's stormwater drains on Five Furlong Road, resulting in inundation of several neighbourhoods."They had built a drain to take off surplus water and connected it to our drains on Five Furlong Road. This led to a major overflow of drains last year, leading to flooding of the road. There was a sluice gate too, but it still did not stop the flooding last year. We had fined them for connecting their drains to ours," said Amith.While the current ponds will help in water storage, in the future, the corporation plans to build a drain via the Interior Race Course Road, Velachery Main Road, and Chellammal College to the Adyar River.The corporation will also be desilting the existing ponds in MRC for the upcoming monsoon. Last year, the ponds were filled with vegetation and silt, so their depth was barely a few feet. The existing ponds are cumulatively only 5,000 square metres in size with a lesser water holding capacity.
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