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Remembering TNA
I had the pleasure of meeting late Dr. T.N. Anantha­krishnan in 1977 when he came to Port Blair on tour as Director of the Zoological Survey of India. We accompanied him to Wandoor and took him in a boat to make collections of the fauna of the coral reefs in shallow waters. His knowledge on the various groups of marine animals of Krusadai Island in the Gulf of Mannar was very good.
Next day he gave a lecture in the Government Arts College, Port Blair, on Thrips, a group of insects which are pests on rice. He got the Rafi Ahmed Kidwai Prize for his work on Thrips.
After 28 years in 2005, when I received a Scroll of Honour from the Government of India, Ministry of Environment and Forests, Zoological Survey of India, Marine Biological Station, Chennai, he remembered me and congratulated me!

Dr. D.B. James,
ph.d; f.m.b.a.
37, Sadasiva Metha Street
Metha Nagar,
Madras 600 029.

Pedestrian safety
Keep to the left is the rule for all road-users.
The Municipal Corporation and Government are taking road safety measures providing railings at traffic junctions, improving pavements, increasing police traffic control measures, etc. Yet accidents take place. Why? One important reason is that pedestrians keeping to the left cannot see vehicles coming from behind till the vehicles overtake them.
A pedestrian seeing a pot hole or a bump on the road or a child going astray has to move a couple of feet to the right; consequently any vehicle coming from behind has to suddenly swerve further to the right to avoid hitting the pedestrian. If, unfortunately, he is unable to manage this, he is liable to hit the pedestrian.
Also, roads being congested, a vehicle driver who has to overtake a pedestrian quite often finds a speeding vehicle coming from the opposite direction and he too is in danger of being hit. This sort of a situation is a common occurrence and responsible for many accidents.
Is there a solution? Why not have the pedestrian keep to the right of the road, while vehicles continue to keep to the left? Then the pedestrian can see vehicles coming in front and can avoid them and the vehicle driver also can see well in time the pedestrian attempting to avoid pot holes, etc. Both will thus have a fair chance of avoiding an accident.
This logical assessment can make a lot of difference and reduce accidents.
The salutary universal rule for road-users to be adopted henceforth should be ‘Vehicles Left, Pedestrians Right’.

P. Sabanayagam
14 Bishop Gardens,
Chennai 600 028

Condescending
‘Street Life’ by Frances W. (MM, September 16th) is boring, full of cliched remarks about dirt in our streets, does not contain even a single original or interesting thought, and is irritatingly condescending and patronising. The only reassuring feature is what is said at the top – that it is an ‘occasional’ column. I can only hope that the occasions will be few and far between.

G. Ram Mohan
Akshaya,
1, Sriramnagar South Street,
Alwarpet,
Chennai 600 018

Damage by tanneries
I refer to the article of ‘The Leather King’ (MM, September 16th, 2015).
Nagappa Chettiar might have contributed considerably to the development of the leather industry, but, the industry, through its tanneries, and the raw materials produced, continues to be a great threat to the ecology, farm lands and health of people in all the tannery belts and surrounding areas.
The Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore, through its branch department at Vellore in Vellore District, in its report dated March 6, 1992, stated that due to the effect of tannery effluents in Vellore District alone, more than 35,000 to 40,000 hectares of fertile agricultural were either totally or partially damaged and became unproductive and the people including the workers in tanneries were all suffering from skin and respiratory diseases.
Renowned agricultural scientist Dr. M.S. Swaminathan has stated that “we must find methods of preventing damage to agricultural lands from ­tannery effluents.”

P.S. Subrahmanian
Honorary Secretary, Vellore Citizens’ Welfare Forum
subrah.vellore@gmail.com

Has the Cooum been irreparably damaged?

Fascinating news items waxing on the cultural and historical connections of the river Cooum appeared in various media during Madras Week. Reading these items, I remembered the fascinating volume Nadandaai Vazhi Kaveri by Chitti Sundarrajan. Unfortunately I did not see any news item referring to the science of the Cooum. Or, did I miss one? Nevertheless, I offer here some details on the science of the Cooum supplementing with relevant bibliography (so that people interested can pursue them).
No issue of the famous Madras Journal of Literature & Science published from Madras in the 19th Century talks of the Cooum in any significant manner; neither do the journals published elsewhere, either in Calcutta or in London. Obviously all was well with the Cooum and probably the people of the then Madras never felt compelled to study this system professionally.
The earliest formal reference to a detailed scientific description of the ‘geography’ of Madras city and the Cooum appears in M.A. Thirunaranan’s paper titled ‘The site and situation of Madras’ published in the Madras Tercentenary Volume. Thirunaranan (who was the Registrar of the University of Madras in the 1970s) has alluded to the science of this river in this paper. The most informative section is the Appendix. Thirunaranan indicates that decrease in water flow (as in the 1930s) is due to deposition of silt in the lagoon area. He offers a fascinating explanation at this point, which I reproduce here:
“There was also a decrease in the volume of water flowing into the lagoon, when the Palar shifted its course from the Cooum channel to its present more southerly course, less than a thousand years ago.”
In a footnote, he further explains that the shifting of the course of Palar affecting Cooum has been previously discussed in a paper (by himself?) titled ‘The Rivers of the Palar basin’, published in the Journal of Madras Geographical Association [JMGA], Volume 13.
As a companion volume to the Madras Tercentenary Volume, C. Srinivasachari’s History of the City of Madras appeared in 1939. He refers to the Cooum several times in this volume.
After these landmark works, nothing significant progressed in the science of Cooum until the 1960s, by when irreparable damage has been done by us — the residents of Madras — to this water system. From being a river, live and dynamic with immense and intense biological activity during the times of Pachaiappa Mudaliar, we successfully killed it by transforming it into a canal, by dumping garbage and other non-biodegradable materials into this. Elangovan and Dharmendirakumar (environmental chemists from Madras) in their paper published in the Journal of Chemistry (2013) say: “The Cooum river is 80 per cent more polluted than the treated sewage.” The remark is not only disappointing, but also distressing.
In the last few years, people not only from Madras and Tamil Nadu, but also from other parts of the world (e.g., Martin Bunch of Canada) have been studying the decaying Cooum offering various insights into the complexity of the issue.
An assay of the water quality of the Cooum reported by Abraham Samuel in 2012 (Journal of Environment & Earth Science, 2) describes the Cooum water unfit (even) for irrigation because of high acidity, low dissolved oxygen, and high levels of dissolved solids. In fact, Samuel found that some of the Cooum water samples included populations of Escherichia coli and various species of Staphylococcus, Streptococcus, and Bacillus, harmful to humans if ingested by error. Samuel concludes that the water quality of the Cooum before entering Madras is at an acceptable level, but due to anthropogenic activities and discharges of industrial wastes and sewage into the river in the city, its water quality is at its worst and is unfit for domestic use as well as agriculture.
Whereas it is pleasant to live in the colourful tapestry of the arts of and around the Cooum, we need to grapple seriously with the science of the Cooum. It is supposed to be a river, which has been systematically damaged by us especially from the mid-decades of the 20th Century.
A river is a critical asset to a town (and a city). Such natural endowments are keys to preserving the health of the town (and city). Greed and lack of sensible management of the Cooum have resulted in an awkward situation for us at present. In brief, the Cooum is no more a ‘river’. It is changed into a ‘canal’ (an euphemistic term for a sewer) with no aerobic life in it. It supports anaerobic organisms, such as sulphur bacteria, generating abundant hydrogen sulphide. Remember the embarrassing and intolerable stench at the Chintadripet-Egmore junction, because of the coir retting activity? Contamination by human agencies has been the primary reason in damaging this natural gift to Madras residents. From the looks of things – at least to me – the Cooum is irreparably damaged.
Are there any alternatives to utilise the space of the Cooum more meaningfully?

– Dr. A. Raman
ARaman@csu.edu.au

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