Auroville's Pitchandikulam Forest Consultants, a commercial unit
of the Auroville Foundation, has been awarded the contract to
make a Master Plan and to execute the work for the ecological
restoration of the Adyar Creek in Chennai. The Adyar Poonga
Master Plan. Click 0n image to enlarge. Chennai, the coastal
metropolis of South India , has a network of six main waterways
crossing the city. Two of them, the Adyar and the Cooum, are
natural rivers flowing eastward and draining into the Bay of
Bengal . The other waterways are man-made. One of them is the
Buckingham Canal , which runs from Andhra Pradesh to Marakannam,
and cuts through Chennai from north to south, intersecting both
rivers. Once upon a time the Adyar and the Cooum were in
pristine condition with balanced eco-systems and beautiful
environments. A mural at the Adyar Poonga exhibition centre
shows the wealth of fauna of the original Adyar estuary As late
as the 1960s people fished and bathed in the rivers. Today these
waterways are heavily polluted b