Madhumitha Viswanath By Express News Service CHENNAI: The construction debris from the Chennai Metro Rail’s sites where work is going on is collected and dumped illegally on the waterbed in a quarry at Thiruneermalai along the Chennai Bypass Road. When Express visited the spot, locals and residents said that this activity had been happening since construction of Phase-I stretch that started in 2011. The Thiruneermalai quarry is one of the few structures in the city that still holds a good amount of water. As a handful of lorries have been depositing debris into the quarry’s waterbed on a daily basis for the past eight years, the accumulated debris resembles a small mountain now. Sources privy to the issue said that concrete waste was collected from Metro stations where construction is underway and from Wimco Nagar where Phase-I extension is in progress. Residents recalled that before this menace started, they used to drink stagnant rainwater from the quarry which had no traces of pollution then. Once construction waste and sewage from nearby housing complexes started finding their way into the quarry, residents only wash their clothes and have a bath in this water. “Lorries are hired from our locality by Metro Rail and are used to ferry leftover bricks and sand from many places in the city. We have also been repeatedly complaining about it. But authorities also have a part in this,” said Vinod, a lorry driver and resident, who lives next to the quarry. As there is no other space inside city limits to get rid of the waste, a secluded place such as Thiruneermalai was chosen, said the source. “Moreover, good quality sand that is got from tunnelling is sold illegally over the market prices to dealers. Metro Rail doesn’t show this profit as a part of their income in any records. Tonnes of the sand are dumped in front of the employee’s quarters in Koyambedu,” said an employee on condition of anonymity. Pughal V, a local activist, intercepted one such lorry which was dumping waste into the quarry a month ago. On enquiring with the driver, he came to know the source of the waste. “The driver told me that the debris was not from any private building’s construction site, but from Metro Rail’s work site. These trucks stop along the service road of Chennai Bypass and quickly dump the waste. All residents I spoke to said the same as well,” he said. When Express contacted the Metro Rail management, they said that there was no water when they started discarding sand into the quarry and denied all claims pertaining to illegal sale of sand. “We wanted to level the base of the quarry which was dry then. We are not aware that this is affecting the localities living there. We will look into the issue and try to shift the place,” said a senior official. ‘Waste from Metro’ Pughal V, a local activist, intercepted one such lorry which was dumping waste into the quarry a month ago. On enquiring with the driver, he came to know the source of the waste. “The driver told me that the debris was not from any private building’s construction site, but from Metro Rail’s work site,” he said

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