It was supposed to be Chennai’s Times Square. When planners proposed a pedestrian plaza along Pondy Bazaar in T Nagar, they envisioned a peoplefirst corridor through the city’s most busiest shopping district. The concept took years: designed in 2013, trial runs in 2016, and a grand inauguration by former chief minister Edappadi K Palaniswami on Nov 13, 2019. On that evening, with fairy lights across trees and music filling the street, it felt like a different city.Built under the Centre’s Smart City Mission at ₹39.86 crore — with an additional ₹19.11 crore spent on redesigning 23 streets — the nearly 1km stretch from Thanikachalam Road Signal to Pondy Bazaar Police Station was fitted with seating areas, landscaped green zones, play equipment, and smart poles with surveillance cameras.
Batteryoperated shuttle carts ferried elderly shoppers for free; cycle-sharing stands enabled last-mile connectivity; police personnel patrolled on segways.Nearly seven years have passed. The city and its administrators spent this time dismantling what they builtShopkeepers pushed display stands onto the elevated platform, and vendors staked out corners, together eating up half the plaza. The result is no mere inconvenience. “I fractured my ankle here last week,” said R Narasimhan, 59. “I was trying to dodge someone demanding money, walking between encroachments, when a two-wheeler tried to pass. I tripped and fell,” he said, pointing to the white cast on his right leg.Each element of his account points to a distinct hazard that defines daily life on the plaza. Transgender persons, children, and some adults seek alms from pedestrians, cornering them at narrow points where there is little room to manoeuvre. The platform itself is uneven in stretches — people risk tripping while navigating encroachments on either side.Threading through all this are twowheelers, treating the footpath as a convenient bypass for the gridlock on the road. Among them are police — the force once tasked with patrolling the plaza, now among its most visible violators.The road has fared no better. “The plaza came with a simple idea — give pedestrians a proper walkway and discipline traffic on the one-way road. It should have worked. Instead, it is chaos from morning to night,” said Savitha Menon, a teacher.
“Vehicles are parked on both sides — not just at the kerb. We miss the bus sometimes as even the stops are blocked by parked vehicles,” she said, her seven-year-old daughter struggling beside her with a heavy backpack.The smart poles — fitted with cameras and emergency features meant to give pedestrians, especially women, a sense of security — are now effectively inaccessible. Encroachers have settled around their bases. Whether the cameras are functioning or if anyone is watching is anyone’s guess. “No one uses it anyway. If I move my shop from here, I will end up blocking the road,” said a fruit vendor.The public bicycles — part of a citywide cycle-sharing scheme that promised a cleaner commute — have quietly disappeared from T Nagar, as they have from much of Chennai. The children’s play equipment that once made the space feel like a civic square — the monkey bars, the see-saws — are gone, broken, or absorbed into the surrounding clutter. The batteryoperated shuttle carts that ferried elderly shoppers free of charge have vanished without a trace. The benches where the weary could rest have gone too.The pedestrian plaza still exists, technically. The platform is there. The smart poles stand. But the city it was designed for — orderly, safe, walkable — lives only in the proposal documents, somewhere in a govt archive. For the people who come here every day, a ₹40-crore dream of a free-to-use public plaza seems to have been flushed down the toilet.
