Wilbur Smith Associates, a South Carolina-based transportation consultant, recommended a solution to the city’s jammed roads: a 6-mile-long elevated expressway running through Chennai’s four beaches and 14 fishing villages. According to its Web site, Wilbur Smith “has more than 1,000 associates in 56 offices in 8 countries. Since its founding in 1952, the firm has completed projects in all 50 U.S. states and 117 countries on six continents.”
Environmental damage is not the only grounds for challenging Wilbur Smith’s Chennai project. Virtually all key aspects of the three projects – environmental, social, and legal — are under fire. Company studies, not just in Chennai, but across the country are also drawing criticism for conflicts of interest. Citizen groups allege that the company cooked feasibility studies, circumvented due process, committed data fraud, and made false claims regarding community consultation.
The Beach Expressway is only one of three major elevated freeways Wilbur Smith has proposed in Chennai. If the company’s plans materialize, the Adyar River Expressway, officially known as the High Speed Circular Transport Corridor; the Cooum River Expressway, aka Port-Maduravoyal Expressway; and the Beach Expressway will create more than 60 miles of expressways that will crisscross the coastal city and dismember Chennai’s famed beaches and river fronts. In addition to interfering with the nesting turtles and hatchlings, the roads will transform the banks and the beds of the city’s two rivers, the Adyar and the Cooum, aggravating the floods that ravage the city during the annual monsoons. Together, the projects will render homeless more than 100,000 people – the equivalent of Berkeley California’s population, according to compiled data from various sources including a report in the reputed journal Economic and Political Weekly.
In a modern re-enactment of caste oppression, most of the evicted will be from communities that occupy the lowest rungs of India’s still prevalent caste system. The government will provide a lucky few with alternate housing, but very far from the city where their jobs are. Others will be left to fend for themselves.
When the State Highways Department awarded Wilbur Smith $55,300 for a feasibility study, it required the company, as a “primary task,” to include: “Stakeholder consultation, with communities located along the road, NGOs working in the area, other stake-holders.”
Wilbur Smith reports that it held consultations, including meetings in five fishing villages in the presence the five respective leaders. It concluded that the project was feasible since fisherfolk agreed “to move from the coast if there is any unavoidable requirement.”
But in June 2010, all five fishing leaders named in the report wrote to the Tamil Nadu chief minister denying that Wilbur Smith had held any consultations in their villages. The Highways Department revealed that neither the department nor Wilbur Smith could document that consultations had taken place. Other stakeholders including beach users, NGOs, and the Theosophical Society — which occupies a densely wooded campus in the affected area — also say that Wilbur Smith failed to consult them.
Wilbur Smith’s failure to consult is not restricted to the Beach Expressway. The $440 million Cooum River Expressway also cites nonexistent consultations with locals, its critics charge. Adding further weight to their argument is their allegation that geotechnical data about the contour along the alignment was cooked up by the consultant.
Don’t break the law, change it
Even setting aside allegations of fraud and manufactured consultations, activists argue that all three of Wilbur Smith’s projects in Chennai violate the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) Notification, 1991. The law, which regulates development within 500 meters of the sea, was designed to protect the coastal environment. It prohibits many construction activities including road building in the sensitive intertidal zones which form part of all three projects. The Union Ministry of Environment and Forests has twice used this criteria to reject the Cooum Expressway.
Nonetheless, the reports for all three projects – the Cooum River, the Beach and the Adyar River expressways – conclude that the expressways are feasible, without mentioning that the CRZ rules prohibit them. Responding to a query by the Highways Department on the implications of the CRZ rules on the Beach Expressway project, the company pointed to a Government of India proposal to amend the original rules so that, “construction of roads on stilts [flyways] is a permissible activity.”
This is not the only instance where Wilbur Smith has been accused of inappropriate influence. In the lead-up to the 2010 South Carolina gubernatorial election, Indian-American candidate and now governor Nikki Haley was hauled up by opponents for failing to disclose a $42,500 payment from Wilbur Smith, allegedly for lobbying. Both the consultant and Haley denied the charge of lobbying, and described her role merely as intelligence gathering.
Haley is not the only Indian-American connection with Wilbur Smith. The consultant has proposed numerous expressways, most of them controversial, in North America. Both in America, and in India, the popular verdict seems to be that the road to hell can be a freeway.
– from alternet.org