The city of Chennai has an estimated 4.5 percent of its area under green cover. The share of Chennai's greenspace is dominated by the Guindy National Park, with an area of 2.71 sq km, which covers a vast area south of the Adyar River.
As of December 2014, the city has about 396 parks. Until 2011, the seven zones of the old corporation limits had about 260 public parks, 154 traffic islands and 103 centre median parks, maintained by the parks department of the Corporation of Chennai, many of which suffer poor maintenance. Public parks include 88 notified parks, 73 park sites in extended areas, and more than 100 open spaces that have been earmarked for recreation purposes. The eight zones in the newly added areas of the city have about 265 locations that have been identified for development of new parks. The largest among the parks in the city is the 358-acre Tholkappia Poonga, developed to restore the fragile ecosystem of the Adyar estuary.
Chennai's greenspace is further augmented by a network of open spaces containing forests, prairies, wetlands, canals, streams, and lakes that are set aside as natural areas along the city's periphery.
In pre-Independence days, the ceiling on the number of permanent workers for maintenance of city parks was fixed at 350. This has not been revised till date.
Increase in numbers
Until 2011, there had been 260 parks in the city. In the following year, 200 new parks were proposed. Eighty-seven of these were opened in January 2014 and the rest are nearing completion as of July 2014. By December 2014, there were about 396 parks in the city.
In July 2014, the Chennai Corporation identified more than 440 open space reserves (OSR) to create 100 new parks in the city. The Corporation hopes to have at least 560 parks in the city by March 2015. However, this number would still remain way lower than that of Delhi (1,500), Mumbai (1,300), Bangalore (721) and Hyderabad, India (709).