speak Tamil. There is a community of French people and a number of French institutions, such as a French consulate, the French Institute of Pondicherry, and L'Alliance française. Civic administration The city of Puducherry comprises two municipalities, Puducherry and Uzhavarkarai. Both the municipalities and the commune panchayats in the Union Territory of Puducherry function under the administrative control of the local administration department. The Puducherry municipality, under the Puducherry district, comprises the former communes of Puducherry and Mudaliarpet, with its headquarters in Puducherry. It has a total of 42 wards spread over an area of . Wards 1–10 are north of the city; wards 11–19 are in Boulevard Town, and the remaining wards are southwest of the city centre. Urban agglomeration Data according to the 2011 census There are two proposals by the Puducherry government, firstly to merge Pondicherry and Oulgaret municipalities and upgrade the Pondicherry municipality into a '"municipal corporation", and secondly to upgrade Villianur and Ariyankuppam commune panchayats into municipalities, which would increase the Pondicherry region's urban area around of the total . Transport Road Pondicherry is connected to Chennai via the East Coast Road through Mahabalipuram. There are daily bus services from several main stops from Chennai. The Pondicherry Road Transport Corporation runs buses within the city and it runs Volvo buses to Chennai and to various places. The Tamil Nadu State Transport Corporation operates Volvo air-conditioned bus services from Chennai to Pondicherry. Rail PDY/Puducherry (Pondicherry) is connected by train to all the four major metro cities of Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata (Howrah), and Mumbai, as well as other important cities such as Kanyakumari, Hyderabad, Nagpur, Bhubaneswar, Bengaluru, Visakhapatnam and Mangalore. Moreover, VM/Villupuram Junction which is at a distance of around (both by rail & road) is connected to several other Indian Cities. Air Pondicherry Airport is located at Lawspet, an Assembly Constituency in the union territory of Pondicherry. It has direct flights to Hyderabad, Bengaluru operated by SpiceJet Airlines. Tourism Pondicherry is a tourist destination. The city has many colonial buildings, churches, temples and statues which, combined with the town planning and French style avenues in the old part of town, still preserve much of the colonial ambiance. While the sea is a draw for tourists, Pondicherry no longer has the sandy beaches that once graced its coastline. The breakwater to the harbour and other hard structures constructed on the shore caused extreme coastal erosion and the