Worst water crisis in Chennai's history: Is it too late to save the city?

Chennai's water crisis has jolted the govt into action

R Balaji, a resident of an upscale locality near Marina beach, can hardly keep his eyes open at work. For the past several weeks, he has been up all through the night standing in line at public taps to fill four pots with water for his daily use. The water flow even at the public tap is erratic. A fight erupts almost daily over whose turn it is to fill next as people run out of patience.

But he is ready to endure all that and more for he has no choice. The taps at his house went dry several weeks ago, leaving the sinks and the toilets stinking. His wife and eight-year-old daughter have temporarily decided to shift to their hometown in Hyderabad to escape the travails, but there seems to be no end in sight.

Every day at 5 am and then at 10 pm, Kasturi and her husband have a similar routine. They leave their home in Mylapore, another prime locality in central Chennai, with eight plastic vessels and go around the city looking for a hand pump that is still functioning. With groundwater depleting fast, most have run dry, but if they are lucky, they return with at least a few vessels filled with water —their only source for drinking, cooking, washing, cleaning and bathing.

Home to nearly five million people and a hub for the auto industry, India’s sixth largest city is facing the worst water crisis ever in its history. Its four main water reservoirs have run dry completely. There is no running water for residential complexes, schools and even public institutions. Hotels and business establishments have scaled down their operations to manage with less water.

This predicament is surprising for a city that has one of the lowest consumption among major Indian cities at 107 litres per capita per day, compared to 140-270 litres per capita per day in other major cities. The situation might remind one of Day Zero when Cape Town in South Africa became the first major city in modern times to announce that it was about to run out of water.

While the state government blames nature, which is partially true as since the past 200 days (till June 22), the city has not received any rain, experts say the water crisis is significantly man-made.
 

Ground situation

The water in four major city reservoirs, with a total capacity of 11.5 thousand million cubic feet (TMCft), has dipped to less than 1 per cent of their capacity against 20 per cent last year.To put things into perspective, even in 2017, when Tamil Nadu experienced the worst drought in 140 years due to the failure of the 2016 monsoon, the city reservoirs had more water.

Currently, three water desalination plants supply 180 million litre per day (mld), the new Veeranam pipeline brings 90 mld water from a 1,100-year-old Chola-era reservoir 235 km away. The abandoned stone quarries are being pumped out to fill tanks and tankers for about 5 per cent of the city’s 0.85 million households that have water connection.

The rainfall was significantly lower in 2018, with the city receiving just 45 per cent of the monsoon rain, the lowest in 15 years. But what has brought water shortage to this crisis point is the lack of effort by government to do something about it, even though this was expected.

“Nothing has been done to address it so far and what the city is seeing now is a man-made disaster,” said Rajeshwari Raina, professor, Department of International Relations and Governance Studies, School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Shiv Nadar University.

Chennai’s water bodies have failed to keep pace with the city’s ever expanding periphery. 

Environmentalists Nityanand Jayaraman points out that in 1980, the total built up sq km in the city was 47, which increased to 402 sq km in 2010 and has been increasing every year. At the same time, the area under wetland dropped to 71.5 sq km from 186 sq km in 1980.

Two districts close to Chennai — Kancheepuram and Tiruvallur — have been known for water bodies as they had around 6,000 lakes, ponds and reservoirs, which were the main source for replenishing groundwater. Even here, only 3,896 water bodies have survived.

The department of geology at Anna University, based on a city map of 1893, has revealed that there were nearly 60 large water bodies right in the heart of what was then Madras. In the 1950s, people used the Buckhingam canal for navigation and to go around the city. The city’s busiest shopping hub T Nagar used to be a green sprawl dotted by lakes and tanks. But what used to be a green jungle then, is now a concrete jungle.

Many of these reservoirs were destroyed by the government. For example, Nungambakkam lake, which incidentally during the 1970s was filled and turned into a site for the Valluvar Kottam, a monument dedicated to poet Thiruvalluvar. It stands at what was the deepest point in the Nungambakkam lake in Chennai.

Too late for revival?

Experts say the government needs to implement measures to revive the city’s water bodies on a war footing to reverse the situation. The immediate priority should be to clean the water bodies, protect them from encroachments and create new reservoirs. The city has only three reservoirs for nearly a century.

“Implementation of a proper plan could help the city tide over even five or seven years of drought,” said Raina. 

“An estimate of the per capita water availability should be drawn and then the water should be redistributed accordingly.” 

Everyone agrees it is not the unpredictability of the monsoon, but the lack of storage that is the problem. Chennai receives a lot of water that flows into the sea (around 259 tmcft). Over the last decade, groundwater level across the city has dropped by 85 per cent.”To prevent this run-off, we can build a large underground water storage structure. Every four to five years, Chennai faces a water supply drought, and every four to five years the city also experiences flooding,” said Jayaraman.

Late Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa had initiated rainwater harvesting schemes and made them mandatory for government and residential buildings. Such measures helped the city overcome the drought-like situation in early 2000s.

However, the programme was not implemented properly and people who had set up water harvesting systems did not carry out regular maintenance, resulting in the water systems falling into disuse after a few years.

The government’s immediate response has been to ration water and conduct havans to please the rain god. Chief Minister K Palaniswami has said the city has enough water for another four months and it was supplying water judiciously to avert a full-blown crisis.

Over the longer term, the government has announced a Rs 1,000-crore project to build check dams to hold rainwater and prevent it from running off into the sea. So far, 56 of these projects have been undertaken and 17 have been completed.

A new reservoir is also being constructed and will be completed in two months. Besides desilting and restoration/rejuvenation of water bodies are being undertaken in a major way. State administration is hopeful these projects would be ready before the rains arrive in Chennai.

A major long-term project would be to link the Cauvery and Godavari rivers, to ensure steady water supply to farmers in the Cauvery delta.