Water costlier than gold in Chennai!

S Anwar
Writer and filmmaker

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The month of May usually has people house-hunting as the academic year comes to an end and parents look for residences proximate to their children’s schools. However, this May in Chennai was different. Thangaraj living in Royapuram in North Chennai, despite the proximity of school, was forced to abandon his house due to water shortage and move further where there was a minimal guarantee of water. Sothukudiyan is considering moving out of Triplicane, where he has a house. Sumithra is staring at paying a huge maintenance charge as the wells in her complex in the southern suburb of Pallikaranai have dried up and the residents' association spends a fortune buying water via lorry tankers, the cost of which has been steadily rising, some jokingly say more than the price of gold. 

This is the scene being played across Chennai, which two years ago, ironically, saw one of the worst floods. With the rains having failed, the city reservoirs have been running dry and the crisis was expected. Nevertheless, none expected that the restaurants would temporarily shut down or the IT companies would ask their employees to work from home and, above all else, the price of a tanker-load of water would be higher than a gram of gold. 

Ironically, two rivers run through the city and the modern city itself was founded as a trading outpost of the East India Company by the side of the river Cooum in 1639. The Nawab of Carnatic, who moved his durbar to be under the protective guns of the company, built his palace in the 1760s on the other side of Cooum. It was closer to the point where the river would finally meet with the sea. As the company consolidated its power and when it handed over the administration to the British crown after 1857, Madras was already a corporation and the city had expanded to include another river, the Adyar, in the south and its western boundary lines bordered on a huge lake that was seven square miles in size and, hence, known as the Long Tank. One end of the Long Tank lay closer to Cooum at its northern point at Nungambakkam and the southern point almost touched the Adyar river at Saidapet. Today, not many in Madras, that has now become Chennai have any memory of the Long Tank, for it disappeared almost a century ago. During the British regime, as power came to be centered at Madras, the capital of the Madras Presidency, the city grew. 

In the 1920s, as Madras city then was considered as getting overcrowded, Madras Christian College, which had its campus at Parry's Corner, preferred to move to quieter environs, to the distant Tambaram, which was then considered beyond the outskirts. It was at that point that the decision was taken to close the Long Tank and build on it a planned suburb, which came to be known as Theygaraya Nagar (T Nagar), named after the leader of the Justice Party that was in power. Not only did the Long Tank disappear but the rivers too turned into sewers. 

When historians recount details of the Arcot Nawab Walajah or the famous Dubash Pachaiyappa Mudaliar having their bath in the Cooum, people laugh with derision, being more used to seeing them as open sewers and not as flowing rivers, that were once the lifeline of the city. As the city’s water needs grew, the Poondi reservoir was built on the outskirts of the city by Congressman Satyamoorthy, when he was the mayor of Madras in 1940. Soon, water was diverted from the Cooum river, thereby reducing its flow into the city, slowly killing the river and, in the end, turning it into a sewer. 

Neither the closing of the Long Tank nor the diverting of the river waters to a reservoir met with any protest from the public or policymakers at that time. On the other hand, in independent India, lakes became easy targets for the governments to build bus depots, schools and government buildings and in places like Mogappair (another planned suburb of Chennai), ironically named as the Eri (lake) scheme, making it obvious that there was no guilt about turning a lake into a settlement. 

This disconnect of seeing the centuries-old water bodies as immaterial to the water needs of the local populace has its roots in the colonial history. Unlike northern India, Tamil Nadu does not have perennial rivers. Hence, for more than a millennium, the rulers of the Tamil country felt duty-bound to create water bodies across the landscape. From Karikala Cholan of the ancient Sangam era, who raised the banks of the river Cauvery to the Arcot Nawabs of the 18th century who built a huge water tank near Neyyveli, the importance of water-harvesting, in a state mostly dependent on rain, was not lost on them. 

Ironically, when Chennai became water-starved, it was one such huge water tank created by the Cholas in the 10th century at a distant Veeranam (246 km from Chennai) in Cuddalore district that came to the city’s rescue. Till about a century ago, the locals in the state had a stake in maintaining the water bodies, especially the Ooranies (ponds mainly for drinking water) and lakes. It was known as the Kudimaramathu. With the centralisation of power under the colonial governance, a process that only accelerated after Independence under the Indian administration, Kudimaramathu became a thing of the past. 

While feeble attempts were made to bring back the system, a corrupt nexus of contractors and politicians has ensured that it never really took off. The lorries that fetch water to the parched city, too, come under such patronage. However, successive Tamil Nadu governments have tried to address the water scarcity of the city in various ways. During MG Ramachandran’s tenure as Chief Minister, the Telugu Ganga Scheme was conceived to bring water from Srisailam in Andhra. With the Bay of Bengal being the coastline, two desalination plants have come up at Minjur and Nemmeli and a third is being planned. 

With relentless economic growth that is centred round Chennai and huge apartment complexes replacing old neighbourhoods, water scarcity is a warning sign to the planners. The silver lining is that over the past two decades, there is a steady increase in awareness about the natural resources and sustainable development, resulting in many Tamil Nadu farmers turning the organic way. This crisis has led many to rethink the usage pattern of water. With 1,300 to 1,400 mm of annual rainfall and 4,000 water bodies around the city, rainwater harvesting and grey water treatment are being considered by the citizenry with greater vigour than the government. 

The existing water bodies are now looked at with respect. As the monsoon rains finally make their appearance, Chennai may weather this drought, but unless governments learn to spread the economic development beyond the metropolitan cities, the solutions can only be temporary.