Water Supply

Well, that almost sounds like a page out of a fantasy novel, given the water scenario many of its localities have been facing in recent years. It's been barely two years that the city was making global headlines for having dried up completely in the wake of a monsoon failure and depleting groundwater reserves.  Was it this crisis that served as a wake up call for the Tamil Nadu government, pushing it to take steps to augment the city’s water supply and conserve water resources? How is summer 2021 going to be on the water front? What has changed in…

On a late Wednesday evening in mid-April, a queue of women forms in front of the water tap at Doraiswamy Reddy Street, Korattur. Leaving their domestic chores and cooking half done, these women have rushed with their pots and cans to source their bi-weekly water supply from the Chennai Metro Water Supply and Sewerage Board (CMWSSB). The anxiety on their faces is palpable. Not everyone will have filled pots to take back home at the end of the evening. A light brown coloured liquid with a rotten smell trickles down the road, as a woman opens the tap. She just lets…

The very approach of summer sends a few shivers down Chennai's spine now. The memory of 2019 is still fresh and enough to bring on a few nightmares. Two deficit monsoons following the 2015 December deluge led to reservoirs going bone-dry, and the city literally running out of water. After Cape Town, Chennai had become the next face of a water-starved dystopia in national and global headlines. While various solutions have been attempted since then to prevent recurrence of a similar situation in the city, Murali Anand Apartments in Mandaveli has a simple, traditional solution to suggest which saw them…

In the first week of February 2020, there was a leak in the Veravali reservoir water pipeline in Andheri East. Neighbouring areas such as Jogeshwari, Kurla, and Ghatkopar were without water for three days. The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) workers, the Hindustan Times reported, had to enter 40 feet deep into the earth and "walk for 50 metres to reach the spot and fix the leak by welding the pipeline". It took "150" workers and engineers "60 hours" to fix the leakage. But the fixed leakage did not mean that water reached all homes immediately. Not even close. https://twitter.com/mybmc/status/1223602610286080000?s=20 As…

In the mid 19th century, Bombay got its water from 136 public wells and tanks such as Gowallia Tank, Babula and Byculla, Nagpada, Framji Cowasji and Cowasji Patel Tanks. Most of these were built by citizens, writes Mariam Dossal in her book Imperial Designs and Indian Realities: The Planning of Bombay City. By 1845, trade flourished in Bombay, the population doubled (from what it was 25 years ago), and the scarce water resources came under severe stress. These water sources were dependent on rain, and whenever the rain failed, water supply diminished. Like tankers today, the British government would ply…

Did the recent rainfall help to bring about any significant increase in the groundwater level in your neighbourhood? You can check the data online now.  In a bid to assess groundwater level across the city, so that it can take proactive measures when the table dips, the Chennai Metrowater Supply and Sewerage Board (CMWSSB) has installed 200 groundwater monitoring devices and 20 rain gauges across 15 zones of the city. Notably, Chennai is the first Indian city to have a comprehensive automatic groundwater monitoring system. But why do we need such a system in the first place and how will it…

Historically, civilizations grew around rivers in their valleys (i.e. Nile and Indus valleys). It is relatively very recent in human history that we now dwell and thrive in spaces that are far away from rivers or other water bodies. I (Deepak) have read earlier that the city of Mumbai, with its population of 20 million people, draws its water requirement from large reservoirs and rivers that are more than a 100 km away from downtown city. Ironically, the native population living around these reservoirs have been restricted access to these bodies of water that are present in their communities. The…

In Bengaluru, apartments have to set up their own Sewage Treatment Plants (STPs) to manage the sewage they generate. But the design and operations of most apartment STPs are flawed. Often, residents suffer due to the poor quality of treated water which they have to reuse; and excess sludge from the STP is dumped elsewhere, endangering public health. We, at Brigade Altamont apartment in K Narayanapura, recently fine-tuned our STP system so as to make it fully legally-compliant, and with little investment. K Narayanapura has no underground sewer network, and our apartment is located near a rajakaluve that traverses Arkavathy…

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is spending about Rs 1600 crores over a period of about three years to desalinate water from the Arabian Sea to make it drink-worthy or potable. In November 2020, Chief minister Uddhav Thackeray announced that Mumbai's first desalination plant should take care of the water shortage that the city invariably faces in the summer months of April- May, by accounting for about 10-15 % of its annual water needs. Similar proposals were planned back in 2005 but were rejected as they were considered too costly. This time around, the proposal has officially been approved despite being…

Just like all civilizations, Madras also drew sustenance from a river. Historically, Adyar and Cooum Rivers played a pivotal role in the flourishing of Chennai. But today, with these rivers polluted, Chennai is largely dependent on the Northeast monsoon (mid-October to mid-December) that recharges groundwater. The presence of hundreds of lakes and temple tanks is a silver lining, but with most of them encroached and polluted, they don’t meet the water demand of the ever-growing city. So how exactly does this city of roughly 11 million people sustain itself? Where do you get the water that flows in your taps…