India: A Tech City Of 10 Million Is Running Out Of Water – Chennai is chin high in Drought as Country faces self made Deserts

No Drips, No Drops: A City Of 10 Million Is Running Out Of
Water

These satellite images from June 15, 2018, (left) and June 15,
2019, show the diminishing size of the Puzhal Lake reservoir in
Chennai, India.
Copernicus Sentinel-2 Satellite Image/Maxar Technologies via AP
In India’s sixth-largest city, lines for water snake around city
blocks, restaurants are turning away customers and a man was killed
in a brawl over water. Chennai, with a population of almost 10
million, is nearly out of water.

In much of India, municipal water, drawn from reservoirs or
groundwater, typically runs for only a couple of hours each day.
That’s the norm year-round. The affluent fill tanks on their roofs;
the poor fill jerrycans and buckets.

But in Chennai this summer, the water is barely flowing at all.
The government has dispatched water tankers to residential areas to
fill the void. Still, some people in especially hard-hit areas have
vacated their homes and moved in with relatives or friends.

Satellite images of the city’s largest reservoir, Puzhal Lake,
taken one year apart, reveal a chilling picture. Since June 2018,
the lake has shrunk significantly. Puzhal is one of the four
rain-fed reservoirs that supply water to most parts of Chennai.

Another picture shows the parched bed of Chembarambakkam Lake,
another major reservoir. Its cracked surface is covered with dead
fish.

“It’s shocking but not surprising,” says Tarun Gopalakrishnan, a
climate change expert at the New Delhi-based Centre for Science and
Environment. He says the crisis in Chennai is the result of “a
toxic mix of bad governance and climate change.”

Rains have become more erratic because of climate change. That,
coupled with a delayed arrival of the seasonal monsoon, which
usually comes in June, has all but dried up the city’s water
supply. Government data show that the storage level in the four
lakes combined is less than one-hundredth of what it was at this
time last year. A severe heat wave gripping most of India,
including Chennai, has aggravated conditions.

What’s happening in Chennai could easily happen anywhere
across India, Gopalakrishnan says.

A 2018 government think tank report projected that 21 major
Indian cities, including the capital, New Delhi, and India’s IT
hub, Bengaluru, will “run out of groundwater as soon as 2020.”
Approximately 100 million people would be affected, the report
predicts.

In Chennai, residents are scrambling to conserve water.

“We stopped using showers for bathing. We use buckets so that we
can ration the amount of water,” says 33-year-old university
professor Nivash Shanmugkam. His family also avoids using a washing
machine for its laundry and washes clothes by hand as much as
possible.

Public institutions are suffering. Hospitals and nursing homes
are charging more for services to cover the increased cost of
water, according to the local press. There are also reports that
toilets at schools are dirty due to a lack of water.

Indian workers carry the last bit of water from a small pond in
the dried-out Puzhal reservoir on the outskirts of Chennai.
A scuffle over water turned deadly or a 33-year-old man when he
tried to stop another man and his sons from siphoning large amounts
of water from a public tank this month.

Businesses and offices have been affected too. Amit Agarwal, a
28-year-old IT professional in Chennai, has been working from home
for the past few days because there is no water in the bathrooms in
his office. Many tech companies have been advising employees to do
the same.

In Chennai’s shopping malls, restrooms are operational only on
some floors.

The rich can buy additional deliveries of water from private
tankers, sometimes at exorbitant rates. Poor people living in slums
simply can’t afford to pay.

The response of the government of Tamil Nadu, the state whose
capital is Chennai, has ranged from downplaying the extent of the
crisis to praying to the rain gods.

“There has been a water shortage in several areas due to monsoon
deficit. The government is taking several steps,” Tamil Nadu Chief
Minister Edappadi Palaniswami told reporters on Friday.

Those steps include a special train that will soon begin
transporting 10 million liters of water per day – that’s about 2.6
million gallons — to Chennai from another part of the state. After
initially turning down donations, Tamil Nadu has accepted an offer
of aid of 2 million liters of drinking water from a neighboring
state, Kerala.

Opposition politicians in Tamil Nadu are staging protests.
Dozens of women carrying colorful plastic water pots with slogans
written on them gathered in Chennai this week to criticize the
government for its handling of the water crisis.

One thing that could have possibly averted this acute water
shortage? Rainwater harvesting.

In 2002, the government of Tamil Nadu passed legislation that
mandated rainwater-harvesting structures on all buildings,
including private homes, in the city. The goal: to capture
rainwater and store it for later use. It was a revolutionary idea.
When the city got hit with heavy monsoon rains a few years later,
rainwater harvesting raised the water table enough to last the city
until 2016, says Sekhar Raghavan, director of the Chennai-based
nonprofit The Rain Centre.

But the government failed to monitor the rainwater-harvesting
structures, which meant a lot of them didn’t work properly.

“This is a wake-up call for the government and citizens,” he
says.

Raghavan says he’s now getting calls from people asking about
how they can properly harvest every drop of rainwater.

Anticipating inadequate rainfall and planning for acute water
shortages are further complicated by climate change.

“The fear associated with climate change is not the fear of
knowing that everything is going to be worse,” says Gopalakrishnan.
“It’s the fear of not knowing.”

While they may not necessarily light ceremonial fires for rain
like their elected leaders, Chennai residents will nevertheless be
praying for a downpour soon.