Work from home, shut restaurants and hotels, and water tankers. Nothing is helping enough.
Water tankers have again become the most important vehicles plying Chennai's streets after 20 years. Consecutive years of failed or below par monsoons have dealt a withering blow to Chennai, which is now reeling from a water crisis. This is a city that had been flooded less than four years ago.
Here are 10 things to know about the Chennai water crisis:
1. Options for Chennai residents
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Chennai residents are now trying to get water in two ways. One, they wait for water supplied by tankers of the Chennai Metro Water Supply and Sewage Board, locally known as Metro Water, which tend to be unreliable in terms of timings. Two, those who can afford private water tankers call for them, and even these are running through delays amounting to days with prices doubling in some localities.
2. No water in offices, employees asked to work from home
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Offices and businesses are finding ways to cope. A number of companies in Chennai's IT sector have asked employees work from home because they are unable to ensure water supply in their offices. Hotels and restaurants are either reducing their business hours or are operating at limited capacities because they can't get the water they need.
3. Reservoirs dry up
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The major reservoirs that supply water to Chennai - Chembarambakkam, Puzhal, Red Hills and Madurantakam - have all either dried up or are running fractions of their usual storage levels. These lakes, along with a handful of others close to Chennai also help raise the groundwater level in and around the city.
4. Deeper borewells
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A number of people are attempting to address the water shortage by digging deeper borewells (A vast majority of houses and apartments in Chennai already have borewells from the previous water crisis in 1999-2000). However, there has been a crackdown on those digging borewells for commercial purposes. Some localities where the water table was previously hit by bores about 150-200 ft are now struggling to find water even at 600 ft.
5. How Jayalalithaa solved last water crisis
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Late Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa had received much credit for solving the last time there was a crisis of this magnitude by completing the incomplete-for-decades Veeranam Project. This pumped water from the massive Veeranam Lake about 220 km south of Chennai, which was built by the Chola Dynasty around 900 AD.
6. Chennai's growing water needs
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The Jayalalithaa government between 2011-16 also operationalised two desalination plants on the coast, but that was hardly enough to account for Chennai's growing water needs. More desalination projects are yet to fully materialise.
7. How water management by TN govt is responsible for crisis
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Water management by the Tamil Nadu government has also been a major contributing factor towards the creation of this drought-like situation. The government had after the 2015 Chennai floods been criticised for not releasing water from the reservoirs around the city soon enough. Most of the excess water had eventually flowed through the city into the sea. However, little has been done till then to prevent such wastage through run-off.
8. No quickfire solution
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There may be no quickfire solutions to the crisis. Things are already getting bad, and are bound to keep getting worse. There have already been report of a man who was stabbed to death in Chennai after an altercation in a queue at a Metro Water tanker. The government may need to act faster than it is right now before a further slip towards chaos.
9. PIL in Madras HC
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The Madras High Court heard a PIL on Tuesday and noted that water crises are not created in a day. It criticised the state government of allowing this crisis to happen. It had earlier asked the government to submit a report on its efforts to tackle the problem. The court also ordered the government to submit a report on the number of lakes that it had desilted and on the encroachment of water bodies.
10. CM Palaniswami's response
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Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami has said the crisis is not as bad as the media is making it look. However, he said water would be released from the Mettur Dam (which lies across the Cauvery River), to bolster storage levels at Veeranam.
