Chennai struggles to meet rising water shortfall

For a city that is staking claim to be the most favoured destination for investment in India, Chennai has one major drawback the water supply.

With a population of 6.7 million, the city needs 840 mld (million litres a day), but currently Metrowater, the water supply agency, is able to supply only 500 mld on alternate days, that is, only 250 mld a day.

But even this is a vast improvement over the situation during the last three years, when the supply was meagre and erratic. Bereft of any perennial source of water, barring three rain- fed reservoirs which have a combined storage capacity of 218.40 million cubic metres, the city has depended heavily on the bounty of monsoons to keep its water supply going.

But the failure of the monsoons for three consecutive years from 2001, had pushed the city to such a crisis. "In fact, around June last year, evacuation of the city was a serious option. But such a move would have been disastrous, so we had to look for other solutions," State Water Supply Minister K.P. Anbalagan told Gulf News.

All the three reservoirs were almost bone dry, forcing Metrowater to totally stop supply of water through its network of pipes for 10 months from December 15, 2003. By then most parts of the city had given up on the public supply of water and had already switched over to buying water from private suppliers, who transported through tankers water drawn from wellfields outside the city.

The cost of a tanker load (8,000 litres) of water, which ranged from Rs200 to Rs250 in 2001, shot up to Rs600 to Rs700. With the result that many households in the city were spending an additional Rs 1,000 (Dh83.95) a month on water alone.

But after the failure of monsoon in 2003, the government took over the exclusive rights of exploiting water wellfields within a radius of 30 km around the city. And to tide over the crisis, it spent Rs10 million a day merely on transporting water from the wellfields to the city. Steel and PVC tanks of varying capacity were set up in almost every street in the city, which would be filled by these tankers and the local residents had to ration it out among themselves, with many households ending up with just 200 litres of water a day.

However, in the last few months, the situation has improved dramatically thanks to the implementation of the Rs85 million New Veeranam Project to convey through huge pipelines 180 mld from Veeranam lake, about 200 km south of Chennai. But this project too has its drawbacks as Veeranam lake is fed by inflow from a major tributary of Cauvery river. The flow of water in Cauvery and its tributaries depends on the quantity of water released by the neighbouring state of Karnataka, where the river originates, and this has been a major point of dispute between the two states.

"We are trying to overcome this problem also. We intend to dig a huge well in the bed of Kollidam river which feeds Veeranam lake and draw 150 mld from this well if the storage in the lake is insufficient," says O. Panneerselvam, Minister in charge of the state's Public Works Department.

But what the city needs is an integrated approach. "That's why we are also planning to install a desalination plant with a capacity of 300 mld. The desal plant, the rainfed reservoirs, the Veeranam Project and the Telugu Ganga project are a part of this integrated approach," says state Chief Minister J. Jayalalitha.