Water on Tap for Hardly an Hour: Chennai Dealing With Crisis

Video Editor: Mohammad Irshad Alam
Cameraperson & Producer: Smitha TK

It is 6 am. The chirping of the birds and temple bells are drowned in screams, slamming of buckets and gushing of water. The stopwatch was on and just 30 minutes left for a line of 1,000 houses to fetch as much water as possible. Whether in the heart of the city or the IT corridor or the adjacent villages, the water crisis is severe in Chennai.

With Chennai metro water supply cut by 40%, the supply has been cut down to 525 million litres of water per day when the city actually needs 880 million litres of water per day.

In most areas, water is available on tap in homes for hardly an hour leaving everyone at the mercy of water tankers.

“We used to get water for two hours. Now we don't get even for half an hour. Only if the water tanker comes. And everyone here goes to get water from it. Water tanker comes at 10 pm or 11 pm at night. We need to fetch water then and it becomes late for everyone to wake up and send children to school,” said a resident of Badrikarai in Chennai.

However, with demand exceeding supply exponentially, metro water tankers have not been able to attend to the needs of the whole city.

You could even book a metro water tanker for your apartment or locality online, but the wait period is too long.

“I've made a booking on 16 May, and only now are they distributing water that was booked on 9 May,” said Ansar, a resident of Nungambakkam.

Meanwhile, Fayaz, who has also been waiting for over a month since the booking, is willing to go to any length to take a lorry home.

“I am looking to get a water lorry right away and obviously you know in India there is nothing without bribe, right ? I am going to give them some money and then get the (water).”

Fayaz, Resident, Nungambakkam, Chennai

People have turned to private tankers but it is not affordable and accessible for all. Also, a problem raised by the private dealers is the dearth of water that has made it difficult to find reservoirs to extract water from.

“To extract one load, it costs us Rs 800. We charge Rs 1,500-1,800. And we need to travel 45-50 kms to get water. Earlier because we had rains, we could access water better but now with no rains, the water levels have gone down 25 metres at least. Even the people there don't have water so the people there are also not letting us extract either,” said Janardhanan, driver of a private water tanker.

Almost all reservoirs in Chennai – Chembarambakkam, Poondi, Red Hills – are bone-dry now.

Recently, the Tamil Nadu government’s Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Department instructed all major temples in Chennai to perform varuna pooja, praying to the rain god, because of the monsoon deficit.

But is that the solution people are looking at ?

People want the government to install desalination plants and rainwater harvesting systems, regulate the extraction of water and install more taps in rural localities.