Opinion: Urgent need for water resource management blueprint

Unfortunately, urbanisation of Chennai is not being guided by this Master Plan and the development agenda has become real-estate driven. In the process, the metropolis has lost more than one-fifth of its greenery in 20 years and by 2026, it may go down further, to one-third! 

The biggest casualty of this predatory ‘development’, is water management. With the city experiencing a strange phenomenon of massive water-flow — even causing deluge — during monsoon and severe water scarcity during the better part of the year, much has been written on the subject. However, “It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.” 

‘Light’ in the form of water management has two dimensions. One, to prevent and abate floods and two, to assure year-round access to good quality water for drinking, industrial and other purposes. 

To achieve the former, Chennai and its citizens need comprehensive vulnerability analysis, risk mitigation policy and resilience capacities. This would call for severe curtailment of urban sprawl and chalking out a visionary, climate-change adaptive, regenerative flood control/ water security plan and implementation mechanism. The latter would need an innovative and sustainable water harnessing, harvesting, conservation, distribution and delivery system and its effective implementation. 

It is, therefore, imperative to design an Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) blueprint for Chennai and make it part of urban planning, development and governance. Such a blueprint, inter alia, should include accounting of complete entities and population-industries, commercial establishments, institutions, apartments and households among others in the city. It should also contain a complete water ‘mass-balance’ and mapping of the available water resource to help fill the supply-demand gap.  

This blueprint should cover sustainable ground and surface water abstraction; wastewater discharge, treatment and reuse; water conveyance and distribution efficiency; sanitation services; public toilets and baths; storm water collection and draining system; rain water harvesting; flood control measures; groundwater and aquifer conservation and recharging; reservoir optimisation and storage efficiency; cleaning and desilting of rivers and water ways; water bodies linkage and net working; demand side management; community-based decentralised initiatives and technology-driven smart solutions. 

Chennai metropolis is being projected as a global business destination while its nature-given environmental infrastructure and resources like land, air, water, water bodies, waterways, marshes, ocean and coastal ecosystem, are shrinking, deteriorating and degenerating fast. Water being the common and most critical among these, it is essential that an IWRM system is put together and made operational without any further loss of time.