The Niti Aayog’s Composite Water Management Index has said that Chennai is one of 21 cities that will run out of groundwater by 2020—less than two years from now. Chennai has long had water problems, as have other major metros in India. And like all cities in India, myopic planning may well have led us to a crisis. And as in all such crises, those with the least resources will be the worst affected.
The powers that be are heavily banking on desalination plants and such technological solutions. However, proper planning, with foresight, and implementation of existing plans is crucial to safeguard our water resources. For one, rainwater harvesting structures are required to be part of every building in the state. However, implementation is weak and therefore efficacy has been affected. Similarly, Chennai, like other cities, has allowed for wanton encroachment on water bodies. The result of this is urban flooding that occurs as regularly as the monsoon itself.
The other result is that rain water that could have recharged the water table instead becomes surface runoff. A precious resource is thus wasted. Civic bodies tend to target encroachments by the poor slum populations—also the worst affected by flooding—rather than the wealthy who have been allowed to build permanent structures where there should be none. That slum populations, which provide for most of the labour in the informal sectors of cities, live on encroachments itself is an indictment of the lack of planning to accommodate them within cities. While the 2015 floods in Chennai showed one effect of such shortsighted policymaking, the impending crisis of 2020 shows the other side of it.
Desalination and treatment plants may help mitigate the problem, but they are not the solution. The solution is for planners and governments to get serious about thinking ahead and implementing meaningful far-sighted policy, even if it results in taking hard decisions.