CHENNAI: They store flood water that would otherwise inundate Chennai, and when summer arrives, quench the thirst of millions here. However, even after a disastrous flood and cruel drought in consecutive years, the authorities have done precious little to spruce up the city’s four reservoirs.
The Water Resources Department had submitted a proposal to desilt Chembarambakkam, Red Hills, Poondi and Cholavaram reservoirs to increase their capacity, which in turn would help in countering floods. However, with only weeks left for the onset of the next monsoon, the proposal is still awaiting nod from the State government, sources said.
This makes the city vulnerable to inundation, indicating that lessons were not learnt from December 2015, when Chennai drowned. Making things worse, water managers here are even claiming that they have no details about their desilting and other maintenance, even though the city is dependent on every water source around, including even abandoned stone quarries in the neighbouring districts.
“When we approached the PWD for data on waterbodies that have been desilted and those remaining, we realised that they don’t have any such data. Through an RTI, we found that no desilting has been carried out in the Puzhal lake,” said Jayaram Venkatesan, convenor of Chennai-based citizens rights group Arappor Iyakkam.
In response to an RTI filed by a member of the group, seeking the satellite images of waterbodies in Chennai, Kancheepuram and Tiruvallur now and a map of the waterbodies 20 years ago, the PWD replied no such data was available. It also admitted that it did not have data on the capacity and area of these waterbodies.
“Ideally, these lakes should have been desilted between May and July since the waterbodies were dry then. Now that it has rained, it will make it difficult to carry out desilting work,” Venkatesan said.
On the other hand, unplanned development continues unabated, and encroachments that remain near waterbodies have gone untouched, even two years after the historic floods.
On 15 November 2016, the Madras High Court passed an order to expedite the process of evicting 55,000 ‘encroachers’, along the Adyar and Cooum rivers, and the Buckingham Canal. But this only refers to slum dwellers, with no mention of large-scale encroachment by the more affluent.
According to a survey by the PWD, the waterways of Chennai are shrinking due to encroachments that even occupy catchment areas. Many of these illegal structures are likely to be regularised under an amendment to the Town and Country Planning Act.
While officials from the slum board had earlier said that those in informal settlements along these waterbodies would be evicted in time for the monsoons, there has been no movement so far. However, with those in informal settlements often being the first to be affected by disasters, activists said that the lack of planned rehabilitation was the reason for the delay. The residents have locked horns with the authorities, refusing to shift to rehabilitation tenements which are themselves not safe from disasters.
“Shifting those from vulnerable areas and resettling them again in similar areas only puts them in more danger,” said Vanessa Peter, a policy researcher from the Information and Resource Centre for Deprived Urban Communities.
According to the Indo-German Centre for Sustainability (IGCS), although the State Disaster Management Authority was set up in 2008, neither a policy was formulated nor disaster management plans were implemented.
The disaster management plan for Chennai is several years old but has never been formally adopted. The master plan only makes fleeting remarks about flood risk management. There are even instances where areas identified as low-lying by the first master plan was shockingly designated as primary residential areas in the second master plan.
Reservoir levels (in million cubic feet)
Poondi
Full Capacity: 3,231
Storage: 27
Cholavaram
Full Capacity: 881
Storage: 22
Red Hills
Full Capacity: 3,300
Storage: 83
Chembar-ambakkam
Full Capacity: 3,645
Storage: 180