After spending my first summer in Chennai this time after a decade living in the states, I wanted to point out some things:
1. Water crisis is bad but a good fraction of people (most of the upper and middle class) are getting by through exploitation of ground water. My guess would be half of the city still has usable ground water accessible through bore wells including where I live. However these Wells going dry is a common occurence. Someone is digging a deeper well every day in my street alone (no exaggeration). Heck, my house with 4 tenants is already exhausting it's 5th borewell. The day these Wells collectively stop giving water is when things are going to get very interesting.
2. The government here doesn't really consider water as an utility it's actually responsible for. All the articles you see are mostly talking about drinking water. The pipe system in the city is barely capable of only providing drinking water to most people even if most of the water sources are full. It is everyone's assumption that if you need more than a few tens of liters per day per person for things like showers that's completely on you, not the government. This is not going to change anytime soon. The entire plumbing system is riddled with leaks everywhere and no metering. People have also built systems to abuse this plumbing (by using motors) so unless we get a sudden abundance of water this system cannot provide the water the city needs.
3. Most importantly, if ground water runs out, the city really doesn't have any alternative for water in any developed country sense. No usable River for hundreds of miles and every river that CAN provide water originates in a different state and none of them are prepared to share their resources.
4. Chennai the city alone has more people than most Scandinavian countries. The desalination plants are not going to provide more than a few tens of liters per head even if their capacity multiplies by ten.
5. While there's always blame on people here for wasting water, I'd argue that it's outrageous. Even the worst offenders don't waste that much water compared to any Western standards. My household is definitely in the lower quartiles of how much water we use but I estimate we use at best 50-70 liters of water per head per day including everything. Even if I don't want to think like this, I subconsciously think twice before using the toilet (maybe if I hold it for a while I can go one less time?). People here should not be blamed for abusing water, water should be a basic necessity for our lives.
6. Just three years back this city literally drowned in a flood that was far worse than what happened in Houston.
Desalination is expensive so you don’t want to scale it. But as a sanity check.
Assuming you’re talking 70L per day, the worst case using desalination is about 20$ per year. So, at that useage level water is not really a long term issue.
Of course i have absolutely no idea of the real situation, but why the Palar river isn't usable? Of course water from there will require proper treatment/cleaning, but still? Not trying to argue, ofc you know what you are talking about, just to get a piece of education.
Let me guess, there are bacteria in it's water which are too hard to filter out/kill?
It's not usable because the sand has been mined by the sand mafia for more than two decades. I'm from that area and I've seen thousands of trucks carrying sands every day. And the river is continuously being polluted by industries. It'll take immense effort from the government to make it usable.
One district collector (Irayanbu) tried to fight the sand mafia but he was transferred soon after.
That city is so poorly planned, I am surprised it is still habitable. I am not exaggerating here. Just read about how the cyclones couple of years ago messed up the livelihood of so many people.
I haven't seen anything blaming the residents for wasting water except the reference to metering.
Also I think what constitutes wasting water is context dependent. For instance the amount of wasted food that is a problem is a feast vs a famine is very different.
Thank you for your local perspective. To what extent is individual water harvesting done in the region? Assuming the monsoons of Tamil Nadu include Chennai, is there any barrier to rooftop/tank water storage?
Do you realize what all you need water for? Washing clothes, flushing the toilet and God forbid a bath. And this is not a bath by any Western sense, no one uses a shower or a tub, I'm talking about taking five liters of water and using the absolute minimum to wet yourself for soap and wash the soap off. Even astronauts in the ISS probably use more water than that. Of course someone sitting in a developed country who uses a few hundred liters every day makes this comment.
I’m actually working on a waterless toilet startup. It’s like a cat’s litter box but for people (app-connected and Bluetooth enabled, obviously). I really think it will change the way people live in the climate change era.
Some of Sandy’s (current name of my startup) technology is borrowed from my friend Liz’s startup. She (Sandy, not Liz) will be able to diagnose disease and transmit test results via Bluetooth to your phone from just a drop of fecal matter. You’ll be able to say, “Hi Sandy, do I have worms?”, for example. Liz said her technology is not foolproof, but what is in this day and age?
I am sorry if I am being rude... Don't you think its a huge issue of trust?. The data can be sold to insurance or advertising companies ( no HIPAA or other laws to protect the data here ).
Yes, Sandy will sell that information and use it to provide targeted advertising. EG if you have worms, she will announce ads and discounts for anti-worm medication.
We call it Sandy with special offers. If you'd like to pay extra you can get a special-offer-free experience. If you don't like the idea of any data collection you can just buy a cat litter box and have your own Sandy (without the added features).
Best wishes with the waterless toilet. Surprised that you got lots of downvotes, when instead your startup team is one of those few actually doing (trying to do) something about the water situation.
Your toilet startup has a website?
(Websearching a bit, seems normal toilet water usage is 30 - 100 liter water a day, sounds like a lot to me.)
Seems to me yes people can have mobile phones, and still no water. Have a look at this comment by someone who apparently lives? has lived? in the relevant areas:
> A good part of people seem destitute, yet they have good mobile phones.
Inexpensive mobile phonoes aren't that expensive and where I live also the beggars have phones. To me seems realistic with a future where everyone is conneted with a phone, and at the same time starving and being ill because of polluted water (or no water).
I see that, and agree, for the short-term future. My point is that manufacturing of circuits, touchscreens and other components is extremely resource intensive. Relatively pure water is one of very many inputs that are required. Other resources such as metals and rare-earth minerals are often mined in places which are quickly becoming inhospitable.
We already see metals being harvested from infrastructure. I expect that to get worse -- and worse faster in more impoverished areas. It seems to me that the remaining hospitable climes will face increasing pressures on their resources, and the luxury of nearly-free electricity powering smartphones will be fleeting.
Ok that sounds reasonable, that these surprisingly low cost phones, cannot last that long.
At the same time, shipping phones to far away places where there is a "shortage" of phones, and selling them there, is going to be more profitable, per shipment, than shipping water to that same place.
And one needs just a few shipments of phones, for everyone to have a phone. One ships just 0.1 kg phone per person, once. Compared to 10 or 100 kg water per person and day.
With that in mind, I'm thinking phones will continue to be prevalent, in comparison to water, in areas where there's a drought.
My main memory of Chennai (formerly called Madras) was the awfully dirty waterways in the city. I think it used to be a river but was when I visited in the 2000s basically a gigantic trashdump, smelly and rotting and probably spreading all sorts of disease. Utter and complete mismanagement by the city authorities and of course high disrespect by many of the local population for their lifeline. This is how waterways used to look in 18-1950 in Europe, with the added issue of plastic and electronic waste and of course much higher popolulation density.
India needs tougher water recycling laws like Portugal or Israel. It also needs to illegalize bore wells, whilst also needing a better way to preserve its rivers and harvesting the rain water.
Madras isn't the only city on the brink, every major metro in India is at risk but like the proverbial frog in boiling water, the law makers are asleep at the wheel. Or, may be, they are simply disconnected from reality as they can personally afford solutions to problems (owing to their vast resources) that most of the population can't.
The law makers aren't asleep at the wheel, they are actively profiting from the crisis. The water tankers are run by local politicians and they make a lot of money from this scarcity. In Bangalore they actively sabotage water supply pipes so that you are forced to purchase water from the tanker mafia.
I think you just don't understand how things work in India (neither did I until I lived there for a while).
The authorities don't police anything (the locals literally argue with the police, and carry on what they are doing even if the police tells them they can't do it), the only time you need the authorities to get something you have to bribe them (a small amount in westerns standards, but still...).
People don't care about their surroundings like they do in Europe. Your just throw garbage in the ground (also because the bins are mostly non existent). You have buildings from the 80's without plumbing (in some of them they are added after, outside the building).
There is chaos in any activity (traffic is just surreal).
A good part of people seem destitute, yet they have good mobile phones.
Your have 3 people doing the job of 1 in a lot of places. Example: In a restaurant there is someone getting your orders, someone putting the table and getting the orders to the table, and then someone that stays around serving you... literally putting the food on your dish, not just when they bring the food, but there, checking whenever your plate is empty and then filling it (you know, like your grandmother in a southern European country does). Outside bathrooms in a restaurant, there is someone just there to keep them clean, permanently. Yet the bathrooms are not clean at all.
All in all, India just defies your (at least mine) logic. I am worried about what will happen when it stops growing in the 10s% like it has been growing until now.
My dad grew up poor in Chennai before immigrating to the US, and all of his horror stories revolve around the failing/nonexistent infrastructure. According to relatives who still live there, it is now a common practice in Chennai to have variable pricing based on the cleanliness of the water - you can get a 20-50% discount if you're willing to accept dirty yellow water and boil/filter it yourself. The thousands of trucks that carry water into the city now drive 2-3x farther to find water, some from dubious polluted sources. Several years ago during a severe flood, a relative of mine recounted how she had to pour water through a cloth sheet to remove live worms and bugs. Hopefully they finally find the political will to address the situation, but I wouldn't count on it.
I'm not an expert on this one, but my gut feel is that linking rivers will probably greatly change and likely destroy ecosystems. This idea has been floating round in India from the time I was in my teens or a bit later, and there has been both support and opposition to it from various groups. IMO, at least the wildlife - both flora and fauna, not to mention micro-organisms, will drastically change (and some of them will likely be heavily affected), due to the sudden physical and chemical changes (like differing levels of dissolved salts and other chemicals, silt, salinity or freshness), of some rivers versus others, when they are linked together.
A better idea is probably much more intensive and extensive rain water harvesting, building thousands more ponds and "tanks" (term here for larger ponds) for water collection, water usage reduction (where it makes sense), water conservation, and majorly, afforestation.
For afforestation (and preventing or reducing deforestation, first), it is well known that forests increase rainfall and also moderate and buffer its dispersal once it is on/in the earth, and reduce/slow down its discharge from the ecosystem, thereby proving more water throughout the year, even in dry seasons.
See the book The Forest and The Sea by Marston Bates [1].
I had read it as a teenager. A very good exposition of the many interacting factors in natural systems like forests and seas, symbiosis, and all the benefits they provide for humans.
[ "Though Rachel Carson is usually credited for raising the public’s awareness of ecology, as Marion Clawson noted, it was Marston Bates’ 1960 book, The Forest and the Sea, not Silent Spring, that made “ecology a household word.” ]
The Indian government, NGOs and corporates could look to countries like Israel (which seem to have done wonders in the desert with drip irrigation and many other techniques - I've only heard a bit about it, some from my grandfather, who was a scientist in the field, and visited there), to solve the water issues and also improve resource usage / conservation and also better and more agriculture production, all at the same time.
The politicians and bureaucracy complete lack of action is astounding. I believe Bangalore will soon face similar situation.
Politician's themselves profiting of sand mining from rivers, not taking any action to prevent pollution of lakes even though some of them have caught fire(the infamous Bellandur lake), allowing encroachment of water ways etc. Any one of this should have caused people to vote out those in power or raise voice against the bureaucracy. But no, it will not happen - why? My guess is people will continue to vote on religious and cast lines. People will be divided based on any difference they can find between them and will never fight together for what matters. Absolute horrible of a shit show it is....
When I was in Bengaluru, I used to volunteer for tree plantation events run by Say Trees. IIRC, they had around 90% success rate of planted trees growing well after maintaining them in non-monsoon season of first year of plantation.
It is time people take up and support initiatives like this, in addition to looking for government driven programs.
Harvesting the rain water is the only way. Desalination could be another way. But in general, keeping rivers alive, lakes, ponds and smaller water bodies alive is the key.
Earth has everything for everyone's need but not greed - Mahatma Gandhi.
Was thinking this recently. Saw the Netflix show. From my very limited understanding it seems the cost per litre of safe water could be prohibitive but I don't know that.
I remember watching Quantum of Solace and being so disappointed the precious resource the bad guys wanted to control was just water. How could that be precious? It’s everywhere!
Watch the documentary "Blue Gold: World Water Wars" to understand the scale of the problem worldwide.
Most people have no idea of what is in the offing w.r.t. fresh water reserves. In fact many of the wealthiest on the planet have already brought up land containing fresh water reserves as a hedge against the future.
The water woes can be solved easily if people with sense start rain water harvesting. Every year Chennai drowns in rains, if one can store all the excess water there should be no water scarcity in the summer, it's just people not giving a fuck. Too worried about stupid shit like language, cows and dick head politicians to care about drinking water.
1. Water crisis is bad but a good fraction of people (most of the upper and middle class) are getting by through exploitation of ground water. My guess would be half of the city still has usable ground water accessible through bore wells including where I live. However these Wells going dry is a common occurence. Someone is digging a deeper well every day in my street alone (no exaggeration). Heck, my house with 4 tenants is already exhausting it's 5th borewell. The day these Wells collectively stop giving water is when things are going to get very interesting.
2. The government here doesn't really consider water as an utility it's actually responsible for. All the articles you see are mostly talking about drinking water. The pipe system in the city is barely capable of only providing drinking water to most people even if most of the water sources are full. It is everyone's assumption that if you need more than a few tens of liters per day per person for things like showers that's completely on you, not the government. This is not going to change anytime soon. The entire plumbing system is riddled with leaks everywhere and no metering. People have also built systems to abuse this plumbing (by using motors) so unless we get a sudden abundance of water this system cannot provide the water the city needs.
3. Most importantly, if ground water runs out, the city really doesn't have any alternative for water in any developed country sense. No usable River for hundreds of miles and every river that CAN provide water originates in a different state and none of them are prepared to share their resources.
4. Chennai the city alone has more people than most Scandinavian countries. The desalination plants are not going to provide more than a few tens of liters per head even if their capacity multiplies by ten.
5. While there's always blame on people here for wasting water, I'd argue that it's outrageous. Even the worst offenders don't waste that much water compared to any Western standards. My household is definitely in the lower quartiles of how much water we use but I estimate we use at best 50-70 liters of water per head per day including everything. Even if I don't want to think like this, I subconsciously think twice before using the toilet (maybe if I hold it for a while I can go one less time?). People here should not be blamed for abusing water, water should be a basic necessity for our lives.
6. Just three years back this city literally drowned in a flood that was far worse than what happened in Houston.