Madras's smarter ways with water

CHENNAI: With the livelihood options expanding from purely agriculture to crafts and industry, new urban settlements started developing in nontraditional areas.

Hence, centuries ago, when colonial powers scouted for ideal sites in India to set up bases and settle, their priority was to be near a weaving settlement.

However, with commerce comes exponential population growth, which inversely affects naturally available sources of water.

In the case of Madras, for instance, the population went from just 500 Europeans and Indians to more than a hundred times in just a century.

A settlement without rivers to replenish water storage would shrivel, initially leading to parched throats and finally resulting in the exodus of the masses.

But right from the beginning, Madras had a bureaucracy that was alive to such existential issues posed by water scarcity.

THE SEVEN WELLS

When they set up base here, the founding fathers did not have the ambition to visualise Madras as a large urban node teeming with people.

At the most, they had planned a trading station to house a few hundred people, whose water needs were met by a few wells within Fort St George.

When the wells turned saline, naval captain-turned-city Mayor George Baker proposed bringing water to the fort from Seven Wells through a pipeline.

For this, lead and cast iron pipes had to be imported. The 16-foot wide wells, seven in number, were in the farthest corner of the Black Town in North Peddanaickenpet (now at the end of Mint Street). Water from these wells was raised manually by picotahs (water levers) and conveyed via cast iron pipes to the cisterns under the walls of the fort.

This was one of the earliest piped water supply systems in the country. Incidentally, when Mysore Sultan Haider Ali failed to capture Madras, he tried to poison these wells with animal carcasses.

TIRUKKURAL AND THE WELLS

The bureaucracy was mindful of addressing the water woes of the city. When the people faced a severe drinking water shortage in 1818, the Collector of Madras, Whyte Ellis commissioned 27 wells across the city.

Being a great scholar of Tamil, it was not surprising that he also ensured that a couplet from Tirukkural was etched on a stone near each of those well.

The last surviving well and tablet are in Royapettah. In 1849, a proposal was mooted to tap rainwater by constructing a reservoir within the Black Town.

It was named Trevelyan’s Basin after the people-friendly Governor, Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan. However, it never took off. It is still remembered in the Basin Bridge station on Walltax Road.

THE EARLY DAMS

Though two of the three rivers here, the Kosasthalaiyar and the Cooum, were on favorable slopes to supply water, it reached the city not more than a month a year.

To make use of the river water, the idea was mooted to erect dams to store the floodwater during the monsoon. Thus, when the Sepoy Mutiny was just subsiding in North India (1857), Madras was building its first dam.

Built-in the 1860s, the masonry weir across Kosasthalaiyar at Tamaraipakkam was one of the earliest dams of modern India. It diverted the river water into the Red Hills lake through a channel.

Soon thereafter, the Cooum, too, was dammed with Korattur anicut and diverted into the Chembarambakkam.

These structures did help quench the city’s thirst, but in the process, they were essentially sacrificed and now declared dead.

THE SCARS OF MONUMENTAL ERRORS

While many smart decisions in water management helped the city grow to become the present expanse, there have been monumental blunders, too.

In the race to find space for the exploding population, Madras has shown scant regard for its waterbodies. Dozens of lakes that stored water for summer and also mitigated flooding in the process were lost.

They now are remembered only by the names of the roads that once bordered them.

These include Tank Bund Road, Lake View Road or Lake Area in heart of present-day Madras. When the Long Tank with an area of seven square miles was drained to create the housing and shopping hub now known as Thyagaraya Nagar, it was considered Madras’s greatest achievement in urban planning.

That is not all. From IIT-Madras to several central government offices, residences, and public spaces like parks now stand on what could have been our aqua insurance.

HONOURING THE ENGINEERS

The city has to thank a bunch of men who pursued scientific methods to ensure that Madras never goes thirsty.

The importance with which these men who designed the water supply system for the metropolis a hundred years ago are held could be gauged from the fact that there are roads named after many of them, including James Welby Madeley and Hormusji Nowroji, a Parsi sanitation engineer.

Another water engineer, Jones, has the tower in Red Hills reservoir named after him.

Madeley, a British water engineer who revolutionised the concept of organised drinking water system in the city, was reportedly an avid flyer, too, and used to fly daily over the lakes of Madras to inspect their levels.

Madeley also introduced the concept of concealing the supply line to protect it from contamination.

PONNIYIN SELVAN AND VEERANAM

The famous novel, Ponniyin Selvan, starts on the banks of the Veeranam lake. The lake, which was created during the Chola period in the 10th century CE, is a 16-km long waterbody near Chidambaram.

Rajadityan also known as Veera Narayanan, directed the Chola army to dig the lake while the soldiers were waiting for orders to march northwards.

While he didn’t survive, the lake has. The idea of pumping water from Veeranam was proposed in the 1960s but the project was embroiled in scandals from the start, and pipes meant to be used for the work lay along the highways as an embarrassing metaphor.

Finally, 36 years after it was first conceived, the Veeranam project commenced delivering water to the parched city of Chennai through steel pipes, which, for the most part of its 235 km length, run underground.

This is Cauvery water that is diverted from Mettur.

SATHYAMURTHY AND THE POONDI LAKE

Poondi lake

Madras has half a dozen reservoirs, with some like Chembarambakkam lake surviving from the Pallava period.

The vision to have another artificial lake was conceived by Mayor Sathyamurthy. In a way, it heralded a new era of civic conveniences offered by the city while also triggering large-scale migration to the city in the decades to come.

His persistence led to the creation of Poondi lake which lies about 50 km to the northwest of the city, one of the most important bulwarks against scarcity for the last 80 years.

The population of the city was rapidly increasing in the interwar period, and it was then that a pressing need to increase water sources in the city was felt ever more acutely.

A 4-km-long earthen bund connecting the hills on either side of the Kosasthalaiyar impounded the water to form a 32.37 sq km lake.

With a wartime outlay of Rs 60 lakh, Sathyamurthy managed to lay the foundation stone within the one-year term he was the city Mayor.

The Poondi dam was renamed Sathyamurthy Sagar and a memorial was erected after independence.

THE POINT OF PERENNIAL SCARCITY

In 1940, while laying the foundation stone for the Poondi reservoir, Mayor Sathyamurthy – the initiator of the project who later had the honour of having the expansive lake named after him – wondered why Francis Day, the founder of the city, zeroed in on a place with perpetual water scarcity to set up a settlement.

His doubt was not ill-placed: the rainwater had to be stored in lakes to ensure round-the-year drinking water supply.

And it only took a poor monsoon to move to ration water, resulting in long queues to collect whatever little that is supplied.

In 1947, while throwing open the military swimming pool in Marina to the public, the then Mayor pointed out the crippling scarcity and warned that water from Red Hills would not be let into the pool at any cost.

When the iconic LIC building on Anna Salai caught on fire at a time when the city was reeling under water scarcity, the fire service and the government were helpless because there was not enough water to put out the blaze. Finally, the fire was doused using water from the Cooum.

NTR AND THE TELUGU GANGA PROJECT

NT Rama Rao

When he became the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, Telugu matinee icon NT Rama Rao, a long-time resident of Chennai, wanted to gift the city a lasting present.

That is the Telugu Ganga project (Krishna Water Supply Project), a water supply scheme he implemented to provide drinking water to Chennai.

The water is drawn from the Srisailam reservoir to travel 406 km to reach Chennai.

The plan was first conceived in 1881 by WM Ellis, a British irrigation expert, but it took a century to implement. In 1983, the Krishna Water Supply Project was launched by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, in the presence of the Chief Ministers of four States, includingKarnataka and Maharashtra. She described the project as a “symbol of national unity”.

However, more than half of the water does not reach Chennai, lost in evaporation and leakage from the channel.

COURTING GODS AND COAXING CLOUDS

There have been instances when regimes of determined atheist parties have ordered more than 33,000 temples run by the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Department to conduct special rituals to appease Varuna, the rain god.

Groups of Carnatic musicians seasonally resort to playing the Amrita Varshini raga which tempts the clouds to shed moisture.

In a desperate attempt to solve the crippling water problem in Madras, the State government has even taken recourse to cloud seeding.

The seeding procedure involves using dry ice or silver iodide to accelerate and facilitate the formation of drops that are too heavy to remain in the cloud.

A Piper Aztec plane owned by Atmospherics Inc, a California-based private company, began seeding clouds over the catchment areas catering to the city’s water supply as early as 1975. Though the government audit claimed it “produced satisfactory results”, they realised it was not a sustainable way to fill the lakes.

KILPAUK WATER WORKS

When the first water treatment plant in Madras was built in Kilpauk, it followed a distinct Indo-Saracenic style of architecture.

The Puzhal reservoir in Red Hills was originally built in 1876 as a small tank with two masonry weirs using locally available laterite stones.

The water from it entered Madras at Kilpauk 108 years ago through an open canal.

At Kilpauk, it was sent through special filters of fine sand, pebbles, and bricks. Kilpauk Water Works could supply the city with 80 million litres per day, and perhaps had the largest overhead tank in the country with a capacity to hold 7 million litres.

After purification, the water was pumped to different parts of the city using a steam engine.

A 177-foot chimney (as tall as the LIC building) stands near the sand filter structure.

This chimney was used to let out the smoke that came from the coal-fed steam engine.

FAR FROM ENOUGH

Despite sowing the seeds of modern water supply systems so early, the city is still not equipped to supply piped water to every household, nor can it ensure scarcity-free life for all sections of the population.

When the storage goes down as it happens every now and then, the supply is restricted to alternate days, that too reduced quantity.

Many of the tail-end areas do not get water at the doorsteps. Even the high-profile areas along Old Mahabalipuram Road, which has become the hub of the software sector in the State, do not have access to piped water.

In areas that are unserved by the State-run utility, the people are dependent on private water tankers.

But even while becoming the lifeline for many a residential and industrial locality, these private operators have also garnered notoriety of functioning like a mafia, extracting groundwater illegally, and for their brushes with the law.

TURNING TO THE SEA

Considering the long coastline that Madras is blessed with, it was just a matter of time and technology before the city turned to the sea for drinking water.

In 2010, the first seawater desalination plant commenced operation in Minjur, followed by similar facilities in the south of the city on the East Coast Road.

While the city heaved a sigh of relief at the new supply, there are environmental concerns that the effluent ejected by the plants is causing marine life in the bay to wither.