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Context
- Chennai’s meeting with the northeast monsoon resulted into all-round relief since the water fortunes of more than eight million residents of the metropolitan region depend on this weather system.
What are the issues?
- The larger issue of how the city deals with flood and drought cycles remains unaddressed.
- Chennai is a lower elevation coastal city with very high population density. Scientific management should have ensured the preservation of the many traditional lake.
- Successive governments allowed the mindless draining of wetlands and their conversion into expensive real estate, with catastrophic consequences.
- Regrettably, the great flood two years ago, which left many dead and families impoverished, has not yielded a policy course correction.
- Tamil Nadu, one of India’s most urbanized States, has a poor record in this area, resulting in fragile slums. New housing has mushroomed in Chennai’s suburbs, where municipal bodies are mired in incompetence and corruption.
What should be done?
- Chennai should return to the traditional wisdom of creating tanks and lakes for water storage, and rejuvenating old silted ones, in order to harvest the floods and replenish depleted groundwater.
- The finding from one study in 2013 shows that 27 tanks have totally disappeared and another 400 have lost almost their entire capacity. This underscores the need to revive such natural sponges.
- Inviting the community to monitor the health of the tanks and lakes can keep out encroachers, who are often protected by patron-politicians.
- These measures can work only when the deficit of good housing and civic infrastructure is actively addressed.
Way ahead
- The priority for the State should be to integrate flood management using expert opinion and public consultation.
- Remedial structures should be built for existing localities.
- Poor waste management is exacerbating the problem by blocking drains, canals and lakes, while ill-planned road projects are cutting off flood flows. These have to be immediately addressed.
- The tendency to treat floods and drought as events to dole out patronage is preventing Chennai from forging robust solutions.
