| My parents are both residents in Chennai and visited me in Tokyo last month. I overheard phone conversations and their complaints on state of the crisis. The water crisis gets deeper and more sinister. I remember plumbing being done years ago around the house to harvest rainwater, to store it in underground tanks and excess drained into the well. Nearly every household was forced to do this by the government. Few households built a sump and others bought plastic water storage tanks (it is the cheaper option) to store water. These are being re-purposed to store water delivered by water tankers. (a family 4 approximately uses upto 4000 L of water every month, in Chennai, around my parents neighbourhood) With the water crisis now, these plastic storage devices are under attack. Near my parent's neighbourhood a few households had the water drained from the tanks and the tanks themselves stolen or sabotage to prevent further storage. Sumps are not risk free either, as malicious actors drop pipes into them and use a pump to drain the water out. (some pollute the sump after draining it and later charge to clean them up as innocent service providers) Furthermore, water bodies around the greater metro have dried up. These so called "water tankers" are siphoning water from bodies which were designated unsafe for drinking, from agricultural wells, and through other illegal means. The water being delivered is neither certified for quality or acceptable for drinking. Some neighbourhoods that were recipient of such water have seen a rise in the number of sick children. Edit: ---- The well in our house was 8ft deep, there are also two borewells one at 400 ft and the other at 1000 ft deep. All three of the waterholes are now dry. There's literally no underground water left in certain areas in Chennai. It also costs several thousand dollars to drill a new one now. There is hope yet. People have banded together to clean up nearby water bodies, like the Chitlapakkam Rising [0] and Velachery Rising [1] NGOs who have raised funds and put their children and old to work on cleaning nearby lakes removing garbage and making the lake bed deeper. They hope to have the monsoon rain fill them this year and restore the underground water supply. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt29MvgX01I [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozhwWzuPNAw |