Water, water, everywhere, 

And all the boards did shrink; 

Water, water, everywhere, 

Nor any drop to drink. 

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

For the past several months, the country as a whole has been “reeling under severe water crisis” and “experiencing a crippling water shortage” and “brought to its knees by an acute water shortage” and whatnot (such fancy descriptions people come up with, but if only everyone understood the seriousness of the situation). So severe is the issue that even the popular TV show Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah incorporated this into its storyline. Arguably the most affected city is Chennai, where I live. With a population of 9.1 million and an average water consumption of 870 MLD (million litres a day), Chennai’s population has been struggling to cope with the water shortage that’s been prevalent for months now.

Is the problem with the apparently “delayed” monsoon? That’s what we want to believe because no one will accept that fact that the “stupid” common man and his greed are at the roots of this issue. Let’s first have a look at the current situation.

Chennai gets its water supply from four reservoirs, out of which only two still have water now. One is the Poondi reservoir, and the other is Veeranam lake, both of which will soon run dry as well. The only bright side for Chennai is that it makes good use of its two large desalination plants, supplying almost 200 MLD to the residents.

IT parks and malls are slowly shutting down, the former even asking employees to work from home. Colleges and schools are buying water from private tankers (who charge around INR 4500 for a 12000L load), as are other commercial enterprises. Where do they magically get water from? By exploiting the reserves of farmers outside the city and paying them a pittance for the water. Why are the farmers okay with this? They’re not, but they have no one to help them. When they raised complaints, the tankers went on a strike, bringing the city to an even more desperate situation, and hence, the complaints were ignored. Government tankers are much cheaper but if you go through the process of registering a request online in their site, it will take a week for delivery. A week!

Nevertheless, to a common observer, activities still seem to be going on normally. Offices and hotels are running, public transport is still functioning… it seems so normal, and that is where the problem is. Everyone thinks “someone will solve my problem”, the reason being “because I’m paying for it”. They want their work to go on uninterrupted irrespective of what goes on around them.

The only way one’s mentality changes is when he suddenly is at the receiving end of the problem, no longer shielded from the water crisis. In my case, it was when we were told that the hostel would receive supply only once a day. When you are faced with a situation where you open the tap in the morning and there may not be water coming out, that’s when it hits you that something is wrong.

It’s about time people realise that just the rains won’t solve problems, and more importantly, they need to get their priorities straight. Running the AC system in a monstrosity of an office building cannot take precedence over families in a building who could conservatively use the same water for a couple of days. Filling your private swimming pool is not what you should be doing at this time, no matter how much money you have to buy a tanker full of water. At the rate of consumption, there is no way this rain will fill up the reservoirs. In the entire city, only a small fraction of buildings employ rainwater harvesting well, while others just look out the windows sipping tea (or Kumbakonam degree coffee). It is going to take a repeat of the Chennai floods to replenish the groundwater in the city. On that note, it’s annoying to see people be so immature and ignorant about monsoon. The official Tamil Nadu Weatherman’s Facebook page is filled with comments like “Why is it not raining in Anna Nagar?”

The damage done through land reclamation and poor maintenance of water bodies in the city is irrevocable… or so it would seem. It is highly encouraging to see efforts such as the people’s movement to restore the Chitlapakkam lake. Here is another inspirational story. Seeing volunteer groups spearhead such a movement is a welcome change compared to the typical Indian mentality, which is to wait till a crisis and then go “oh-oh”. When has the motto ever been “Prevention is better than cure?” The places which get hit by floods suffer losses and deaths every year; Chennai has had water problems for years together and effectively nothing has been done to save or improve groundwater. If anything, people do halfhearted patch-work and shrug their shoulders later saying, “Well, I tried,” which might get you a B instead of a D in a test, but certainly won’t save lives.

When rainwater failed, the city turned towards train water. A special train has been arranged from the town of Jolarpettai (in Vellore) to Chennai, carrying 2.5 million litres of water on a daily basis. The train has two engines to speed up the delivery process, which, including the loading and unloading time, takes 12 hours. Yet again, this is only a temporary solution. On a related topic, there was a news item last month which said that the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister refused the “generous offer” made by the Kerala government for a one-time supply of 2 million litres of water. To those of you who were seething in anger at his refusal, actually think about it first! The daily requirement of the city is 870 million litres, and a single supply of 2 million litres is like you making a “generous offer” of 20 bucks to someone who needs 20 lakhs for a surgery.

The only way out right now is to work on alternate techniques, like desalination plants. We seem to be mentally programmed to look for short-term solutions and never to deal with issues that don’t directly affect us. The majority of us still think of climate change as “yeah that thing which is supposed to be dangerous and all…” or as a certain leader put it, “a change in the weather” either due to lack of awareness or simply because we don’t care.

It is not an exaggeration to assume that this crisis is one of many such “symptoms” of the exponential population burst, and also of global warming and climate change that will eventually destroy our planet. It makes me wonder if the protagonists in fictional tales actually “save the world” by stopping some villain who wants to wipe out the human population. What do you say, Ethan Hunt and Robert Langdon?

So unless a miracle happens, the air conditioners will still be in full blast, the cars will still burn barrels of petrol, and factories will continue spewing tonnes of toxic waste into the air until the day all of them are submerged under water.