Kudos to Jayalalitha for steering a People's Movement. As more and more urbanization is happening along with crowding of people, our water needs go up. This makes us to heavily depend on the ground water for our increased water consumption. As the ground water is more and more exploited, the water table goes too low that the sea water creeps in. Water is one of the important resources that we need to preserve for our posterity also. In the Nature's cycle, water plays a key role. The availability of water decides the well-being of our ecological system. Major civilizations also happened where the water resources was abundant. In other words, scarcity of water is the first sign of impending disaster to the living-beings. If the ecology is disturbed and disrupted, how can lives thrive on the soil? It is a no brainer that water is the key requirement for the existence of living species otherwise we would not be investigating evidences for the existence of water in Mars.

The strength of the soil and the plants that grow on/in it depend on the water content and its quality below the soil. Water is not a material that would get exhausted because the ecological cycle will make sure that water comes back to the earth. However, the recycling of water to earth can change or can get redistributed /ill-distributed depending on how best we manage our climate by preserving our ecology. The more we grow the trees, the more we take care of not polluting the environment, the care we take not to raise the surface temperature, the way we manage our water bodies - these can make sure that recycling and distribution of water back to earth is maintained.

As a responsible society, we are answerable to our posterity. Any resource from our ecological system is to be enjoyed by us but we should not exhaust or destroy it. In the past few months, we are debating on the possibility of interconnecting all our rivers so that water resources can be well-managed. In this column, this approach was welcomed and appreciated. As more and more data comes on to the table, it looks like that it may not be possible or even if it can be made possible, it may be an unviable option. Pollution of the pure water of one river with the polluted water of another river, disturbance to the aquatic lives in sea due to reduced water inflow to the sea, disturbance to the ecology, possibility of India getting into a debt trap are all the daunting factors that prevent the first step in this huge project. We need to carefully evaluate the cost benefit ratio for this mammoth project.

While we continue our debate on interlinking our rivers, we must not wait to implement other options. For a country like ours, projects of small magnitude would always work out in favour of higher benefit to cost incurred. In order to manage our potable and irrigation water requirements, we should first make sure that we are not contaminating the available water in our rivers and underneath the ground with the industrial and human refuses. Let us take the case of Chennai with close to 7 million population. Chennai is struggling to meet its water needs. But we also see a big Coovam river flowing across the city carrying all sorts of refuses. If we look at it as the water catchment canal, one can appreciate the land area, that too on which rain water falls without any diversion/interruption, that is getting unutilized. On a conservative estimate if the length of this river is 30 kms across Chennai city and its width is 100 m (on an average), we are talking about an area of 3 million square meters. The average rainfall over Chennai is approx. 70 cms. This means that if the Coovam does not let out its water to sea and transformed into a water catchment area, we can collect approx. 2 million cubic meters of water every year. There are many arguments why Coovam can not be cleaned and transformed into a pure river that can alleviate Chennai's water needs to certain extent. The major reason is not even the cost but the lack of sanitary facilities in major parts of Chennai. So, even if the Coovam is cleaned, it would get polluted in no time. But we need to start somewhere otherwise Coovam is a potential destroyer of human beings, if not in the near future but in the foreseeable future as it can emerge as the root-cause for endemic diseases.

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