City-Level Decoupling-Case Studies

CITY-LEVEL DECOUPLING: URBAN RESOURCE FLOWS AND THE GOVERNANCE OF INFRASTRUCTURE TRANSITIONS

26. The politics of sustainable water management in Chennai, India

By Matthew Wood-Hill (Development Planning Unit, University College London)

The acute water crisis experienced in Chennai, the capital of the state of Tamil Nadu, India, in 2003-2004 demanded a revised strategy with a longer-term vision for a more sustainable approach to water management in the city. Though pre-colonial Chennai was supplied by a rainwater-fed system made up of a series of tanks, reservoirs, lakes, and ponds, the more recent history of water provision to the city has relied on 'macro' systems of water supply. In the nineteenth century these functions were performed by two reservoirs, with water sourced via underground pipes. When the expanding city experienced its first major water crisis, in the 1960s, the institutional response was to attempt to pipe water from the Veeranam dam, some 225 km away. That this project was deemed a failure after just a few years did not deter the state from pursuing such mega- engineering projects: the Telugu Ganga project aimed to channel water from the Krishna River in the neighbouring state of Andhra Pradesh. Though this was commissioned in the mid-1970s, work only began in 1983, and was not completed until 1997, providing much less than the promised volume of drinking water to the city. Rainwater harvesting, in the context of the 2003-2004 crisis, offered a means of breaking away from this dominant approach based around large-scale solutions, by providing something local, tangible, and relatively inexpensive. Its primary goal, rather than increasing the immediate availability of surface water (with over 40% estimated to be lost due to evaporation or seepage), was to replenishing Chennai’s depleted aquifers, thus providing a sustainable, reliable source of water. 268 The technique had been increasingly promoted by MetroWater (the municipal water authority) since the early 1990s. In October 2002, the Municipal Administration and state Water Supply Department passed an order demanding that all buildings in the city be capable of harvesting rainwater before September of the following year. 269 The adoption of this practice as the preferred means of tackling the crisis, over long distance water piping and desalination plants, therefore seemed natural. In addition to the ecological and economic benefits of the scheme, it also promised to strengthen the essence of democracy by creating the foundations for partnerships between state, civil society and community actors, across class and caste divides. In the neighbourhood of Thiruvanmiyur, in the southern Chennai, these social benefits were tested as the community-led Puduvellam (meaning 'New Water') initiative, aligned with the plans laid out by the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH), sought to restore the presently-defunct historic Marundeeswarar temple tank as a means of groundwater recharge. Numerous unsuccessful attempts had been made to create a public-private partnership to resurrect the tank over previous decades. Puduvellam , led by a member of the predominantly middle-class Valmiki Nagar community, attempted to engage residents associations in the area to foster community support for the project through awareness and fund raising events such as community festivals around the temple tank. This suggested a further benefit of the project, and a goal of INTACH: to reclaim public space and to cultivate community cohesion. The purpose of such

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