2016 was water famine' year

Chennai: They were neither cups to cheer nor to inebriate, to rephrase a pithy line from the English poet William Cowper. It seems a new paradox of our times, a ‘famine’ in an otherwise relatively better economic development stage.

It was a startling grim reality. Going by the widely used indicator of water scarcity worldwide, called the ‘Falkenmark Water Stress Index’, the unprecedented drought Tamil Nadu reeled under in 140 years during 2016, has been termed a ‘Water Famine’ year.

Taking that benchmark indicator of the annual per capita water requirement of 1,700 cubic metres for every person on planet earth to lead a reasonably healthy life, any drop below 500 cubic metres is considered an “absolute water scarcity/water famine” year.

And in Tamil Nadu last year, the average water availability plummeted to an alarmingly historic low of just 122 cubic metres per capita per annum due to a total 81 per cent deficit rainfall from both the Southwest and Northeast monsoon seasons, to earn the description ‘water famine year’ for the State.

Highlighting this aspect for the first time, Dr P M Natarajan, a noted expert on water and groundwater management, a former member of the working group of the State Planning Commission, Tamil Nadu, and a researcher on water issues also working on climate change, says there cannot be more bells to toll to ensure the State’s water security.

Thanks to a far-sighted, sort of a track-two initiative by the State Governor, Ch. Vidyasagar Rao, in inviting all stakeholders to identify the quantity of additional water resource that needs to be generated to “save Tamil Nadu” from this acute water crisis, Dr Natarajan has just completed a comprehensive 34-page research paper, detailing what precisely needs to be done for the sake of both the living present and for posterity.

The Governor’s quiet exercise is a first of its kind in recent Tamil Nadu history, says Dr Natarajan, in the research paper, contents of which he shared with DC. While currently on a visit to the U.S., his vision has been shaped by the still haunting, childhood memories of the cycle of droughts and crop failures as the son of a small farmer in arid Pudukkottai district. That is why farmers’ suicides, even after 70 years of Indian Independence, hit him like a hammer blow.

Dr Natarajan, who has been collaborating with a serving IAS officer, Shambhu Kallolikar on the State’s water issues, right from the days former Chief Minister, J Jayalalithaa had taken up a huge project on a mission mode to see every ‘pucca’ household in Tamil Nadu installs a rainwater harvest facility, told Deccan Chronicle over the phone that he has sent his research paper for the Governor’s perusal in Chennai, as a follow-up to Mr. Rao’s initiative.