Chennai police announce traffic diversions for Mylapore Panguni Festival thehindu.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from thehindu.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
India Currents, in collaboration with bioGraphic and the California Academy of Sciences, is publishing the last in a 3 part series on Chennai’s restoration of its marshlands. R
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Featured Image: Mylapore Tank holds water even during the dry season, but only because its bottom has been paved over.)
Temple tanks
As in most Indian cities, Chennai’s piped water supply is available for just a few hours a day. And many parts of the city have no water connection at all. So many people pump groundwater, either on their own property or from government wells on the street. Others hire tanker trucks to fill their cisterns with water that has also been extracted from underground. “A huge quantity, almost 200 MLD [million liters daily] of water, is being shipped every day,” a water utility official told me. But surface and groundwater are not separate sources; they are linked by gravity and hydraulic pressure. So when people pump groundwater, they are ultimately depleting surface wate