Story of Water

It’s raining all the day. Our meteorological department says that for the past five years we have been receiving 90 to 98% of rainfall. A friend of mine by seeing these facts asked me a question that if we were receiving needed rain, why do people suffers in water scarcity. That’s the question made me to write this post.

In order to make you understand reasons for scarcity, I need you to travel along with me to our past. It’s the period of Cholas dynasty, the rainfall is not very high but the availability of water is high, people do agriculture throughout the year. How?

It is not because of the rainfall, it’s due to the methods adopted for irrigation. They had built several lakes to store the flood water and each of the lakes is networked among themselves and also with rivers by using canals. Not a huger quantity of flood waters is allowed into the sea those days. Particularly in Ramanathapuram district (now it’s been declared the water scarcity area) had 127 such lakes to avoid water scarcity. Even the irrigation experts in US wondered by seeing the satellite pictures of the network. But at present all those networks are disrupted by encroachments of people. The flood water due to the rain is not getting into those lakes like it did in the past. Also many lakes are destroyed or made into small size lakes by our irresponsible activities.


Not only Ramanathapuram, take our state capital city Chennai as example. During the period of Pallavas their irrigation plans made Chennai the next major agricultural area after Tanjore. But irony is that our history subject in the academics deals only about the construction of Mahabalipuram and Tanjore temples. Researchers say that Koovam rivers flows completely in a different path at present due to the several concrete structure built in the middle. Koovam and Adayar are the rivers which irrigated the agricultural lands of Chennai during the past, but now they act as drainage for the city. Many lakes of Chennai is been completely destroyed and today you cannot see the traces of it. Nungambakkam is one such place.

Both Ramanathapuram and Chennai are just examples. There are others cities and towns in Tamilnadu like Coimbatore and Tirupur with the same kind of stories. Here the blame should not be on the governments which ruled us; it should be on us the citizens of this republic. So we youngsters should be aware of things and should not repeat the same mistakes done by our ancestors and should make a prosperous Tamilnadu for our children.