What's in a name?

You have to be a dubashi to figure out what's awkward with this street's name. Leading off from NSC Bose Road, across the road from the High Court complex, it is quite possible that it could lead to some kind of barracks. No awkwardness, for sure, if you know only English. If you know only Tamizh, you wouldn't be too worried about sign saying "Baker Theru". After all, there are quite a few streets in the city whose Tamizh names sound quite different from their English versions. The big question in this case, however, is about which version is correct. Is it Baker, or Barracks? Or was there a Baker in the Barracks?

Chennai's early history has a few candidates for the 'Baker' in this street; Henry Davidson Love's "Vestiges of Old Madras 1640-1800" lists eleven Bakers in its index. Of those, six are merely name entries, and two are related to one of the more storied Bakers. The first of the remaining three was also the first on another list - in 1652, Aaron Baker took over as the first President of Fort St George - an early attempt at creating a Madras Presidency. The second, Charles Baker, is listed as a 'Civil Servant', with some mention of "his pursuits". But it is the third one who is the likeliest candidate to be the eponym for this street.

That man was Captain George Baker, whose first visit to Madras seems to have been as the captain of the sloop Cuddalore, arriving in the city in 1756. For some reason, this Baker seems to have had a run of stop-gap appointments: his captaincy of the sloop seems to have been because of a heavy death toll at Negrais, Burma and the sloop sailed out of Madras with a new captain (John Howes). Baker seems to have been within a whisker's breadth of being appointed as the Ambassador to the King of Burma before his return from Negrais. The listing of Chennai's mayors lists a Captain George Baker for less than a year (1765-1765) and then again as an interim bearer of the office in 1773. But the reason for his being memorialized in the city is better explained by Sriram here!

Saving water

It has been a little over a dozen years since the Tamil Nadu government amended the Chennai Metropolitan Area Groundwater (Regulation) Act of 1987. That amendment was carried through in a kind of tearing hurry, as the city's water reserves were almost exhausted. The law now required all buildings to ensure that they had made provisions for rainwater harvesting (RWH) and there was a phase of six months when the implementation was carried out vigourously. Buildings that passed muster had to have a notification indicating compliance displayed on their wall.

Most buildings displayed the notification in a discreet manner. Not this one, which has proudly proclaimed its status on this. For a moment, that basin seemed to be one of the components of the RWH process; but no, it is just a decorative piece - it doesn't even seem to hold the little bit of rainwater that has fallen into it!

Pump it out

"A civilisation is known by the quality of its drains". I am sure it was not Florence Nightingale who said this, but she said quite a lot about sanitation in India. Particularly, she was the moving force behind Madras' efforts to get a drainage system in the second half of the 19th century. She was convinced that Lord Hobart, Governor of Madras between May 1872 and April 1875, was a victim of the city not having proper drains. In her letter of June 25, 1875 to William Clark, who was in-charge of the sanitary engineering project in Madras, she writes, "There is small doubt that Lord Hobart died of delay: i.e. in carrying out Drainage".

Despite her support, the sanitary engineering project for Madras moved at an excruciatingly slow pace. The reasons could have been many, but in 1882, a letter to Lord Ripon, then Viceroy of India, she despairs, "You ask me to tell you "as to what is doing with the sewerage and draining of Madras." I wish I could. I only know that they are doing something different from any of the plans which have been discussed." Lord Ripon had had the work kicked off in 1881, but even then it did not proceed quickly. Somehow, it seems to have all come together and the city does have a drainage system today, just in case you are wondering.

The system as it worked then was to collect all the sewage in what is today the May Day Park and pump it out to the sea, possibly through the Cooum. That sewage farm has disappeared, but a key office of Chennai's Metrowater operates from those premises. The name of that road also calls to memory a time when all of Chennai's drains would come here to be pumped out! 

Pure water

The city's second desalination plant, and the country's largest, has been operational since February this year. When running to full capacity, this reverse-osmosis based plant at Nemmeli, on the way to Mamallapuram, will supply 100 million litres of treated water every day. To enable that, it takes in a little over 250 million litres of seawater every day from the Bay of Bengal. 

But wait. Doesn't the desalination plant at Minjur also put out 100 MLD of treated water? So how is this the country's largest? Well, the only explanation is that the position is jointly held by these two plants which together provide roughly one-sixth of the city's current fresh water requirements!

Water woes

If you had grown up in the 1970s and 80s in Madras, you will look at this with nostalgia. Pumping iron had a completely different meaning, but you had to get this mechanism going before you could use it as your personal gym. That first mug of water, poured into the barrel as you start moving the lever up and down, to "build up presser". And the thrill of hearing the wheezing change into a solid thump as the water surges through the pipes in time to your pumping. One-handed pumping, making sure the "presser" did not drop until all the buckets in the house were full, keeping the flow of water even - all these were forms of entertainment. 

Not to mention the "body-building" aspect of this. Good exercise for your arms to fill up ten buckets of water every day. And then to carry them to various points in the house, all full, hoping that mom doesn't notice the spilled drops before you had a chance to wipe them dry... well, that kind of thing doesn't happen these days. 

For starters, the water availability is itself suspect. After a less than average monsoon, Chennai city is going to have a difficult time in the summer ahead. Start conserving. Now!

Water supply

Coming up from the southern districts into Chennai city, the NH45 rises up in a bridge just before getting into Porur. That bridge divides the Porur lake into two unequal parts, with the smaller part, shown in the picture on the left. Spread over 300 acres, the lake today is less than half of what it was about half-a-century ago. The 800 acres covered by the lake provided the water to irrigate about the same area of farmland. As the city spread out, the farms went away and the lake began to dry out, too, leaving the field clear for illegal encroachments.

Those encroachments came in the hundreds; as always, the ones who came in later were the innocents, lured by the prospect of having a small piece of land that they could call their own. As always, they were the ones who suffered the most when the government finally woke up and went on a massive eviction drive to clear up the lake bed, in November 2006. Since then, there has been a better effort to protect the remaining part of the lake, so that it continues to be a major source of water for the city's population.

There is much that remains to be done, for the deal was to clean up the lake, de-silt it and improve the storage works, once the eviction was complete. In the two years since, there does not seem to have been any change in the lake's storage capacity; as against the promised 60 million cubic feet, it still remains at around 25 mcft!

Parched throats

Sometimes, you just can't beat water as a quencher of thirst.

Chennai Metrowater has spruced up the polyethylene storage tanks which can be found by the roadside at several places. Normally these tanks are used to store water in areas which do not have piped water supply. This one, in front of Fort St George, however seems to be one that is meant for passers-by to slake their thirst.

With agni nakshatram ('fire-star') having started today, passers-by sure need it!

Lifeline

It is tempting to think that with Rainwater Harvesting having been mandated for both new constructions as well as for existing buildings, the problem of Chennai's water supply has been adequately addressed. The move has surely helped in improving the water table (apart from adding one more strand to the red tape of seeking an approval to construct a building), but there are still large areas of the city that have to cope with limited availability of clean water for cooking and drinking. It is estimated that Chennai and its suburbs currently need about 1.5 billion litres of water a day, a figure that is expected to touch 2 billion in the next 12 years. The gap between demand and locally produced supply is almost 50%; water from the Krishna river, in Andhra Pradesh has been of immense help in narrowing that gap down. And thanks to the good monsoons of the past few years, the gap is even lesser, now.

At the turn of the millenium however, Chennai was completely dry. The Chennai Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board (Metrowater) was simply unable to pump water out of the ground. Various ideas were put forward, including proposals for a giant de-salination plant feeding on the Bay of Bengal. Through all that hot air that circulated, the only means of getting water across to the city was the fleet of tankers that were owned or leased by the Metrowater. Traversing the city from their filling points at various locations in the 16 Metrowater zones, the tankers tried to meet the water needs of the city dwellers; but the long lines of colourful plastic pots, queueing up for the tanker to arrive, just did not seem to be shortening. Today, some of those proposals are being, or have been, implemented. The desalination plants are being built, even if on a less grandiose scale than was originally proposed.

But until those plans are implemented, tankers (like the one in the picture, coming out of the Mylapore - Nandanam distribution point) will remain the lifeline to a majority of Chennai's citizens!

Colourful zones - 2

Though technically an autonomous board, the offices of Metrowater are maintained by the Corporation of Chennai. And so, the Area 6 (Chepauk & Triplicane) office on Dr. Ranga Road, has got a fresh coat of paint and completely different from the cream-gone-bad colour that it had sported earlier.

There is still some cream, of course, but added on with the standard blue-is-for-water, the combination works well and gets the building to look inviting. Managed to take this photo just a day after the painting was completed - the painters hadn't yet removed their ladder from the far wall!

They don't make them like that anymore!

Over the years, the overhead water tanks maintained by the Chennai Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board (CMWSSB) have been fading into irrelevance - the water demand in the area a water tank is expected to service outstrips the tank's capacity by over a dozen times, and supplies are not necessarily dependent on the water tank.

One probable reason that they haven't gone away completely is that they still remain key landmarks in many areas. Though many of them are plain and simple cylinders, there is one in Besant Nagar that should be preserved for the sheer adventurousness of the government architect. Apart from a gazebo-like structure at its top, the cylinder itself has six spurs radiating from it, each with a lotus bud (?), supported by a lion figure.

I don't think I have seen any other water tank in the city that displays such maverick design. Do tell me if you know of one!