Villagers accuse city of seizing water as drought parches 'India's Detroit'
By Sudarshan Varadhan
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People living on the outskirts of this southern Indian metropolis [Chennai] are blocking roads and laying siege to tanker lorries because they fear their water reserves are being sacrificed so city dwellers, businesses and luxury hotels don’t run out.
“Private tankers have fitted more than eight bore wells in our village and are indiscriminately extracting thousands of liters of water every day,” the Bangarampettai villagers wrote in a letter to a government official in the region a day after they stopped the tanker.
Bad water management and a lack of rainfall mean that all four reservoirs that supply Chennai, a carmaking center dubbed “India’s Detroit”, have run virtually dry this summer. That has forced some schools to shut, companies to ask employees to work from home and hotels to ration water for guests.
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The state government last decade made it mandatory to install rain water harvesting structures in new buildings, but locals say it hasn’t been properly adopted.
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