Recharged

The rains have been quite patchy this year; cyclone Vardah was an anomaly, one that gave the city more wind than water. The threat of the city going dry within a few weeks, if not days, appears very real. There was a bit of cloud today, and promise of showers over the weekend. If that happens, it would be a Godsend.

You might take a look at the Kapaleeswarar temple tank and wonder what the fuss is all about. If there is so much water here, the ground water levels must be pretty good - that sounds logical. But this tank has been nurtured carefully - in the early 2000s, when rainwater harvesting was made mandatory, the tank was re-done with a little bit of thought. The normally sandy bed of the tank was laid over with a foot-and-a-half of clayey soil, which has helped in retaining the water much better.

If you click on the picture and blow it up, you will notice that the lower steps of the mandapam are bare. We can probably breath a bit easier when they get covered up with water!

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!

Thirsty?

This may not look like much, but in a parched city, it is the best expression of social concern. Even after all the rain last night, there would be enough thirsty souls walking down the road where these taps are.

Do you know where?

Zen feeling

Until a couple of weeks ago, if someone had asked me about Buddhist temples in Chennai, I would have told you that I had heard of one in Egmore, though I have never been there. But on a Saturday afternoon walk at Besant Nagar I found a second temple, with a small pond in front of it. Maybe it is not correct to call it a temple, for it does not appear to have any space for meditation inside. The Theosophical Society's grounds, where this is located, has a few such monuments: Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian and of course, Buddhist.

The pond - a tank, actually - in front of this shrine is a cement bordered rectangle, topped off with granite slabs. It is surprisingly cool even in the afternoon, so no wonder that quite a few visitors had parked themselves on it. Not much of the water is to be seen, because the surface is tessellated with lotus leaves, with the flowers popping up between them. Behind the shrine is a large grove of coconut palms, planted in right regular fashion.

It would have been nice to just sit beside the tank until the sun went down. But a plaque at a corner of the grounds drew me to it. What did that say? Ah, well, you will have to wait until tomorrow's post for that!

Multipurpose tank

Every temple built during the middle ages has some kind of a water body attached to it. Such a water body - the temple tank - served more than an ornamental function. It is believed that these tanks also played a crucial role in the ecosystem. Storing water was key, but the way these tanks were constructed ensured that they collected the runoff water from the catchment areas. Thus, the tanks were replenished during the monsoons and, unless it was a particularly bad year, remained full of water the year round. 

A paper published in 2008 identified 39 temple tanks within Chennai. The paper was about the results of a study on how Chennai's temple tanks could be used in the rainwater harvesting efforts that are essential for Chennai's water supplies. The paper went into details about how the runoff can be predicted; apparently there is an empirical parameter called the SCN Runoff Curve Number that can be used to predict it. Combining this information with factors such as evaporation loss and water depth in the tank, an estimate was made of the size the catchment area for an urban tank needed to be. Let us just say that it is far greater than what is available to any of the city's 39 tanks.

For all that, this tank linked to the Marundeeswarar temple appears to be quite full. With narrow streets around its perimeter, this tank has kept itself reasonably clean and charged up to take on the next dry season!

Tower lamp

The basic water tower is just a device to make sure water is distributed across a limited area using the hydrostatic pressure of water from up above. There are just a few water towers which have won prizes for design - Kuwait Towers comes to mind - or have become tourist attractions like the House in the Clouds.

Chennai's water towers have been blandly functional, with few exceptions. The water tower at Besant Nagar has some flourishes around its basic cylindrical design, but the one inside the IIT Madras campus is a little more adventurous. One look at it and you are reminded of the lamp which is the centrepiece of the institute's logo!

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!