Yesterday there was a spell of rain in Chennai (Spell has one more meaning, guess!!)
It was refreshing to see water but the agony continues. Today morning, upon hearing the (banned) air horn of a water tanker ladies ran out of their homes carrying whatever vessels they could grab.
I'll start with a simple question for you to ponder: If you don't pay water tax, your water connection will be cut; whereas if you don't get the supply of water, what do you do?
When you hear that honk, you (man or woman) runs out to get water, forgetting to apply any beauty product!
Beauty product? Why am I bringing it here? Well, even during this money crunch period, beauty product industry's revenue was more than $50 billion per year - in the US alone!
My goodness! If this amount is spent on water storage improvement, the third world war can be averted.
Anyway, it is an individual's right to look nice and also it's their money. I can't interfere.
Let's go back. I'm getting a feeling that water scarcity is a good, 'indirect' way to get more money from us. Forget the water we buy from private suppliers, I mean the responsible people too.
Now, we pay money to get potable water from metro water. We book for a tanker full of water (since technology has improved so much, you can do it either by IVR phone or by online. If we assume the phone is a digital phone the entire process is digitalized).
Then we sit and wait for tanker - just like a hen sitting on an egg to hatch - but tanker never comes. So you directly go there, plead and get the tanker. And.. the whole process involves money. Did we ever include this in our home budget (and in the state's budget)? Therefore it is surplus money getting debited in one side and credited in another side.
Somehow, our area people managed to arrange a tanker which comes once in two days. They provide three or four - or the number of Plastic buckets you have at home. Of course, there is a limitation because the water in the tanker is for all. A couple of points I would like to mention here,
1. The entire world is talking about abolishing plastic since plastic is non-degradable. But we are forced to buy bigg (as in Bigg boss) plastic buckets, looking like Goliaths so that we get more out of one bucket! These Goliaths like Ayyanar statues in villages are kept near the gate. How are we going to exterminate these Goliaths in the future is a mystery to me.
2. Interestingly, each house has to tip the lorry driver (some 20 or 30 rupees). I won't blame drivers - think of maneuvering lorries in Chennai traffic. But thinking why can't the responsible department pay more to these drivers - unless Department is doing it on a humanitarian basis. Oh, so that's the answer.
I live in Anna Nagar. I request you to visit Tamil Nadu registration website, where they have clearly given guideline price of land in this area. Reason for saying this comes below:
Firstly, farmers didn't get water for farming. They protested, protest and will protest
Secondly, villages, towns, and corporations went devoid of water. They are tolerating.
Third and finally, a prominent place in the capital of Tamil Nadu is also dying slowly. We will be struggling, what else can we do?
'If it rains we will give you water.'
It is an easy statement. We don't need intellectuals, experts, wise men to say or do this. What we need is responsible, caring, active, solution finders! Haven't we seen such men in history - Making the impossible possible. How long do we have to wait? When are we going to see real heroes?
And what are we going to leave behind to our children - solutions or Goliaths?
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R.Bharathram
24-Jul-2019