Veena Srinivasan

Can traditional tanks help Bengaluru in reviving its groundwater levels and in preventing the growing water crisis that the city is currently facing?

Traditional tanks in South India

Deltas around the world are under threat. Recent research shows that around 85 percent of the deltas of the world are shrinking. 

What are deltas

Like in many parts of India, Karnataka’s groundwater is a vital source of irrigation water, but has been depleted by a combination of a prolonged, multi-year drought and intensive extraction. Worsening agro-climatic and environmental conditions are threatening the incomes of smallholder farmers and hampering the continued progress in poverty eradication.

Abstract:

The goal is to reconstruct past system behavior and diagnose the causes of a major water crisis.  In order to do this, we develop a hydrologic-engineering-economic model to address the complexity of urban water supply arising from consumers’ dependence on multiple interconnected sources of water. 

 In these, private tanker truck operators transport water extracted from peri-urban wells to urban consumers.  This study adopted a systems modeling approach to analyzing the informal tanker market in India.  The results indicate that the demand for tanker supply was caused by lack of groundwater availability in private wells as well as unreliable piped supply.

This research study, by Veena Srinivasan, addresses the challenge of supplying water to rapidly growing cities in South Asia, using evidence from the water-scarce city of Chennai. Chennai (formerly Madras) is a rapidly growing metropolis of over 6.5 million people, whose infrastructure has not kept pace with its growing demand for water. In the year 2003-2004, Chennai experienced a severe water crisis, the piped supply for the entire city was virtually shut down for a 12-month period. Consumers became dependent on private tanker suppliers trucking in untreated groundwater from peri-urban areas.