The floodwater was allowed to go waste

[P.J.]

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The floodwater was allowed to go waste

The Tamirabharani experienced the first flood of this year as there was good rainfall in the Western Ghats on Tuesday night.



But the floodwater was allowed to go waste even as almost all tanks in the district remained dry. While the catchment areas of Papanasam dam registered the highest rainfall of 300 mm, Alangulam experienced 274 mm of rainfall to stand first among the taluks. As the influx of water increased manifold, water level in the Papanasam dam rose from 32 feet to 40 feet while storage level in the relatively smaller Servalar dam increased from 47 feet to 79 feet.

However, the entire quantum of flood in the river was going waste to enter the Bay of Bengal beyond Punnaikaayal in Tuticorin district even as over thousand systemised tanks remained bone-dry.


The Public Works Department, which is controlling irrigation systems, should have taken steps to divert the floodwater to the parched tanks. But none of the PWD officials here was prepared to reply to the question as to why no step was taken to store the floodwater going waste in the river in the tanks.


As the Western Ghats continued to receive good rainfall on Tuesday night also, flood continued in Main Falls and Five Falls and tourists were prevented from taking bath in these waterfalls. The flood brought down a huge dead wood at Main Falls. Since the police had prevented tourists from even going closer to the falls, none was injured.
Old Falls also received copious flow of water on Wednesday forcing the police to stop tourists from taking bath in the falls. While areas closer to the Western Ghats experienced either drizzle or rain during the day on Wednesday, drizzle stopped in other parts of the district.


Tamirabharani in spate as rains hit Ghats - The Hindu

 

[krish44]

PJsir
Rains though pre monsoon were unexpected
monsoon rains do not hit the coast before third week of may in the western ghats
however , our response to rain water storage and collection could be better '

in north also , in bihar they have alternately drought and floods in the same places every year .but there is no attempt to harness water . there needs to be lot more thinking on this subject , before meaningful solutions are for sound water management all over the country
water is becoming a scarce resource. some have suggested interlinking of rivers .but it remains a dream due to it being a interstate subject and huge resources involved

 

[sarang]

In this case too we have to go back to our roots and reinstitute old practices. Temple tanks, ooranis, man made lakes, step wells, house wells.

 

[vgane]

Lack of storage facilities is indeed is the crux of the problem...Read the expert opinion on this

India is blessed with a relatively better situation of water availability compared with many other countries, but it is also much worse than so many others. We have frittered away this advantage over the past decades by mismanaging this invaluable resource. To put it in perspective, India’s annual precipitation is 4,000 cubic km, or billion cubic metres (bcm). Obviously, we cannot put all this water to use because some of it gets evaporated and some is utilized by green cover for sustenance through a process called transpiration. The water available to us for utilization is the part that flows into our river systems or collects in lakes and ponds and what percolates into the ground, where it is stored as groundwater. It has been estimated that out of 4,000 bcm, only about 1,869 bcm is available. However, we cannot utilize this entire water because a major part of it flows in rivers in the areas where there is no use for it or it comes at a time when we are unable to make use of it—for example, during the three monsoon months—and the water simply flows unutilized into the sea. Thus usable water is estimated to be only about two-thirds of this, or 1,123 bcm.

This water would have been quite sufficient to meet the requirements of our population if we could manage it properly and effectively. In 1950 or so, when our population was about 350 million, this available water worked out to more than 5,100 cubic metres for each person a year, while a person needs only about a third of this for a comfortable living. Today our population has risen more than threefold and we have come to a situation where we are just about at sustenance level of water availability.


However, since the availability of water has a huge spatial and temporal variation, there are huge shortages in some parts of the country and excess in some others. The obvious and logical answer to this scenario would be to collect this water when and where it is available and use it when and where required. There are two ways we can store rainwater during the three monsoon months and use it during the rest of the nine months—in lakes and reservoirs or in underground aquifers. Since we were endowed with plentiful water resources at that time, no serious effort was made in the 1950s to conserve water resources.


However, in the 1960s and 1970s, realization dawned and we built many storage dams. But the momentum fizzled out by mid-1980s, with anti-dam lobbies springing up to ape the Western developed world and by the 1990s and the turn of the century, the infrastructure development activity tapered down. Today you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of storage projects under construction and these too are those that were taken up many years ago. Hardly any new storage dams are being taken up today. We have a potential of creating storage for about 410 bcm, but after more than 50 years of trying to develop our infrastructure, we have been able to build storage for only about 225 bcm.


The other way of conserving the available water is to assist the water to percolate into the ground. Under normal circumstances some water does go underground, but with our increasing population and indiscriminate exploitation of the groundwater, the natural process is not self-sustaining and groundwater levels are falling alarmingly in 80-85% of critical areas of the country.


So what does this picture tell us? If our population was not exploding exponentially as it did in earlier years, we would still have a respectable per capita availability. If we had built storage facilities, we could have been storing the rainfall and snow-melt, and utilized it during the dry months. If we had paid more attention to water percolation measures for recharging groundwater more effectively, our groundwater reserves would not be depleting so alarmingly.


So it is mostly our own mismanagement that is responsible for the dire straits that we are in today and unless we gear up to improve how we utilize this precious resource that nature has bestowed on us, we are heading for trouble.

Is the alarmist picture on water justified? - Livemint


A.K. Bajaj is former chairman of Central Water Commission.

 

[white40]

I agree with the views of member Sarang. Mahaperiyava has reiterated about Poortha Karma, which refers to digging of wells, ponds, water tanks, as one of the vihita karmas for human beings.

 

[vsubbu48]

One of the main ways of preserving rain water is to construct a large number of check dams. I do not have any info on check dams in TN. But I think there are no check dams in rain fed rivers, streams etc which are very important to hold the flood waters that come suddenly. Other methods of rain water harvest need to be adopted. In Gujarat I have seen that large trenches are dug along state highways with bunds to hold rain water. In fact during rainy season these trenches will be full of water lilies and that is a sight to watch.
Litigation with neighbouring states is unlikely to get enough water.