Chennai’s Veeranam drinking water project that hogged the headlines for wrong reasons
The row over the Mekedatu drinking water-cum-balancing reservoir project, aimed at addressing the drinking water requirements of Bengaluru, refuses to die. Decades ago, the Veeranam
The row over the Mekedatu drinking water-cum-balancing reservoir project, aimed at addressing the drinking water requirements of Bengaluru, refuses to die. Decades ago, the Veeranam project, meant for bringing water to Chennai, had continued to evoke controversy for long. It was the Congress regime in the 1960 that the seeds for the project were sown. An investigation by an eminent engineer in the State government. A.R. Venkatachari, had revealed that not only the project would be “very feasible” but also it would not affect irrigation sources. The project envisaged drawing water from the Veeranam tank situated at the tail of the Cauvery basin, about 225 km south of Chennai. The tank gets supply from its catchment of 500 sq.km. and, through Vadavar channel, branching from the Coleroon river above the Lower Anicut. Also, it flows during the northeast monsoon. The tank, whose original capacity was 1.441 thousand million cubic feet (TMC), saw an erosion of the storage to the extent of 0.930 TMC. Now, its capacity has been enhanced to 1.465 TMC. It has an ayacut of about 45,000 acres. In March 1967, the DMK succeeded the Congress and decided to go ahead with the project. Three months later, it had formally cleared the project, which would then cost ₹ 24 crore to convey 40 million gallons a day (MGD) or around 150 million litres a day (MLD).
The proposal was to draw raw water from the tank through an intake tower and pump it to the treatment unit at nearby Vadakuthu. Pre-stressed concrete pipes were laid at many points to carry water. In October 1967, the then Chief Minister C.N. Annadurai inaugurated the project at an event in Saidapet constituency, which was then represented by his Cabinet colleague, M. Karunanidhi, who was considered the driving force behind the project. As a mark of the event, a statue of the Mother Cauvery was kept there. Once the project got enmeshed in political controversy, the statue was abandoned and it lay on the pavement of Anna Salai in the area for years before getting destroyed. The execution was not as swift in the 1970s as it should have been but the project hit a roadblock when leakage under pressure developed at the joints of the pipes in certain places. This paved the way for charges of corruption and political row. The project’s execution came to a halt in May 1975 and this was followed by the dismissal of the DMK regime in January 1976. When the State went to the Assembly polls in June 1977, the project became a subject of intense discourse. The AIADMK government, headed by M.G. Ramachandran, which took over subsequently, had abandoned the scheme. The Sarkaria Commission was also constituted to go in to the corruption charges of the DMK regime, and it was before this panel that charges were made on the payment of bribes and the quality of the work.
The BriefWire