What Government Couldn't Do For Years, Rain Did In Two Days. Here's How Chennai Floods Brought Cooum River Back To Life

A National Green Tribunal bench recently said, "What you couldn't do in one year, the rain did in a day or two," while rapping the state government for its slow pace of work in restoring the Cooum.

The Hindu

In the past five decades, more than Rs 5,000 crore was pumped into projects to revive the Cooum, many of which have come a cropper. And all it took was two weeks of rain to naturally flush out the muck in this river-turned-drain. The 65-km-long Cooum, the city's worst scar, is now a sparkling picture of a flowing river. The last time the river sprang to life was during the tsunami of 2004 and the following year when the northeast monsoon brought torrential rain to the city .

Once an integral part of the socio-economic and cultural life of the city , the Cooum is now just a drain with encroachments, garbage and sewage sapping out its life.Experts say , at present, around 30% of the city's raw sewage falls into the Cooum.

"But the recent spell of rain has breathed life into it," said a senior faculty at the Centre for Water Resources, Anna University . She explained the reason: "The natural flow is obstructed by two factors: Formation of sand bars at its mouth before it enters the sea, and pollution. Rain increases the velocity of the flow, helping the river break these sand formations," she said, adding, "The flow is usually more rapid when the tide is low." The sand bars are formed by dredging activity of the harbor nearby .

Experts say every year, the Cooum flows for around 15 days after a good monsoon. Officials in the state public works department estimate the natural de-silting must have saved the government more than Rs 20 crore, even as the rain battered it on other fronts.

Efforts to restore the Cooum first began in 1872 under the British. What followed was a century of draining public money into projects that either ran into rough weather or just failed to take off.

"The river may look clean now, but the waste has just been dumped into the sea," said T K Ramkumar, an advocate who has studied the waterway for 20 years. "Copying a western model will not work here because of the density of the population here and the geography ," he said.Ramkumar said the immediate step the government should take is to chalk out a map showing breaches, where the water stagnates in catchments areas and the reasons.

"They also need to identify sewage outfalls and take measures to plug them and fine those found illegally letting out sewage." Removing encroachments and rehabilitating slum dwellers, experts say, should be done in a phased manner.