In the summer of 2019, Chennai looked like a city waiting for water.

At street corners, plastic pots stood in long lines before tankers arrived. In apartment buildings, taps ran dry. Hotels cut back on laundry services. Restaurants reduced their working hours. Some offices even asked employees to work from home because toilets had stopped functioning.

It was a startling image for a coastal city shaped by the rhythms of the monsoon.

That year, all four of Chennai's major reservoirs had nearly dried up. Close to 10 million people were pushed into what many described as a "Day Zero" moment — the point at which a city's water system begins to buckle under demand.

But Chennai's water crisis did not begin in 2019. By then, it had been building for decades.

Long before the city became a cautionary tale about urban drought, it had already discovered part of the solution. It simply stopped holding on to it.

The years of extraction

In the 1990s, Chennai's population stood at around 3.8 million. The city's piped water network struggled to keep pace with its growth.

Families queued at public taps. Those who could afford it bought water from private tankers. Thousands of households drilled borewells, drawing groundwater faster than it could be replenished.

The consequences soon became visible.

As water tables dropped, seawater began creeping into underground aquifers. In many neighbourhoods, well water turned saline. Residents recalled brushing their teeth with water that tasted of the sea.

For water........

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