C O O U M , C h e n n a i

Chennai’s rivers continue to get severely polluted as lorries openly dump raw sewage into the Cooum and Adyar rivers, and Buckingham Canal. A sewage lorry with a capacity of 24,000 litres pushes all its contents into a dry canal leading to the Cooum river near Red Hills-Madhavaram area. This canal leads straight to the Cooum river. The river is narrow, placid, slow and meandering. The river is primarily fed by discharge from tank and water bodies and has seen a steady drop in freshwater over the years, a primary reason for its present-day condition. However, the core problem of the Cooum has been that due to the sand bar, the river mouth near the Napier Bridge gets blocked for most of the time, preventing the river water from draining into the sea. This has, eventually, made the river, in its 18-km-long stretch in the central district, a stinking cesspool. Nearly 30 per cent of the estimated 55 million litres (15,000,000 US gal) of untreated sewage being let into the waterways of Chennai daily, including by Chennai Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board, gets into the Cooum river. About 60 per cent of the untreated sewage gets into the Buckingham Canal and the Adyar River takes the rest. In 2010, about 340 sewage outfalls into the waterways were identified. Of them, more than 130 sewage outfalls were in the Cooum River and a majority of them were between Aminjikarai and Nungambakkam. In some of the spots in areas such as Maduravoyal, more than 7 tonnes of municipal solid waste is being dumped in the river every day.