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As Chennai water woes mount, here’s the audit report Tamil Nadu govt wanted buried

The word ‘failed’ appears 38 times and ‘failure(s)’ 41 times in the CAG report on 2015 Chennai floods – it was a manmade catastrophe.

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In March 2018, the leader of the opposition in Tamil Nadu, M.K. Stalin, asked the government on the floor of the assembly why it had not tabled the CAG’s audit report on the 2015 Chennai floods. The deputy chief minister, O. Panneerselvam, replied that the government had sought legal opinion from the advocate general, on 13 February 2018, on tabling it. The CAG’s report was submitted to the TN government on 1 June 2017. That is when those of us following the flood story first got an inkling that perhaps the CAG had said something controversial.

As the singular official document that sought to audit and place accountability for the floods, this report was significant. It should have been shown to the public as soon as possible, so that all the stakeholders, especially those of us affected by the floods, could learn the truth and take steps to avoid another disaster. Moreover, the city of Chennai had the right to know why it flooded and who caused this flood, and this interest far outweighed any ‘privilege’ the people we elected to offices enjoy. Lawyers and activists who regularly use the RTI told me how information never comes out from the government departments in the first instance. Unless one persisted through appeals, usually at least two rounds of it, what one sought would remain elusive. Luckily for me, the same week a response to my appeal was due, the TN government finally tabled the CAG’s report on the floods out of the blue, on the last day of the assembly session, 9 July 2018. This meant that no debate took place around the report. By the time this report came out, it lost its newsworthiness and was buried in the inside pages of newspapers.

The ‘Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India on Performance Audit of Flood Management and Response in Chennai and its Suburban Areas’ minced no words while explaining just why this flood had happened: ‘The agonising impact of the floods brought to public domain the failure in the roles, which ought to have been played by various Government bodies in effectively managing the disaster.’


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In the 171-page report, the CAG explained the various reasons that may be attributed to these floods. The most scathing remarks in the report were reserved for the way the TN government had handled the tank that had caused the floods:

On 1 December 2015, at 2 p.m., when the Chembarambakkam Reservoir had 3.377 TMC water—which was 0.268 TMC less than the total capacity of the tank—the amount being released from the tank was increased from 12,000 cusecs to 20,960 cusecs. Again, at 5 p.m., the discharge was increased to 25,000 cusecs and from 6 p.m. to 29,000 cusecs. The CAG felt that since the tank had space for another 0.268 TMC, the amount of water released from the reservoir could have been maintained at 12,000 cusecs for another six hours and even then the tank would not have reached the brim. The auditors also came to the conclusion that this indiscriminate release of nearly 21,000 cusecs was made to save illegal encroachments in the foreshore area of the reservoir from submerging.

‘This was a serious failure in operation of the reservoir, thus, contributing to the massive disaster. Such imprudent and injudicious action by the Tank-in-charge as well as WRD warrants detailed enquiry [emphasis added],’ the report said. No action, however, has been taken based on these findings. The report also pointed out that the indiscriminate discharge of water at 29,000 cusecs continuously for twenty-one hours from six in the evening of 1 December until three in the afternoon of 2 December into the Adyar River, in addition to the water from upstream tanks and catchment area, caused a huge flow of floodwaters into the river. It blamed the state’s non-existent Emergency Action Plan—‘due to GoTN’s failure to update its system/manuals as per CWC (Central Water Commission) guidelines’—for the unsustainable manner in which water was released from the tank, drowning a hapless population, while also losing precious water that could have served the city during the dry months. History seems to have repeated itself in Chennai.

There is an uncanny similarity between what happened in 1877 in Adyar and what happened in 2015.

Writing about the great wastage of irrigation water in 1877, William Digby said:

As an instance of the frightful waste of waters which occurred, the case of Adyar river may be taken. Nothing was done to conserve the water in its channel. For three days the river flowed full from bank to bank—250 yards wide at the Marmalong bridge. In the middle of the stream, for the width of one hundred yards at the least, the current was moving at the rate of two miles an hour: the depth of water was four feet on an average. It may be that there was not tank accommodation available for the storage of more water. But, even from the tanks, the waste was enormous. The Marmalong tank at Saidapett (a suburb of Madras) may be taken as an indication of the waste permitted. This tank, when it was seen by the present writer a few day’s after the rain, was discharging over its waste weir a volume of water six yards wide and one yard deep, flowing at the rate of five miles per hour. The reason given for this outflow was that, if the water were retained, some of the banks of the tank might give way. Yet the level of the water in the tank was below what it frequently had been, and no disaster followed. The truth was this: the budget for petty repairs of tanks was so cut down at the beginning of the revenue year, that funds were not available for carrying out such precautionary works as were absolutely needful. The system by which works are done is so unsatisfactory that engineers, though they see the necessity for saving water, are unwilling to take the responsibility of keeping the water in the tanks, in the absence of that protection to the banks which they feel is necessary. They, therefore, choose the lesser of two evils, and, rather than risk a breach of the banks, with consequent flooding of the country around, and much damage, they consider it wise to let the water run to waste, and keep the level in the tank very low.


Also read: Mumbai, Chennai & New York could be lost to sea level rise by 2100, says new US study


A good portion of the CAG’s observations also pertain to planning or the lack of it in the state capital—no frequency-based flood inundation maps, no Emergency Action Plan for dams, no basin-wise comprehensive master plans prepared to respond to challenges posed by heavy rains, no law on Flood Plain Zone resulting in large buildings coming up on the banks of rivers and obstructing the free flow of floodwater, and no updated Water Policy. The report blamed the Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA), which issues permissions for the construction of buildings and other development, for liberally allowing constructions in zones meant for other purposes, resulting in a steep increase in the built-up area. Such unauthorised constructions, it said, shrank the city’s water bodies and led to massive inundation during the floods.

On encroachments, the report said, ‘Despite enactment of a law in 2007 to protect tanks from encroachment, the percentage of tanks encroached, kept increasing year after year.’

The report also pointed out that eight drainage-related projects in Chennai that were part of the JNNURM were not finished because of encroachments and lack of coordination between different departments—a charge that would be made against the state’s various departments over and over again in the years following the floods. These incomplete projects, apart from poorly designed stormwater drainage networks, the CAG felt, contributed to flooding in many areas.


Also read: Chennai’s water crisis is only getting worse, and there’s no relief in sight


This report also blamed the government for not taking desiltation work seriously enough and for not releasing funds for the same well before the monsoon. The CAG felt that the ‘non-execution of works before monsoon hindered the free flow of floodwater’ and added that this too led to flooding. The report concluded that the Chennai floods of 2015 was ‘a manmade catastrophe’ and found that the failures of various departments of the Tamil Nadu government had caused the floods. The word ‘failed’ appears thirty-eight times and ‘failure(s)’ forty-one times in this report.

This excerpt from Rivers Remember: Chennai Rains and the Shocking Truth of a Manmade Flood has been published with permission from Westland Publications.

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3 COMMENTS

  1. This country belong to every Indian who born here so every Indian do their best to protect this country and after power transfer British to Indian and implementation of Indian constitution our army are much strong because every Indian have to serve this country ,so don’t compare Sam did his job and Jagjivan ram did his job very well mannered

  2. Good Article. It is not just the political establishment, the state bureaucracy which is more to blame. Like the IAS, they never plan and are just happy to sit on their backsides doing nothing

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