Demonstration showcasing the transformative capacity of the Water as Leverage programme

A perspective on how to use green infrastructure to treat wastewater.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVUPLlzjH4I

Chennai has a problem that can be defined as uncertainty when it comes to water. Either there's too much of it or too little of it. Climate related disasters have been actually slowly but steadily creeping into Chennai. It's almost like two sides of a coin: the recurrent flooding that the city experiences followed by severe droughts. One great thing about the city of Chennai is this is not a city that gives up. We see this as an opportunity; “City of 1000 Tanks”, Chennai's first collaborative water alliance, conceived from “Water as Leverage”, deploys nature within the city as an interconnected system of many water infrastructure units that together collect and treat water.

The City of 1000 Tanks has a nice mix of international expertise and local knowledge and talent on the ground. We bring this perspective of how do we use green infrastructure to address the issue of water. We are using the root system of plants to actually clean the 27,000 Litres of waste water that this school generates every day and finding ways to infiltrate that water into the soil to recharge the groundwater. So the school was chosen because it is a very urban location and it seems to reflect the kind of problems that the city has on a much larger scale and therefore we thought that if we can solve the problem of water here, then we could use it as a demonstration model to help scale up in other parts of the city as well.

For the first time, we have a model that can be demonstrated, that can actually be scaled up. If it can work here, it can work anywhere else. When children experience this, there is every chance that they become the ambassadors of this particular initiative for water management and conservation.

We dream of a Chennai where we treat our water bodies, our rivers and our thousands of lakes as precious assets. We dream of a world where water can become a trigger to ensure that equity and social justice is enabled. Then we can make Chennai a water resilient city. And that's our hope for cities across India and cities across the world.