Desilting the Veeranam

 Southern India is facing a serious water crisis, TN included. But the problem is not only inadequate rainfall. Every monsoon, enormous volumes of Cauvery floodwater rush downstream and eventually into the sea because we lack sufficient storage to capture it. We then face scarcity when the dry months arrive.

Veeranam Lake is a striking example of this failure.

More than a thousand years ago, the Cholas understood that water security meant storing water when it was abundant. Between 907 and 955 AD, under Prince Rajaditya Chola, they created a vast reservoir extending up to 16 kilometres to capture and store the erratic flows of the Cauvery system. They achieved this without modern machinery or engineering technology.

Today, we are allowing that achievement to deteriorate. Veeranam's original capacity was *1,465 million cubic feet (mcft), and nearly one-third is estimated to have been lost to accumulated silt. Restoring that lost capacity should be treated not as routine maintenance, but as *critical water-security infrastructure.

There is also an opportunity to make the project serve several purposes at once. The millions of tonnes of material removed from the lake could, after appropriate testing and treatment, be used for suitable highway embankment and slope applications in the major road projects underway in Cuddalore and neighbouring districts. This would reduce the need to source earth elsewhere while restoring the lake.

MGNREGA can add another dimension. Alongside mechanical desilting, suitable labour-intensive restoration work could provide employment to thousands of rural workers while rebuilding a vital community asset. Welfare expenditure would thus become productive infrastructure investment.

The opportunity is therefore much bigger than desilting a lake: water security, rural employment and infrastructure development can be addressed through one coordinated programme.

Veeranam has already waited long enough. Parts of it were addressed decades ago under the New Veeranam Project, but continued silt accumulation has steadily reduced its capacity. Every year of delay means less storage and greater risk. The machinery exists. The workforce exists. The road projects and government schemes exist. What is needed is the administrative will to connect them.

The Cholas built Veeranam a thousand years ago because they understood that water security could not be left to chance. We should at least have the wisdom to restore what they built.