Train carrying water from Jolarpettai arrives in parched Chennai

Pic/ANI

A train carrying 2.5 million litres of water arrived in Chennai, which has been grappling with an acute water crisis over the past few months, officials said on Friday.

The train with 50 tank wagons (BTPN), carrying 50,000 litres of water in each of them from Jolarpettai in Tamil Nadu's Vellore district, reached the filling station at the Integral Coach Factory in Villivakkam on Friday afternoon.

Around 100 inlet pipes installed near the railway tracks would be used to discharge 2.5 million litres of water in all the wagons to be sent to a treatment plant after passing through a conduit, an official of Chennai Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board said.

The water is expected to be conveyed to the Kilpauk Water Works, three km away which is one of the facilities that feed water to the metro.

Pipes have been specially laid for the purpose of carrying water from the railway station to Kilpauk. Two trips are planned every day for the water special.

"After treatment, it would be sent for distribution. This arrangement has been made for the next six months until the (advent of the) north-east monsoon," the official told PTI.

The train was supposed to reach Chennai on Thursday, but leakages in the valves led to the delay. Jolarpettai is 217 km away from the southern metropolis. All the arrangements took around 20 days of time to complete.

The initiative would be formally inaugurated by Tamil Nadu Ministers later in the day, the official said. Chennai has been grappling with an acute water crisis over the past few months. The southern metropolis is facing a daily water deficit of at least 200 million litres, and the four reservoirs supplying to the city have run dry.

The state government had announced plans to bring water from Jolarpettai by rail wagons as Chennai faces an acute water shortage after the failure of monsoons for the last two years.

The work on bringing water from Jolarpettai was started a fortnight ago and Water Board officials had worked day and night to bring water from Jolarpet to Chennai by train.

The Tamil Nadu government had earlier requested the railways to help them ferry the water to the city.

Earlier, Chief Minister K Palaniswami had announced mitigating Chennai's water woes by getting drinking water supplied from Jolarpettai with an allocation of Rs 65 crore.

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