The strategy we adopt to cope with the urban water predicament has to be different, and sensitive to the diversity of the country, said water policy expert Mihir Shah.

Delivering a lecture on ‘Urban water predicament in India: A way forward’, Dr. Shah said the nature of aquifer that underlie the towns and cities of India was different. “We need to adopt diverse strategies. Planning in India is centralised and is not sufficiently sensitive to the diversity of the land. Unless you respect the land, water planning will continue to harm the growth," he said.

Pointing to eleven key aspects required for urban water planning, Dr. Shah said people’s active participation was needed for a successful urban water planning.

“We need to protect local waterbodies. In a detailed survey of wetlands in the 1980s, Chennai had 600 waterbodies. Hardly a third of it survive now," he said.

He urged non-governmental organisations and the civic society to focus on restoration of local river systems to prevent fresh conflicts on water between the rural hinterland and urban areas.

Dr. Shah also said the there was a need for the government to create more number of urban local bodies to promote equity in distribution, participatory and decentralised waste water treatment. .

Policy expert Mihir Shah says people’s participation is pivotal for successful urban water planning

The plastic collection exercise, carried out by Tirunelveli Corporation on Wednesdays, which attracted Union Ministry of Urban Development’s attention, has ensured collection of over 89.50 tonnes of non-degradable waste from the residents so far.

According to Commissioner S. Sivasubramanian, who conceived the idea of collecting plastic waste from the public on Wednesdays while ensuring removal of other waste every day, said collection of plastic waste by conservancy workers from the residents on a dedicated day (Wednesday) started on December 21, 2017 under ‘Litter-Free Tirunelveli’ programme, and it evoked a very good response from the public. Besides appealing to traders not to stock, sell and distribute ‘use-and-throw’ plastic carry bags and cups that clogged drainage channels repeatedly to cause untold hardship to the urban civic body, the Corporation started exerting pressure on business establishments through repeated surprise checks that led to the seizure of a few tonnes of the banned products.

Moreover, the traders were encouraged to use degradable cloth and paper bags for packing their products.

When the system of plastic waste collection on Wednesdays was introduced towards the end of last year, the sanitary workers collected over nine tonnes of hazardous waste and it increased sharply in the next couple of Wednesdays with the quantum of collection crossing even 13 tonnes.

However, this graph showed downward trend from mid-January, thanks to the awareness campaigns organised by the Corporation against using plastic bags and cups.