Chennai — India’s sixth largest city — is running out of water. A combination of climate change and “bad governance” are to blame, according to a local climate expert, who warns that a similar situation could easily play out across other parts of the country.
“It’s shocking, but not surprising,” Tarun Gopalakrishnan of the New Delhi-based Center for Science and Environment, told NPR. India’s monsoon season usually begins in June, but was delayed for a few weeks. And over the past five years, rainfall has fallen below average, causing Chennai’s major water sources to dry up.
The problem has been exacerbated by the city’s rapid urbanization. Though massive floods inundated Chennai during the monsoon season in 2015, its displaced wetlands and lakes meant the rain was unable to make it back into the city’s aquifers. According to a 2018 government report, without improved oversight, 21 major cities in India could run out of groundwater as early as next year.
Though water is being trucked in from surrounding areas, residents must be available to collect it whenever it arrives. “Our whole life has been disrupted,” one woman told The Guardian, as her youngest daughter often has to get up in the middle of the night to meet the truck. Wealthier families may be able to afford more, though “gold is cheaper than water” is now a familiar refrain through the city.
In addition to affecting homes and businesses, the lack of water in Chennai has led hospitals to increase the cost of services. Local media also reports that sanitation is suffering. And even with rain now projected to continue through Saturday, its use requires an efficient way to capture it. In 2002, the state government passed legislation that made it mandatory to have rainwater harvesting structures on all buildings. But without proper monitoring, many of them failed to work.
“This is a wake-up call for the government and citizens,” Sekhar Raghavan, director of The Rain Center, a Chennai-based nonprofit, told NPR.
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• The “robotics revolution is rapidly accelerating”, according to a new report from Oxford Economics, which projects that in a little more than 10 years, millions of human factory workers around the world will be replaced by robots. Driven partly by advances in artificial intelligence (AI), the use of industrial robots has tripled in the last 20 years, the researchers say. By 2030, they estimate that an additional 20 million people will be replaced by robots, primarily in jobs with entry level skills. Another factor propelling the use of robots is that they’ve become notably cheaper; Oxford Economics notes that the average price per robot dropped some 11 percent between 2011 and 2016. The researchers also noted that countries like China, which have long staffed factories with low-paid workers, are moving aggressively to replace even those workers with automation. As a result, they warn that the increasing use of robots in factories is likely to most heavily impact workers who receive minimum wage, along with those in low-income regions of the world. This could aggravate economic and social stresses and pose “daunting policy challenges,” they warn. (CNN)
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Short form: India, an incompetent government and bureaucracy of centures standing, simply cannot manage to do anything well. Ever. Climate “change”has got nothing to do with these toads. India does it to itself. Over and over again.