It was after an almost month-long struggle that residents of the West Kochi region of the Kochi Municipal Corporation (KMC) finally received water in their pipelines on Wednesday, March 1. Faulty pumps at the Kerala Water Authority (KWA) pump house in Ernakulam district’s Pazhoor, from where water from the Muvattupuzha River is pumped to parts of Kochi Corporation , the nearby Maradu Municipality, and the panchayats of Kumbalam, Kumbalangi, and Chellanam, had brought life to a stand still in many of these areas. As clean, potable water became hard to come by, residents had to rely on water tankers and expensive canned water for their daily needs.
Two of the three 804 HP pumps at KWA’s Pazhoor pump house broke down on January 28 but many parts of the region were already experiencing water shortage. The KWA, responsible for providing drinking water, had a major task at hand. The pumps that were repaired at Mulanthuruthy and Puthenvelikara need to be secured 51-feet below the ground. While pump 2 was repaired and trial run completed on February 28, pump 1 will only be ready by March 8. “While water has started reaching people on Tuesday itself, it might take a week for it to fully reach its tail ends,” says KWA Executive Engineer for Kochi PH division. TNM spoke to West Kochi residents on the issue.
When TNM visited Telma Thankachan (57) at her home near Kanal Road in Fort Kochi on Wednesday morning, she had just finished a large load of laundry. Washing clothes had been a luxury these past weeks, when Telma and her family, which consists of her husband, son, and two school-going grandchildren, struggled to find water to drink and cook. “We were told that we would get water only on alternate days from February 5, on account of the faulty pumps. But no water came for several days. When it did come, it was severely contaminated and wasn’t fit for use,” she recounts.
Telma drying clothes on March 1. Washing clothes had been a luxury in the past month
Residents of Kanal Road say that the water they got one day came in three different colours. “At first it was white soapy water, then black, and finally muddy,” Telma says, as prologue to the story of how her family and an entire neighbourhood fell ill at the same time. “On February 7, I fell ill and fainted, with a serious case of diarrhoea. I was taken to the hospital and administered IV fluid. As soon as I got home, my youngest granddaughter, followed by my son, husband, and other granddaughter, all fell ill and had to be taken to the hospital,” she recollects, adding that this was the case in every house in her neighbourhood. Their neighbour Judy Miranda, who have four-month-old and three-year-old children, were badly affected and had to shift to their relative’s house in Ernakulam as the pump repair in Pazhoor dragged on.
Over the next few weeks, Telma’s family depended on canned water, bought at Rs 60 per 20 litres, for their daily needs. “We would buy two cans every day, and use that for drinking, cooking, and for my grandchildren to bath, so that they could go to school. An expense of Rs 120 per day was more than we could afford, but we had no other choice,” she says.
West Kochi is also known for two prominent tourist spots, the Fort Kochi and Mattancherry, which witnesses heavy footfall of international and domestic tourists every year and hosts an international art event every two years — the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, the fifth edition of which is currently on. The 2015 Water Policy for the Kochi Municipal Corporation, which spends crores annually to distribute water in tankers in the region, had acknowledged there is a large gap between demand and supply. The water demand for west Kochi, which consists of wards 1-30 of the KMC, which has a total of 72 wards, comes to around 100 Million Litres per Day (200 litres per person per day), said a KWA official, though officially the demand is calculated as 70MLD. However, the total water supplied to the area is only around 52 MLD, or lower due to distribution loss. While 22 MLD comes from Pazhoor through the Maradu Treatment Plant, the remaining comes from Aluva through Perumanoor and Elamkulam.
The district administration and the KWA arranged water tankers for Kochi residents following protests in various neighbourhoods. But for those like Telma, whose house is located on a narrow by lane that barely allows a two-wheeler to pass, carrying full pots of water to their homes, in her case on the first storey, was a strenuous task. A tailor who stopped practising the trade on her doctor’s advice following shoulder pain, Telma sat massaging her right shoulder with her left arm as we spoke. The weeks of carrying water down the road and up the flight of stairs hasn’t been kind on her shoulder.
The residents of Thuruthi, another Fort Kochi neighbourhood, have been struggling for water for much longer than Telma. “It all started on January 11,” remembers 60-year-old Zakina. The water shortage in Thuruthi, which began in early January, was caused as much by broken pipelines as by the faulty pumps in Pazhoor. As they finish off breakfast on Wednesday morning, there is relief on Zakina’s and her daughter-in-law Sajina’s (28) faces, as the family has been able to fill two large drums with water that morning, at the end of almost two months. On several days in the last two months, the family had to buy food from outside as there was no water available to cook. As we spoke, her husband brought in a mug of slightly briny water that had come through the pipes that morning. The family is still using the water collected from a tanker the previous day for cooking and drinking. They are unsure about drinking the water that came through the pipe that morning, because the last time they did, everyone had been down with diarrhoea. “The little water we got gave us diarrhoea, at a time when we didn’t have any water to even use the toilet,” recollects Sajina.
Zakina's family was able to fill two drums with water on March 1
The sickness from the contaminated water affected the old and ailing particularly hard, as Zakina’s neighbour Wahida (44) tells TNM. Wahida’s 67-year-old mother, who is recovering from an angioplasty, had to suffer diarrhoea for almost two weeks after consuming the contaminated water. Shameer Valavath, a social activist based in Mattancherry, lists multiple reasons why the period of water shortage was also one of sickness for residents of the area. “Water pipes often pass through the canals and are damaged at several points. Filthy water from the canals enters the pipes in high concentration when the flow of water through the pipes is low, like last week when there was no pumping from Pazhoor,” he says. Another reason he lists is dirty water tankers. “Tankers that aren’t regularly used for drinking water supply had to be deployed when the demand rose. Rusty insides of tankers also contaminated the water, making people fall ill,” he adds. Reports also suggested that tankers collected water from unauthorised and unclean water collection points.
Vincy, Zakina’s elder daughter-in-law, who is pregnant, had shifted to her mother’s house in Mattancherry almost a month ago at the height of the water shortage. Many other residents in the area too shifted to relatives’ places elsewhere as the water crisis showed no signs of ending. Zakina’s neighbour Suhara (60) would go to her daughter’s house in Palluruthy multiple times a week to bath and wash clothes. A joint family with eight members, Suhara’s household needed to buy a Rs 60 can every day for drinking and cooking. The charges towards auto rickshaw transport to her daughter’s house would come to Rs 400-500 every week. This means that her family, and many others like them, incurred a considerable additional expense every week for the past two months. Yet, at the end of the month, many families in Thuruthi received a water bill from KWA. Wahida, who got a bill of around Rs 270, alleges, “There has been no water for the past month. But every time we ran the motor in the hope of getting some water from the pipes, the metre would turn as the air flowed in. Both water and electricity bills have been high because of this.”
Statements issued by the district Public Relations Department say that 2.8 and 2.32 lakh litres of water were distributed in West Kochi and Chellanam on Saturday and Sunday respectively. But tankers weren’t easy to come by in the initial days of the water shortage, Thuruthi residents allege. Water tankers began to be sent to the locality only in the past week, after residents staged a dharna and blocked the road at Kunnumpuram junction. “Authorities said they would solve the issues on a war footing. In reality, they had declared war on the people, making us struggle till we reached our limits,” Shameer says. Kochi MLA KJ Maxi had raised the issue in the state Assembly on Tuesday, asking the Water Resources Minister Roshy Augustine if adequate steps had been taken to address the crisis. The Minister reportedly replied that the KWA is currently supplying water in a timely manner.
For Suhara and Zakina and the other women of Thuruthi who have been living in the neighbourhood for several decades now, the water shortage of the past two months is the worst disaster to hit them after the pandemic. The people of Thuruthi do not believe their water crisis has been solved for good with the repair of the Pazhoor pumps. “The pipelines here were laid before I was born. There are damages at every single turn. They need to be checked and changed wherever needed for water to flow uninhibitedly round the year,” Shameer stresses. Sajina agrees, “The pumps in Pazhoor needing repair was only an additional issue. Water supply to Thuruthi was hit even before that. A lasting solution will come only with proper pipelines being laid.”
Chellanam-resident Mini Raphael (50) shares similar woes. For 50 households in her neighbourhood that is located 750 m from Malakhapadi on State Highway 66, the effects of the water crisis were heightened by the fact they have no road connectivity. “Our repeated requests for a road have been unheeded for several decades now. Even when water tankers came to the highway, we couldn’t even bring them home on two-wheelers. How many pots of water will a house need a day? How is it possible for anyone to carry pot after pot filled with water every other day for almost a kilometre?” she asks. The neighbourhood survived on the little water that would come through the public tap once every three, four days, and on the water from the wells in a few houses like Mini’s that is yellow but would clear once collected and allowed to sit for a while. “In our frustration, we would tell authorities to send us water on flights as we have no road,” Mini says.
Another person hailing from Chellanam, AJ Bastin (62) says that KWA is the only water source available for people in eastern Chellanam. “Those living in the west of Chellanam have dug borewells and get water that they can use for bathing and washing clothes. Those on the east do not have that option as the land is marshy and the well water is unfit for any use,” he explains. Residents of east Chellanam also faced added troubles during the month-long water crisis because of poor quality of water.
Both Chellanam and Fort Kochi residents tell TNM how many of their school and college-going children were forced to skip studies on multiple instances over the past month as they did not have water to take a bath. Both regions also have similar stories of fights that almost broke out between neighbours as tempers flared as the wait for water brought on tanker lorries barely satisfied anybody’s needs. Those that either didn’t want to wait at the roadside or didn’t have the strength to carry the water home relied on canned water that cost between Rs 50 and Rs 60 per 20 litres.
The water shortage was brought to the Kerala High Court’s notice on February 28 through a petition submitted by Nettoor-native EN Nandakumar. Calling it a “serious” concern, the court told the KWA that it needs to have a plan to address the issue. The matter is scheduled for hearing on Thursday.