The much-awaited train with 50 tank wagons carrying 2.5 million litres of water has arrived in Chennai on Friday which has been grappling with an severe water crisis over the past few months, officials said Friday.
A second train carrying precious water for the city is expected to arrive later in the day.
According to report, this is the first time in 18 years that the city receives water from other places in train wagons.
The train carrying 50,000 litres of water in each wagon from Jolarpettai in Tamil Nadu’s Vellore district, reached the filling station at the Integral Coach Factory in Villivakkam on Friday afternoon.
Technicians in the railway station at Jolarpettai, located over 217 kilometres from Chennai, worked from early on Thursday to fill fifty wagons with 50,000 litres of water each, sourced from a south Indian river.
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.
“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,” an official told.
The scarcity of water has forced some schools to shut, companies to ask employees to work from home, and hotels to ration water for guests.
Bad water management and lack of rainfall mean all four reservoirs that supply Chennai have run almost dry this summer. Groundwater levels in Chennai and in regions around the city have been falling due to lack of rainfall.
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.
