Sustainability in Tamil Nadu

We took the overnight “Chennai Express” train west from Kottayam and into the state of Tamil Nadu. As one of 28 states in India, Tamil Nadu has a population of over 66,000,000 people.  Here they speak the Tamil language which archaeologists can trace back to about 3,800 years.

The Tamil Nadu climate is much drier than Kerala, and since we are not in monsoon season, the climate can be considered “semi-arid”—think western Kansas or western Texas during the summer.  During monsoon season, the Western Ghats serve as a barrier to much of the rain that Kerala otherwise receives.  This can leave Tamil Nadu in a state of severe drought.  As far as I can tell, this is a major concern among the village people living here around Vellore and Kasam where we are staying at the Family Village Farm.

Monsoon rains serve to recharge the water table, but deeper and deeper wells are expensive to drill and are not economical.  This is because the nature of the sandstone bedrock here creates a situation very much like western Kansas and the Ogallala aquifer—as water is extracted from the earth, the sand grains that once held water collapse together, thus making the sediment impenetrable for the water recharging process in the future, thus requiring deeper drilling or new wells.  Since we have been here we have tried our best to preserve water at the Family Village Farm—that means no flushing and few and quick showers.  We hope that better methods of preserving water will come to Tamil Nadu so that the droughts will have less impact, and we hope that in some way our group can make a difference when it comes to this concern.

--Laura Murphy