From the past few weeks, the most
talked about person in India is none other than the “Iron Lady” – J.
Jayalalithaa, a legendary personality who have immensely contributed towards
the two most popular industries of India – Movies and Politics. Mystery lingers
around her illness, 74 days of hospitalization and her death. She was an
eminent leader and determined woman who believed in herself, strived and
reached the peaks in the predominantly male dominant fields. At one of our tea
time chats, my roommate asked me, “Why don’t you write something on this
powerful and famous woman?” My immediate reaction was, “Me? I don’t think I can
write anything that too about such a great personality”. But on thinking over it
for a couple of minutes, an idea stuck me and hence this write-up.
This was back in 2003. My family
had recently moved to Chennai. It was hardly a couple of months we had shifted.
One day our landlady came down and was instructing a mason to construct a big
tank near the entrance of our building. I was curious and enquired why there
was a need for a tank now. Don’t we have
enough tanks which adequately cater to the water needs of the premises? Our
landlady just wanted a chance to vent out her frustration. As any normal human
being, she was not ready to accept any kind of change in life that too
something involving unwillingly shelling out some hard earned money. She was
cribbing about a new rule imposed by the chief minister. It had been mandated that
for all the buildings – schools, colleges, office and residential buildings in
Chennai to be equipped with rain water harvesting facility and not adhering to
the stipulated time line will invite fines. This was obviously an additional
cost for anyone owning a house. Our landlady was venting out this frustration
to whomever she finds in the vicinity.
Being an environment lover and
science enthusiast myself, I just had respect towards the great leader for
enforcing such a policy. She did face a lot of opposition on this. But being an
adamant person she made sure it is implemented to the word. The seeds need to
be sown to reap fruits. And she was in the process of sowing seeds to reap after
a long time. It was not an easy task to make sure the rain water is not drained
into the sea but into the ground deep below. I tried to explain this piece of
information to my landlady but it was no luck. It was equivalent to reading a
book to the bull. That’s when I realized how difficult it is to implement
something in a society of people with different backgrounds and mind sets. To
be double sure that all buildings have actually proceeded with the rain water
harvesting as suggested, government teachers were directed to visit each and
every building in the city and inspect on the adherence to this policy.
It was definitely a time taking
activity but the gain too was going to be ten-fold. Chennai had one of the
worst water scarcities in 2001 and this was the path chosen by Jayalalithaa as
an able chief minister to combat the issue. Thanks to the rain water harvesting,
the water table levels in Chennai improved a lot. In 2005, Chennai recorded 3
times the average rainfall. No doubt water scarcity is still a problem. But,
had this not been implemented, the situation would be far worse than this. In
Chennai’s perspective, there is a very long way to go in terms of water
scarcity, but compared to many other cities, it is definitely far ahead in the
race as most of the other cities are considering this option only
recently.
I
never much bothered about the politics or the policies introduced by the
ministers. I used to be under the
impression that any new policy or changes to existing policies were made only in
the interest of the ministers and politicians and they never serve any purpose
to the common man let alone having a positive impact. But for the very first
time, due to this policy, not only did I realize my mistake; I was impressed
and also understood the fact that power can be used for positive causes too and
Jayalalithaa followed a remarkable path towards it.
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