Water Shortage in India.
Manikandan remembers bathing with friends in the well near his house as though it were yesterday. But as the years passed, the well in Coimbatore district in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu dried up, as did the stream in Manikandan’s neighborhood. One year, when the stream remained dry even after heavy rains, the bike mechanic decided to find out what had gone wrong. He and a friend took a bike ride to trace the stream’s route. They found a defunct check dam in its path — hence the rainwater flowed into the ocean. It was the first of multiple water-shortage challenges that Manikandan would resolve to fix. Tamil Nadu, which is south India’s largest state, and its capital Chennai — with a population of close to 10 million people — have hit global headlines in recent years for both devastating floods (2015) and crippling droughts (2018). The floods rendered thousands of people homeless overnight, and the drought was one of the worst the state — which has 39,000 bodies of water — h...