Embrace our Rivers - Chennai Water Forum

India faces huge water problems. Finding answers to these is the major future challenge. The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) expects severe water crises and conflicts in India until 2025. Already in 2014 this was discussed at the world’s most important Security Conference (MSC) in Munich, Germany. “Is India facing its worst-ever water crisis?” BBC News India headlined on 27th March 2016, when the 2300 MW power-plant in Farakka, West Bengal, was shut down for 10 days due to water shortage in the Ganges.

Chennai is a city favored by nature and shaped by water-bodies. But people turned away from the damage done to the rivers and lakes by urbanization and industrialization. Now the water bodies are not only highly polluted but almost dried-out. The water infrastructure has broken down and we depend upon bottled privatized water. With the devastating effects of the floods of November-December 2015 arousing attention from all corners of the world this alarming water reality has come back to the collective awareness.

Asked by the newspaper The Hindu what the key shifts in water management are, the water policy expert Mihir Shah, head of several reform committees says: "One, we must take a multidisciplinary view of water. We require professionals from disciplines other than just engineering and hydrogeology. Two, we need to adopt the participatory approach to water management that has been successfully tried all over the world" (The Hindu, Aug. 19, 2016). This quotation describes precisely how the Goethe-Institut, Germany’s cultural institute, takes up water as a major focus for international cultural collaboration.

The Chennai Water Forum will be an open platform to address the issue of water with a multidisciplinary and transversal approach. Three days of participatory workshops, panel discussions and presentations will bring together people from a cross-section of varied backgrounds as well as experts in water management to create a new dialogue on water.

What can you expect from the Chennai Water Forum? Your academic and professional background does not matter, if you are curious about the question of water and urbanism, then this the place to be. Scientists, urbanists, architects, academics, activists, artists, NGOs, all will come together to talk with YOU.

This enormous potential is an ideal starting point for making Chennai an urban future laboratory for cultural and social projects on water. The Chennai Water Forum aims maximize audience participation to be as participative and inclusive as possible.

• The “My City My Water – Citizens in Action” section presents various civil society and NGO initiatives in the field of water.
• “Practices | Experiences” sessions present case studies from elsewhere.

With more than 50 experts and hundreds of participants from India, Germany and Korea and with more than 60 events the Chennai Water Forum promises to ask some hard questions and evolve a new perspective on water. So make sure you don’t miss it. Kindly register your participation at eor.chennaiwaterforum@gmail.com.