After a delay of six years, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami led the ground-breaking ceremony for an additional desalination plant at Nemmeli, in the outskirts of Chennai, on Thursday. This comes at the height of the worst drought Chennai has seen in decades.
Late Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa had first spoken about the desalination plant on the floor of the state assembly in 2013. Once set up, the Rs. 1,259-crore project is expected to provide 150 million litres a day (MLD) of potable water to the city from 2021. The government also plans to begin work on another plant with a capacity of 400 MLD, which will be the second-largest unit of the kind, in the near future.
