the ministry of environment forest and climate change recently cleared the integrated cooum river ecorestoration project of tamil nadu covering a stretch of 96km between the mouth of the river and chetpet railway bridge despite the delay of one year this has come as good news raising peoples hopes of seeing the river which is now filled with all sorts of garbage and sewage clean and restored to its pristine glory however a few experts who have been involved in mapping the historical significance of the river and thereby bring the focus on restoring it feel that there are several issues that need to be addressed to ensure that this project doesnt fail like the other similar attempts in the pastcooum should flush out naturallyvenkatesh ramakrishnan a chronicler of the cooum river says that no project will be successful unless there is enough water in the river to flush out naturally venkatesh says as long as madras is thirsty the two rivers cooum and korattaliyar cannot be saved the people who are talking about cooum restoration are fooling us saying that the river is spoiled by drainage but its actually being spoiled by drawing drinking water from it as long as chennai is thirsty and growing no measures of restoration will work the river is 70km long and if you draw all the water in the first 55km itself where will the water come from to flush out the river naturally two dams on cooum the kesavaram dam and korattur anicut draw all the water from the river theres no river in the world that is clean without fresh water to flush it the cleanest rivers in the world are those which are perennial now theres not a single drop of fresh water flowing into cooum after poonamallee but if the dams are opened the city will die of thirst he adds jokingly the only way to save the cooum is to construct 10 desalination plants and quench the thirst of chennai agreeing with venkatesh is padmapriya baskaran one of the members of a social media page the cooum a cultural mapping when theres enough water kesavaram dam should be let open so that there is enough water in the river to flush itself out what happened during the chennai floods there was so much water flowing through the river that it flushed itself out thats why for some time after the floods the water in cooum was crystal clear better sewage treatment neededaccording to tr shashwath one of the founder members of the cooum a cultural mapping this is the eighth or ninth agency that is coming up with a restoration project the first project was way back during the time of the british the cooum upstream till about thiruverkadu is quite clean it supplies most of the water to chembarambakkam lake downstream all the sewage is let out into the river and it is partially treated at best so the critical need is