building has been happening since the 1600s, when the british east india company, created the city of madras,na present-day ch in those days, thousands of lakes and tanks dotted the landscape, serving small agrarian communities around them. >> so virtually every one of these blue patches that you see are human made engineered irrigation tanks that they did back to more than 1,000 years, >> reporter: steady, these tanks were built over or encroached or abandod in a world where jayaraman says land was highly valued-- a trend that's been particularly intense over the past two decades. >> under modern economic parlance, be it in india or in houston, texas, what development means is constructing more buildings, paving more open earth with hard concrete or asphalt or steel and glass. >> reporter: for their part,nt resiin these new developments have their own complain. >> we pay our taxes, but we don't get the semuices that the cipality is supposed to give us. >> reporter: harsha and prabha koda have been wting for a decade to get their 50 unit apartment complex hooked up to the city's water and se