As the water shortage in Bengaluru worsens, the tech professionals of India's Silicon Valley have gradually started moving back to their hometowns temporarily. Hinting at urban distress, the acute water crisis has made the city life unsustainable for its residents.
The tech professionals in Bengaluru are seeking refuge in their home cities.
According to a Deccan Herald (DH) report, IT professional working at multinational companies have been moving back to their hometowns.
Citing the example of a resident of Bengaluru's Ayyappa Nagar, Sumantha, the DH report said that he and his wife faced severe shortage of water, despite paying hefty rent.
Sumantha told DH adding that despite this, they are paying a monthly rent of ₹25,000 for a flat they do not currently reside in.
With a strict no work from home policy at his office, Sumantha said that he has to occasionally stay with his friends in South Bengaluru to attend office meetings. The water situation is less severe in the southern area of Bengaluru.
Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister D K Shivakumar, also in-charge of Bengaluru development, has attributed the crisis to the defunctioning of 6,900 of the 13,900 borewells in the city.
Another techie, Anita Srinivas, opted to move out permanently. She has shifted to her second home, Mumbai. “Our dependency on borewells, now dried up, and the wait for water tankers made our situation in Bengaluru untenable,” she told DH.
For residents like Rashmi Ravindran who have relied on borewell water for years, there's an acute shortage of water, along with tension in the community over the distribution of the scarcely available resource.
Talking to DH, she said that their family has been in Bengaluru for around 15 years and have "never faced such an acute water shortage".
She said that they depend on borewell water at their Banaswadi home and now it too gives very little water.
“The neighbours have started fighting to get water to their homes and fixing valves in front of their houses. The water flow pressure is so low that nobody gets enough.”
Recently, Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah had been receiving several requests to make work from home mandatory for IT companies.
Karnataka is facing one of the worst water crises in recent years due to poor rainfall in 2023. The Indian Meteorology Department has attributed the scanty rains to El Nino effect.
On Monday, Shivakumar said that the state had not witnessed such a severe drought in the past three-four decades, and the next two months are “very much important.”
