Opinion
Bengaluru’s water crisis may reflect an even larger one
Summary
- What India’s technology hub seems to lack is the collective will to act in favour of the larger good.
One of the most alarming articles ever written about the epic mismanagement of our major cities appeared this week. It was about Bengaluru’s water crisis. Written by two researchers at Well Labs, Rashmi Kulranjan and Shashank Palur, its matter-of-fact tone was inversely proportional to the article’s devastating conclusions. Sometimes, numbers speak louder than words. Consider that the city’s once well-managed lake systems, which have partly been paved over to make room for housing complexes, malls and the like, could still hold 41,600 million litres of water, but the researchers estimate that “1,000 million litres of sewage is released into lakes every day making it unsuitable for use as water." This misuse also raises the risk of flooding. “When piped water supply was introduced, lakes began to lose their importance," the authors observed in The Hindu.
Bengaluru’s water needs are met just about equally by water from the Cauvery river and thousands of borewells. But, the focus inevitably is on building more borewells, not on conservation and better lake management. Never mind that of the 11,000 government borewells in the city, about a tenth have already run dry, according to another article. As Kulranjan and Palur write, “This is worrying because groundwater recharge rates remain significantly lower than extraction rates." Unsurprisingly, this important article did not make the “forwarded many times" gold standard of ‘Whatsapp University.’
Apathy marks the urban crises rolling across India’s metropolises, be it dirty streets, polluted air or dangerous driving. A book I pulled from my bookshelf this morning featured these warnings: the city government “had played an active role in sabotaging the city’s waterbodies over the years"; that “our government was just not equipped to deal with the kind of calamities we are struck by"; and that “we are a vulnerable people and our disaster management skills are unsophisticated and poor." The passage could have been about Bengaluru, or, more broadly, about Delhi’s air pollution, but the book, Rivers Remember by Krupa Ge, was about Chennai’s floods of 2015.
Our much-trumpeted capacity for jugaad in the face of a crisis is just a coping mechanism to cover our ineptitude. Worse is our inability to acknowledge that something has been rotten with the way we value public resources for decades. A simple way to combat the profligate waste of water in apartment complexes and middle-class homes has been to install water-meters and charge for it. Now climate change and the attendant erratic rainfall that has depleted Bengaluru’s water supply (south India’s reservoirs are all at very low levels) have brought the crisis to the fore. We need long-term and thoughtful solutions.
Instead, in the past week or so, Bengaluru’s state government and water authorities have responded with classic Stalinist diktats. Private water tankers must register with the government and observe price caps. Local water authorities said they would institute fines of ₹5,000 if people used fresh water for washing cars or watering plants. No one is talking about water meters and charging for water, hardly surprising in a city where the government has subsidized electricity indiscriminately. But it is all too easy to blame the government in such situations. The real culprit is us. What India is spectacularly bad at, is what The Earthbound Report defines as “those things that we all own together, that are neither privately owned, nor exclusively managed by the government on our behalf." Water, air and hillsides are classic examples.
In places like California, the response to a water crisis is a sensible prohibition of garden watering. In Bengaluru, the response to the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board’s knee-jerk notice not to use potable water from borewells and the Cauvery has been a shrug. The Hindu on Tuesday featured a chorus of residents arguing that they would not comply. “We have a small garden, which would wither in this heat without water," said one. Another quoted the oddly named Easement Act of 1884 to argue that ground water belongs to the owner of the property. This reminds me of the logic of the driver of the owner of a villa right next to my housing complex. When chastised years ago by several neighbours for hosing the driveway and cars of his employer in a wasteful manner, he retorted that the water was from his employer’s well. Why was it anyone else’s business?
In microcosm, this is how many of us approach urban life. Neither the club I am a member of, nor the building complex I live in has issued anything approaching an emergency notification on saving water. Water-meters have not been discussed. Elsewhere, memes and jokes have started. Some workplaces are reported to have employees gifting perfume to anyone who owns up to not having had a shower that day. At a high-rise complex with water being supplied via tankers for several months now, a few residents, as a juvenile publicity prank, began using the toilets of a mall nearby.
Even as air-conditioned glass towers built as offices for multinationals and the city’s global artificial-intelligence hubs hum with efficiency, it is not clear at all if Bengaluru has either the collective intelligence or the will to escape the crisis it has gotten itself into. I realized I am part of the problem. Well Labs, whose experts are quoted at the beginning of this piece, is located just down the road and yet I had never interviewed them.
