Bangalore
A Look into the Environment of
India's Tech City
Bangalore. In the 11th century, it was a small market place, in the middle of an elevated plateau. For centuries, it remained an intersection between two roads. In the 16th century, Kempe Gowda and his successor, Kempe Gowda II, built temples and water holding tanks. Understanding the limitations of the plateau, with no coastline or rivers, there was pressure to hold a dry season’s worth of water. It is historically reported that up to 285 lakes were created by bunding valley structures into an interconnected network of streams and pools.
The active movement of water created filtration through sediment, bioremediation through the vast amount of greenery, and an abundance of wildlife. It was a veritable paradise, where water was always available. Or so the stories go.
Today, there are many disputes over water. This manifests in strikes, tight budgeting, quantity restrictions, and radical policies to prevent the city from drying up. Currently, the water is being pumped from the Cauvery and Arkavathy rivers. While the national standard is 150 liters per capita per day, the supply can sometimes barely reach 50 liters per capita per day.
New projects to dam the Cauvery river and pump the water into Bangalore is underway, but the projected expense of the energy consumption to do so may consume up to 75% of the project’s budget. In the meantime, all but 17 lakes have been filled, drained, or contaminated beyond use.
There are many reasons the lakes have disappeared; the major reason is the need for space in a rapidly expanding city. Turned into bus stops and residential neighborhoods, the space has been allocated to various other sources. Another main reason to remove the lakes was to combat the malaria outbreaks that were prevalent in the earlier 20th century. Draining lakes was a cheaper, and more eco-friendly, approach than the DDT dump of the Americas.
This was the process in the 1970’s that filled rivers and lakes with anti-mosquito chemicals to combat yellow fever, malaria, and the West Nile virus in America. This resulted in thinning eggshells in birds of prey, and was the cause of decline for many species such as the Bald Eagle.
Lakes aside, another major problem is the desire to try and interconnect rivers. In an attempt to harness the power of flooding rivers and divert to droughting areas, this project was launched in various areas of India in 2002. Experts working in the field are skeptical of the overall success of such a project, and such a radical ecosystem modification raises many additional concerns. “India might have only 2.4 per cent of the world's land area but it sustains eight per cent of the world's biodiversity, and altering the flow of rivers is not the best way to protect the forests which are the sources of water” points out Prof. Balakrishna Gowda of the University of Agricultural Sciences in Bangalore.
In the farming communities of northern Karnataka, the state in which Bangalore resides, the Mahadayi water dispute shows the true friction developing between states. A demand issue between Goa and Karnataka, the proposed channel impacts farmers on both sides of the county line. A similar dispute impacts the Kaveri river water dispute between Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and the Union Territory of Puducherry. Long story short, everyone needs water and there seems to be a lack of rivers.
But don’t lose hope! There are many organizations working on changing what can be changed.
One of them is BIOME Environmental Solutions Pvt. Ltd. I was fortunate enough to be able to meet with Shubha Ramachandran. A civil engineer and water project manager, her passion for combatting these problems runs deep as the bore wells. A pilot project contains a gated community, complete with recharge wells that give water the chance to seep into the aquifers instead of running off the surface and off the plateau. A system of water treatment that uses plants, and then pumping it to the houses for gardening, eliminates water waste. Meters show patrons their usage, and rainwater collection systems are found on every roof. Perhaps too exclusive to be a city-wide solution, but certainly a system of hope and innovation.
“The main challenges are looking at other sources of water like rain water. Managing your ground water, and managing your waste water” she says in her YouTube video. She touches on how much water Bangalore uses, and true stories of how rainwater collection impacts people on an individual level. Families who are able to recharge their bore wells and go off the grid for water year-round. Schools that can remove themselves during the rainy season, and even a few months into the dry, by using large tankers and roof collection systems.
Lake clean-up projects are also ramping up. Bhoomi College, an institution based around sustainability with their post-graduate courses, has arranged several events to raise awareness. Groups of volunteers band together to remove trash, build channels to divert the waste water, and plant native species.
Cleanliness is also a topic on water that cannot be overlooked.
Water that is recycled and sent back into the houses pass through stage 1 and stage 2 water cleaning facilities. There is no stage 3; the facility that removes biotic contaminants.
As a result, water that is pumped into your house is not viable to drink. Some solutions to this include personal filters on the consumer’s end, buying separate drinking water, or simply accepting the risk. This will obviously impact various communities to different scales. This leads to opportunities for micro-entrepreneur models to clean water in slum communities at a minimal cost, such as Pure Paani. Others are creating visions of cheaper ways to test if water is clean, such as Foundation for Environmental Monitoring (FEM) who use smartphones to test water quality.
Foundation of Environmental Monitoring
http://ffem.io/
For every problem, there are many organizations working on them. That is the hope that I have personally witnessed. While BBC claims that Bangalore is most likely to be the second city in the world to run out of water, that claim has outraged many Bangalorean citizens who are working hard to prevent this. From recycling waste water to improving rainwater collections, cleaning lakes to recharging aquifers, the future is full of innovation and energy. There is certainly no lack of intelligence, commitment, or tenacity on improving every aspect of water in Bangalore.