Water Supply and Sewage
A city grows along its edges like an amoeba, feeding on the rural land hungrily. It becomes unmanageable and the new outgrowths at the periphery are divided into smaller urban entities for ease of governance. However, poor public infrastructure and services continue to plague the residents who have made their homes or set up enterprises in these areas. In the meantime, the growth continues. The state political leadership decides to change course and brings all the smaller entities back into the main city’s administrative fold.
Welcome to the Bruhat Bangalore Municipal Corporation Limits.
The residents rejoice thinking that things will change for the better. But the wait continues. While everything else can be borne, drinking water is an issue of survival. The earlier City Municipal Councils, starved of funds and with no access to an adequate source for water, allowed indiscriminate digging of bore wells. Individual householdsand enterprises still dig desperately and deeper, each in survival mode. However, if everyone is an ostrich and keeps digging, the results are predictable: a water table depleted to near extinction.
Here’s the catch. Struggling to address the needs of current residents, they are faced with the continuing growth of industry and home construction. They have no say in this increasing demand for water. However, local government has a mandatory requirement to find water, and bring it at any cost, to its residents. The two are discordant.
Residents of Dassarahalli, Bommanahalli, Kengeri, Yelahanka, Byatrayanpura, etc and even some parts of the older city are at the unregulated mercy of private tankers for their water. In the meantime, new industry and home construction continue. This is great for the city’s economic vitality, but leaves the government scampering to meet the expanding demand for water.
The state launched the Greater Bangalore Water Supply and Sanitation Project with the hope of bringing piped Cauvery water to all areas. The project is facing challenges on multiple fronts – funding, participation, and execution. The fact is that implementing ex-post is much harder than planning ahead of time.
Government needs ingenuity and imagination to address present and future water needs. The long term requires a workable plan for sourcing funds, implementation, reducing transmission and distribution losses, and getting communities involved.
Short-term relief requires regulating the price of private tanker water supply. However, no amount of tankers can take care of the needs of nearly 1.5 million people though, and more added every day! Perhaps new development needs to be curtailed temporarily, in order to check the expanding need and catalyse a collective concern for a workable plan for water. The government otherwise, will be legally liable for failing to provide water.
Swati Ramanathan
Co-Founder, Janaagraha