Lovely climate? Read this before you move to Bengaluru
BBC, in 2018, carried a report listing 11 cities across the globe that were likely to run out of drinking water, including Cape Town and Beijing. Bengaluru was the only Indian city on the list. Not a single lake had suitable water for drinking, the report noted.
In fact, Indian experts have been warning of the coming water shortage for years. In 2016, T.V. Ramachandra, a professor from the Centre for Ecological Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science, had cautioned that Bengaluru would be unlivable by 2020 due to rapid and senseless urbanization.
“Water shortage in the city has been building up. The current situation is a consequence of years of unplanned concretization, loss of green cover, encroachment of lakes along with climate change and droughts," Ramachandra told Mint. In the 1970s, Bengaluru had 68% green cover, and 8% of the surface was paved.
Now, 86% of the surface is concretized and the green cover has shrunk to 3%, Ramachandra estimated. “This pace of concretization has reduced porous surface area and restricted rainwater from entering the lower layers of the grounds, as a result of which the groundwater table cannot be recharged," he said. Many people are often perplexed at the two extremes—at the height of summer, borewells and lakes dry up, and tankers supply water from afar.
When it rains, large parts of the city face severe flooding. But these problems are interconnected, stated the WELL Labs report. Bengaluru is located on a ridge, with a series of valleys acting as water conduits to rivers such as Cauvery.
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