Bengaluru water crisis: How booming real estate projects have deepened the crisis (2024)

Months ahead of summer, Bengaluru is already reeling from an unprecedented water crisis, with apartment owners scrambling for water, amidst dried-up borewells and overburdened tanker services.

While property prices remain on an uptick in the city, the burden of unplanned development and the infrastructural boom have worsened the water crisis, experts say.

Even people who have paid upwards of Rs 2 crore for an apartment in a posh gated society, now only have water for limited slots per day.

In complexes like Mantri Espana, an email circulated by the resident welfare association, accessed by Moneycontrol, mentioned that the project has not been getting a single drop of water for the past 30 hours.

A techie who migrated from Kerala, and chose to remain anonymous said: "We sold our family property and bought an apartment in Bengaluru with a Rs-1 crore loan. Except for the property prices today, nothing has improved here."

Unplanned development within available resources

A major part of Bengaluru is connected to piped water supply from the Kaveri river. The city receives 1,450 million litres per day (MLD) of water from the river. Yet, it is short of 1,680 MLD.

Raj Bhagat, a conservation expert, said, "The major water reservoirs around rivers in Bengaluru, like Kaveri and Dakshina Pinakini , have received good rainfall in the last three years. However, this year, with low rainfall, the urban areas are feeling the pinch of falling water capacity."

Added to it, the unprecedented growth in Bengaluru has dented the balance between consumption and availability. In 2007, 110 villages were added to Bengaluru, spread across Mahadevapura, Yelahanka, South, and RR Nagar zones.

"However, this was done without any concrete water management planning or assessment of groundwater levels. Thus the groundwater has been falling over the years in urban areas ," Bhagat said.

Interestingly, parts of urban Bengaluru that face the problem are the upcoming or recently developed areas surrounding the IT corridor, like Whitefield, Sarjapura and parts of the dense city centres.

Water activist Vishwanath Srikantaiah Added: "The older parts of Bengaluru that have been well-planned, like Jayanagar, have sufficient groundwater levels. It is the new and expanding urban pockets that face the brunt of the crisis today."

To add to it, piped water is only available in parts of the city and the new additions to city limits in 2007 continue to stay without piped water supply. They rely primarily on borewells, which are drying, albeit slowly, and water tankers.

However, even tankers get water from commercial borewells in parts of the older city that have high water tables, remarked Srinivas Alavilli, former head of civic participation, Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy. Thus the gradually growing IT corridors with a booming real estate depend completely on groundwater.

Srikantaiah said Kaveri has enough water to last till the next monsoon. "If we have 2,225 MLT coming from Kaveri river, and we get 500 MLT from groundwater, it is enough to sustain the needs of Bengaluru. And if we can treat the waste water to a high standard, we will have enough water for 41 million people for the next decades."

Outcry for water management

Dr A Ravindra, former chief secretary and former chairman of Bangalore Development Authority (BDA), said groundwater exploitation has becomeuncontrollable today, with upcoming real-estate developments.

"If we build high-rises 30 km away from the city centre, which is still outside city corporation limits, the green cover and agricultural land in between will slowly develop into real-estate pockets. Such upcoming pockets do not have the necessary regulations in place to check for available resources like water," he said.

Experts say it is just not an impact of climate change, and hot summers but also a lack of proper civic planning.

"Cities like New York, Sydney, and Stockholm, among many others, have platforms where government bodies implement water management by assessing available resources. In Bengaluru, we do not see much to even assess the consumption and available resources. Ideally, the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB), local municipal corporation, the Karnataka Ground Water Authority and Karnataka State Pollution Control Board (KSPCB) should come together to do such micro-management," Srikantaiah added.

Not to mention, the miserable state of Bengaluru's lakes has reduced the water-carrying capacities of both the groundwater table and surrounding borewells. Data from KSPCB shows that, in July 2023, out of the 41 lakes surveyed, a staggering 39 were graded Class-E, representing a hazardous level of pollution.

Dr TV Ramachandra, a scientist at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), said 45 percent of Bengaluru is dependent on groundwater. "With unplanned real estate and lack of water management, we have escalated the water crisis 1,000 times today. We have 15 TMC (one thousand million cubic feet of rain) of rainwater available and the city requires 18 TMC of water. Thus, a lot of water is available in the form of rain. However, there are fewer lakes and more concrete to recharge the groundwater."

Researchers from IISc point out thatBengaluru sawa 1,055 percent increase in concretisation and a loss of 79 percent of water bodies in the last four decades.

After the Sarakki Lake, one of the major lakes in the city was rejuvenated three years back, Ramachandra said. After this, the groundwater level in the area improved by 300 feet.

"However, we continue to choke the city with construction activities and exploitation of resources without a need to decongest, which is the need of the hour," he said.