Sharfunnisa, 70, a resident of Varthur in south-eastern Bengaluru, has been struggling to rearrange for water for her household’s day by day wants. As the prices of water tankers have shot up exponentially over the past one month, just a few homes within the neighbourhood, all one-room tenements, have now determined to order one water tanker and share the prices.

“A 4,000-litre tanker was about ₹500-₹600 a month ago; now it costs ₹1,000. Over and above this, we need to buy drinking water cans. Our water expenses grew to over ₹4,000 in February. And this is just the beginning of summer. The water tanker operators have been warning us that the costs may double soon,” says Samina Taj, 35, one other resident of the world.

Also learn | BBMP directs drilling borewells in 58 areas with drinking water crisis

Households in Bengaluru, dependent on water supply from the Cauvery river or water tankers, are making ready for the state of affairs to worsen as the city stares at a severe summer.

Ganga P., a senior citizen who lives in an unbiased home in east Bengaluru, says she washes garments much less usually, preferring as an alternative to hold them out to dry within the scorching solar if they’ve been worn just for just a few hours. She additionally hand-washes garments so far as attainable, to avoid wasting water. “I have stopped using water to clean the veranda of my house. I mop the floor daily to save water so I don’t have to buy a tanker,” she says.

Also learn | BBMP makes registration of water tankers mandatory in Bengaluru

Whitefield and Varthur, which home the Information Technology hall in jap Bengaluru, are among the worst-affected areas by the ingesting water disaster. The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), the town’s civic physique, has directed officers to dig borewells in 58 areas that are reeling underneath the disaster. Of them, 16 are in Mahadevapura, 25 in R.R. Nagar, 5 in Bommanahalli, and three every within the Yelahanka and Dasarahalli zones.

No one has been spared; water has develop into a uncommon commodity even for individuals who dwell in posh residences and might afford to purchase it simply. Unlike the older elements of the town the place, regardless of the drought, the State authorities has prioritised ingesting water wants over irrigation and guaranteed provide until the following monsoon, these areas should not but serviced by piped water provide from the Cauvery river. On account of unplanned development over the past 20 years, these areas have been stretched past their capability. Basic infrastructure akin to ingesting water and underground drainage are absent in these areas, in order that they rely on borewells and water tankers.

Karnataka noticed consecutive years of surplus rain, however the monsoon failed in 2023. The underground water desk ranges are depleted, aggravating the water disaster. Borewells are the supply of water ATMs, or easy accessibility factors to vend secure water, of the BBMP. As they’ve additionally dried up, the civic physique has put up posts at a number of water ATMs stating that one individual can take just one pot of water a day.

Down to a trickle

In these areas, water is essentially the most commercialised and politicised commodity. Even earlier than these neighbourhoods joined the town’s civic limits in 2007, the native panchayats had dug borewells and laid pipelines to produce water; these are actually overseen by the BBMP. But many of those borewells have gone dry or the power of water is all the way down to a trickle, disrupting service in lots of areas.

Also learn | Shivakumar instructs officials to provide Cauvery water to Bengaluru South Assembly constituency within three to four months

“The water man (who is in charge of of releasing water in specific areas) acts like a king. We need to go and beg at his house for water. We pay the water board. But he doesn’t give us water unless we pay him,” says Radha S., 45. She provides that the native MLA and former councillor additionally goal blocks that haven’t voted for them. In such a state of affairs, water tankers have develop into ubiquitous.

In the absence of any regulatory mechanism, the costs of water tankers have been erratic. Tankers normally are available in three capacities — 4,000 litres, 6,000 litres, and 12,000 litres. The costs of those have shot as much as ₹1,000, ₹1,500 and over ₹2,000, respectively. For the primary time, the price has crossed the ₹2,000-mark within the metropolis.

Also learn | Mekedatu imperative for Bengaluru’s water needs: Deve Gowda

The value of water tankers has shot as much as such an extent that even residents of residences have been complaining that sourcing water is changing into more and more laborious and their month-to-month upkeep prices are going up. Many of them have began rationing water to flats. They use recycled water for gardening and have stopped filling up their swimming swimming pools. Recently, an inner word by an condo on Kanakapura Road, south of Bengaluru, went viral. It notified its members that water can be provided solely after 11.30 am after the morning peak hours to preserve water.

Prasad, a resident of an condo neighborhood in Whitefield, says their borewells have utterly dried up, forcing them to depend on water tankers. “A few days ago, the tankers that used to supply water for us stopped taking our calls. They suggested that we contact other operators. When we did that, those operators quoted far higher prices. We had no option but to buy water at the new rates,” he says.

Price cap for water tankers

Deputy Chief Minister D.Ok. Shivakumar lately stated that 25% of the town’s water wants are met by water tankers. The civic administration has made registration of all water tankers within the metropolis, an estimated 3,500, obligatory by March 7. It has introduced that it’ll cap the tanker costs after a gathering with stakeholders within the subsequent few days.

But water tanker sellers dispute the ‘tanker mafia’ tag, utilized by determined residents and even political events. They argue that as borewells have gone dry, water tankers are actually going no less than 40 kilometres away from the town to fetch water.

Praveen Reddy, a water tanker businessman in Marathahalli, an jap suburb, says on common, a water tanker’s journey to the supply and to the shopper has gone as much as 50 km from lower than 30 km a 12 months in the past. “If we were taking half an hour to fill a 12,000 litre tanker from a borewell earlier, now it takes over three hours as the water has depleted. The prices that landowners are charging for digging borewells have also shot up. We are working under severe pressure and are unable to meet the rising demand,” he says. He narrates the story of how the residents of an condo lately waylaid a tanker demanding that it unload the water to them at any value.

Jagadish Reddy, a social activist from Varthur, says a decade in the past, their village had been the positioning of economic extraction of water. Varthur had been supplying water to your complete IT hall and past, together with areas 15-20 km away.

“We did not realise how it would affect the village resources then. Today, the underground water table in the village has depleted extensively and water tankers have to go nearly 20 km beyond Varthur, up to Chikka Tirupati, to fetch water now,” he says.

Reddy provides that as a result of fast improvement of the area, the residents had no selection however to permit business extraction of water to cater to the burgeoning inhabitants. “Some villages will have to pay the price. Now a few surrounding villages are not allowing commercial extraction, forcing tankers to move farther away,” he says.

The civic administration has now stepped in to supply some solace to the poor. Bengaluru’s Chief Civic Commissioner Tushar Giri Nath has introduced that invoking the Disaster Management Act, 2005, the administration will commandeer 200 water tankers over the following few days to produce free water to 58 dry patches recognized by the administration.

Of the ten,955 borewells drilled by the civic administration within the metropolis, 1,214 have utterly dried up. In 3,700 others, the water ranges have dropped. The civic physique has now launched ₹131 crore to redrill a few of these borewells and dig new ones within the outer zones. But because the aquifer ranges have depleted, this can be too little too late.

The altering face of the town

While the IT capital reels underneath a water disaster not seen in latest occasions, specialists say this was solely ready to occur. Rashmi Kulranjan and Shashank Palur, hydrologists at WELL Labs underneath the Urban Water Programme, level out that although there are experiences of water shortages in different cities because of the variability of rainfall from the southwest monsoon final 12 months, cities akin to Delhi and Kolkata should not as susceptible as a result of their proximity to main rivers. “Bengaluru is not situated near a major river or coast. So, it relies on an expensive and unreliable source of water that is located 90 km away and 350 metres below the city’s elevation. Half the city’s supply is still provided by groundwater. And this fluctuates significantly according to the season,” says Shashank.

Bengaluru was not at all times depending on networks of pipelines or borewells pumping water from afar or from under the bottom, says Rashmi. “Most of the city’s water bodies were originally ‘tanks’, rainwater harvesting structures constructed mainly to serve irrigation and livestock purposes. The undulating terrain of the city allowed for man-made cascading lake systems to be built; these played a critical role in managing the availability and surplus of water. Despite centuries of effort that went into building the region’s water resilience, lakes eventually began to lose their importance with the introduction of piped water supply,” she says.

Shashank says with fast urbanisation, lakes have been immediately encroached on or are drying out. “This has not only resulted in a more parched city, but also aggravated the risk of flooding. The lakes and storm water drains have also become a dumping ground for treated and untreated sewage from the buildings around them. This affects the possibility of using them to capture rainwater or storm water,” he says.

The lack of the town’s blue-green infrastructure — water our bodies and parks and inexperienced areas that enable water to percolate — has resulted in a major underutilisation of rainwater harvesting and seize strategies, he provides. The extremely polluted Vrushabhavathy, the one river that originates in Bengaluru, and Bellandur lake, one of many largest within the metropolis, are prime examples.

Ironically, as the 2 of them level out, Bengaluru is located between two river basins. To its west are Vrushabhavathy and Arkavathy, tributaries of the Cauvery, and on its east is the Ponniyar or Dakshin Pinakini. But Vrushabhavathy, the one river originating within the metropolis, has develop into polluted as a result of sewage and effluent discharge.

T.V. Ramachandra from the Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, says Bengaluru receives annual rainfall of 700-850 millimetres, which quantities to fifteen TMC (one thousand million cubic ft) of rainwater. The metropolis requires 18 TMC of water, which implies that 70% of the water required comes from rainwater.

“We need to make rainwater harvesting mandatory, rejuvenate lakes on priority so that we can store rainwater, ensure complete treatment of domestic sewage, apply the ‘polluter pays’ principle to industries discharging untreated industrial effluents as per the Water Act of 1974, create mini forests of 1-2 hectares with native species in each ward, and re-establish inter-connectivity among lakes by evicting all encroachments of storm water drains,” he says.

Rashmi says the Cauvery presently provides 1,460 million litres per day (MLD) of water throughout 4 levels. Water provide from the Cauvery is finished in numerous levels, the fifth being the latest. When the fifth stage is accomplished, a further 775 MLD will probably be added to the availability.

“However, water levels in the river fluctuate seasonally. Currently, the reservoir capacity in the Cauvery basin has decreased to 40%, even before the onset of summer. The Bengaluru water board spends ₹3 crore per day as electricity charges to pump the water into the city. Additionally, the feasibility report for the construction of the Mekadatu reservoir, aimed at augmenting water supply to the city, reveals that the project entails the submergence of 4,996 hectares of wildlife, forest, and revenue land,” she says.

Instead of expending large assets to supply water from afar, different choices have to be thought-about, together with these inside the metropolis, Shashank says. “The city produces 1,941 million litres of wastewater every day. This is likely to go up as the population increases. Treating and reusing it could significantly cut down on freshwater demand and reduce the city’s vulnerability to water scarcity. Bengaluru, notably, is unique for its number of on-site sewage treatment plants at apartment buildings and commercial establishments, but there is a need for better standards and mechanisms to treat and reuse this water more effectively. Bengaluru could also benefit from adopting strategies employed by other water-scarce cities like Chennai, which have proactively implemented indirect potable reuse by harnessing surface water bodies,” he says.

Replenishing groundwater is one other essential step to enhance the town’s water safety, says Rashmi, including that to handle the seasonal fluctuations in groundwater ranges, utilising open areas akin to fallow land and inexperienced areas to recharge shallow aquifers with rainwater throughout the monsoon season might show helpful.

Finally, setting literacy ought to be enhanced, Ramachandra provides. “Conservation, waste minimisation, and nature-based solutions should be part of our daily routine,” he says.