India’s garden city faces severe water crisis

Gleaming new apartment blocks are springing up all over the city known as India’s Silicon Valley, even though there is nowhere near enough mains water to supply those already living and working there.

Many rely entirely on supplies shipped in by tankers filled from giant borewells that have caused groundwater levels to plummet, sparking predictions Bengaluru could be the first Indian city to run out of water.

Once known as India’s garden city for its lush green parks, Bengaluru was built around a series of lakes created to form rainwater reservoirs and prevent the precious resource from draining away.

Many have now been concreted over to build apartment blocks. Many of those that remain are heavily polluted.

“The city is dying,” says T.V. Ramachandra, an ecologist with the Indian Institute of Science who has predicted the Karnataka state capital could be the first Indian city to follow Cape Town in running out of water.

Ramachandra says Bengaluru has enough annual rainfall to provide water for its estimated 10 million people without resorting to borewells or rivers — if only it could harvest the resource more effectively. “If there is a water crisis, we should not think about river diversion. We should think about how to retain the water,” he said, blaming “fragmented, uncoordinated governance” for the crisis.