‘The corrupt gnawed into every open space ... ’
Inteview with Leo F. Saldanha, environmental and social justice activist.
LEO F. SALDANHA is the coordinator of Environment Support Group, a Bengaluru-based NGO that works on a variety of environmental and social justice initiatives. Saldanha has wide-ranging experience in environmental law and policy, decentralisation, urban planning, and a variety of human rights and development elated issues. He campaigns for critical environmental and social justice issues demanding progressive laws and effective action. He has helped various communities with PIL petitions and advocacy efforts, arguing as party in person in several cases, many of which have resulted in crucial judicial interventions.
In this interview with Frontline, Saldanha shares his thoughts on the historical loss of lakes in the city and the unplanned and shoddy system of urban development that has led to the shocking floods in parts of Bengaluru recently.
Recently, Bengaluru citizens experienced harrowing flooding in several parts of the city. You have pointed out in the past that Bengaluru, once known for its lakes and tanks, has lost these over the past few decades. Why are lakes so important?
As dynasties rose and collapsed over time across peninsular India, the turbulence and violence found many expressions, but through all that, an ancient aspect of human engineering survived: irrigation tanks. Through this humble intervention of gently holding back flowing waters in structures which were just adequate to sustain a small human settlement, water was harvested, and it sustained farming and pastoral livelihoods over millennia. A study of the Survey of India’s toposheets will reveal that not a single opportunity for harvesting surface runoff was wasted, evident in the thousands of lakes and hundreds of thousands of ponds littered across the landscape. Each of these water bodies was interconnected by streams, and kaluves [canals].
Over the 20th century, as cities expanded and increasingly relied on electricity to draw water from distant rivers or picked up water from groundwater aquifers, the attention required to maintain lakes waned, and the kaluves, which were living streams, became “sewage channels” or “storm water drains”. As Bengaluru expanded, it could have paid attention to this crucial waterharvesting landscape which was part of the interconnected network of tanks and lakes; instead, it chose to ignore it, which is why we are facing these problems today.
You are saying that politicians and administrators of Bengaluru have made major blunders in urban planning and we are paying the price for it today.
Well, lakes in Bengaluru were drained to tackle malarial epidemics in the early 1970s. That also set off a trend where these spaces — prime real estate as they were in the city and periurban areas — were transformed into industrial and residential layouts. There was no effort to tackle sewage and industrial effluents flowing into kaluves; in fact, that was the default mode for flushing “waste water”. In time, groundwater aquifers got contaminated.
The extensive pollution and encroachment of lakes was already problematic by the early 1980s and compelled the then Chief Minister, Ramakrishna Hedge, to invite the renowned former city administrator Lakshman Rau to suggest ways out. Rau’s report recommended all lakes and kaluves be immediately protected even if they did not have water so they could serve in time as the city
built up to prevent flooding. Though the report was fully accepted and a GO [Government Order] was issued to follow its recommendations, years turned into decades and city planning and civic agencies ignored it completely.
By the late 1990s, the city became the focus of global investment in the It/biotech sectors, and there was massive demand for corporate and residential inventories. Erstwhile feudal lords who held large chunks of land in periurban areas began converting these into real estate plots to meet the demand. Revenue and land use planning laws prevented change in land use from farming to real estate, but this was subverted by employing the discretionary powers of revenue officers to approve the changes. A trickle of such conversion clearances became a flood and soon, a tsunami, as changes in the nature of land use took place all over periurban Bengaluru. This was especially pronounced in the east towards Whitefield and Sarjapur, and towards Hosur where Electronic City had already become a hub of IT activity. Many of these areas are where we are seeing the floods today.
What was the result of this illegal urban planning that accompanied Benguluru’s IT boom?
What resulted was a stupefying mix of highly congested neighbourhoods that slummed erstwhile villages supplying low-cost housing for working classes and the poor amidst which popped up snazzy corporate complexes supplying workspaces for global majors and expensive apartment blocks for employees in the sector. This chaotic assemblage was functional — labour was available for a variety of services, and everyone who worked in these areas somehow managed to get to work and back.
When population densified rapidly and traffic snarls became common, IT heads threatened to move out. To calm them, the Karnataka government spent enormous amounts of public money in a slew of elevated expressways, ring roads, flyovers, all of which were retrofitted into the mishmash of glass, aluminium, and concrete that came to be called the IT corridor. Real estate values rocketed, developers picked up horticultural farms for a song and turned them into high-value office and residence projects.
Thousands of small and marginal farmers who cultivated in the wetlands fed by the lake systems were forced to give up farming under pressure from real estate agents. By the late 2010s, it began to flood every time it rained.
Do you believe the corruption that allowed the land use changes can be chiefly blamed for the chaos?
Yes, that’s correct. In these preceding decades, corruption in land use changes was supported by national and international finance, a phenomenon the sociologist Michael Goldman calls “speculative urbanism”. It made the State government unmindful of the consequences of such urbanisation. Developers gnawed into every open space — erstwhile grazing pastures and lakes, even kaluves, and somehow managed to get building permits. Those who influenced this transformation were soon climbing up the political ladder and are now MLAS and MPS representing Bengaluru.
While TV channels are giving the impression that most of the city was flooded, this is not entirely correct; it is mainly the low-lying areas in the east that experienced flooding.
Yes. The unfettered expansion of the IT corridor was based on the destruction of wetlands across the Bellandur-varthur-sarjapuragara-bommanahalli complex, a huge swathe of extraordinarily rich horticultural farms and paddies to the east of Bengaluru. Without any thought invested into water flow and sewage management, this region was built up in a frenzy. If we had paid attention to preserving the lakes and kaluves here, we would not be seeing such scenes of devastation now.
In these decades, corruption in land use changes was supported by national and international finance.
What has been the role of politicians in all this?
The majority of those who are MLAS and MPS from the city today are those who have been involved in supplying land and have made enormous amounts of money. The ability to orchestrate legal manipulations to divert farmlands and wetlands and encroach water commons (lakes and kaluves) got them a place in the political sun. National political parties have used these people’s financial resources and rewarded them with key political positions.
This is not peculiar to Bengaluru. It is how the IT sector is evolving in Chennai, Hyderabad, even Noida and Mumbai. It is being incentivised further with tax holidays which perpetuate such reckless “development”.
While this year’s rains are indeed unprecedented and could be part of an extreme weather event associated with climate change, Benguluru’s IT corridor floods even during normal rains. Nature has a way of showing up human hubris. These floods are proof it.