India's `Silicon Valley' faces big water crisis

BENGALURU, INDIA >> The water tankers seeking to fill their bellies bounced past the dry lakes of India's booming technology capital. Their bleary-eyed drivers waited in line to suck what they could from wells dug 1 mile deep into dusty lots between app offices and apartment towers named for bougainvillea — all built before sewage and water lines could reach them.

At one well, where neighbors lamented the loss of a mango grove, a handwritten logbook listed the water runs of a crisis: 3:15 and 4:10 one morning; 12:58, 2:27 and 3:29 the next.

“I get 50 calls a day,” said Prakash Chudegowda, a tanker driver in south Bengaluru, also known as Bangalore, as he connected a hose to the well. “I can only get to 15.”

The Silicon Valley of South Asia has a nature issue — a pain point that software cannot solve. In the sprawl beyond Bengaluru's core, where dreams of tech riches usually grow, schools lack water to flush toilets. Washing machines have gone quiet. Showers are being postponed, and children with only dirty water to drink are being hospitalized with typhoid fever.

The big problem afflicting Bengaluru is not a lack of rain (it gets plenty, about as much as Seattle), but rather what often holds this giant, energetic nation back: arthritic governance. As the city rushed toward the digital future, tripling its population to 15 million since the 1990s and building a lively tech ecosystem, water management fell behind and never caught up as otherwise healthy aquifers were drawn dry by the unchecked spread of urban bore wells.

Failures of environmental stewardship are common across a country with severe pollution and an acute need for economic growth to provide for 1.4 billion people, spanning political parties and India's north-south divide. But Bengaluru's water struggle is especially withering for many — and motivating for some who have water sales or reform in mind — because the city sees itself as an innovator. And in this case, the causes and solutions are well known.

“There is no crisis of water availability,” said Vishwanath Srikantaiah, a water researcher and urban planner in Bengaluru. “It's a clear-cut crisis of state failure.”

Viewed another way, he added in an interview at his home, where books about water and rivers were stacked nearly to the ceiling, it is a crisis caused by a lack of imagination.

As public policy experts tell it, Bengaluru and the broader state of Karnataka have been too slow to plan for growth, too divided across agencies and too rigid in their reliance on pumping water uphill from reservoirs along the Kaveri River more than 50 miles away.

Despite a long history of local hydrology — Nadaprabhu Kempegowda, the 16th-century founder of Bengaluru, built hundreds of cascading lakes for irrigation — officials have mostly stuck with the traditional engineering option that their predecessors turned to in the 1950s and `60s.

That is the case despite its challenges and expense. The energy cost alone for pumping eats up 75% of the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board's revenue, while supplying only around half of what the city needs.

The rest, for decades, has come from bore wells — holes about 6 inches wide that act like straws for water from aquifers below. An authority separate from the water board has punched 14,000 of them into the ground, half of which are now dry, according to officials. Experts estimate that residents have drilled another 450,000 to 500,000 into the cityscape, without the government knowing where or having a clear sense of their impact.

In much of the city, the wells are like doorbells, plentiful but seemingly invisible until someone points them out. Drilling failures appear as cutout circles on quieter streets; successes are often covered in flowers, with a black hose snaking into a home down the street.

Spending a day in the cab of Chudegowda's tanker truck offered a glimpse of how the ad hoc system works. At one stop, drivers wrote their times in a logbook while cameras watched how much they took. At another the supply was slow and organized: A half-dozen drivers took 20-minute turns for fill-ups of around 6,000 liters (about 1,600 gallons) just a few steps from a lake depleted to a puddle. At a third, a building owner sold a load to Chudegowda without the wait.

“Every minute counts,” he said as he climbed out of the truck.

His customers ranged from a bra factory with 100 workers to a small apartment building, all within a few miles to maximize profit. He charged each up to 1,500 rupees ($18) for each tanker load, more than double the going rate from a few months ago, which he considered justified because costs had gone up.

Drills — easily hired from companies with storefronts across the city — often fail to find water or have to go deeper now, which means more electricity and gas for the pumps pulling precious liquid from the earth.

The effects, while not at “Dune”-like levels, have become more visible.