We should be conserving water, else Bangalore, the city of lakes, is predicted to become a dead city in less than a decade’s time.
Recently I shifted to a new job and moved to Bangalore. Everyone had told me really good things about the city, the pleasant weather, the nice people, and so on. Although the extreme heat was a surprise, the people I found were genuinely nice, polite, and friendly. Soon, my husband and I were even planning to settle in this place for real.
However, while looking for apartments we found out one major problem afflicting Bangalore – the water crisis. I of course had heard about it earlier, my friends from this city had also many times discussed about it. But till you are really here you really don’t get to understand how bad the situation is.
Apartment prices actually vary based on water supply and water back up. While negotiating for an apartment one of the first questions you ask is about the water supply. And yet there was a time when Bangalore was called the city of 1000 lakes! Where are all those lakes now? Most of the high tech posh places have come up where once these lakes used to be.
The lakes that remain now have turned into sewage tanks, it seems.
People do seem to be concerned and worried about the water crisis, i.e. they at least talk about it. And when there is a water crisis for a day, they crib, they worry, and they get concerned about the future. But in general are we really concerned?
Many apartments I looked over while searching for one for myself were built in complexes. And one the features they provided was a swimming pool! Really? A city suffering from water crisis, after finishing off its natural lakes is providing swimming pools? Does every apartment complex, five minutes walking from each other, need a swimming pool?
I accept there must have been a time when people had not realized how serious this water crisis problem was, but now? Do the new upcoming buildings really need them? Can’t there be properly maintained public swimming pools? Few of them in number rather than in each and every upcoming complex. During the festival of Holi, I even found people putting colors in the swimming pools and enjoying themselves. I do not have any problem with having fun, but is that not wasting the water in a very big scale?
If giving up on small luxuries can help us maintain a necessity for us and our coming generations, shouldn’t we do that?
Rich people need their swimming pools, bath tubs, and so on. But do we ever stop to think how much water gets wasted when you take a bath in a bathtub compared to a shower? If giving up on small luxuries can help us maintain a necessity for us and our coming generations, shouldn’t we do that?
Instead of a swimming pool, shouldn’t rain water harvesting be one of the most provided for and demanded as well, feature of a complex? Shouldn’t we on our own part take care of leaking taps, leaking pipes on our own, when every drop counts?
While being in Bangalore for three weeks I have noticed at least three or four houses where the water is flowing away to the drains, maybe due to some problem with the plumbing mechanism. But shouldn’t it be our concern to rectify the problem immediately.
As per Mr. V Balasubramanian, the former Additional Chief Secretary of Karnataka and Chairman, Centre for Policies and Practices, who conducted an elaborate study of the water woes of the state capital, “The 850 km of storm water drains meant to carry surplus water from higher elevation lakes to lower levels in a cascading system of natural rainwater harvesting, now instead carry the city’s sewage into these existing so-called lakes.”
“Only 30 per cent of the sewage is treated by the sewage treatment plants and the rest flows into the existing lakes,” he said.
Singapore while facing with water crisis has put a sewage treatment in practice which in their words creates, “new water.” But nothing like that is happening in Bangalore.
The borewells that are going deeper and deeper into the soil to get more of the ground water are slowly getting contaminated by this sewage seeping into our lakes, and in the process contaminating the water we are receiving. It is high time something needs to be done.
It is not much time since I have shifted to Bangalore but I have fallen in love with the place with plans to settle here. But I really wish I get a chance to do so and the city does not soon become a dead city as many are predicting.
shakhispeaks 