A Crisis or an opportunity ?
Walking on a narrow a mud-road in Vignana Nagar, I need to
follow a water tanker “watering” the road to keep dust levels down, to get to
my destination. And as I walk in to the
layout I am headed to – a plush row-housing layout of about 200 households on
28 acres - the story of its water begins to unfold.
This layout is right next to the Doddanekkundi lake and was
built around 7 years ago. With no access
to piped water supply from the city, the layout was completely dependent on
ground-water. Six borewells with depths
varying from 200ft to 500ft extracted water from mother earth meeting the needs
of the layout for all domestic purposes, to water the gardens and to run a club-house. The water was supplied after centralized treatment
through a hi-tech set of hydro-pneumatic pumps maintaining pre-set pressures in
the pipes in all houses. All the waste-water
was treated in an STP. In the beginning at low occupancies while STP treated
water was used for gardening, it did not suffice. All the houses were consumption metered,
though initially the meters were not seen as too important.
Time passed and occupancy increased. The area also started
developing with other apartments and layouts emerging around, each of them
digging their borewells too. The yields
of borewells this layout had started decreasing and finally the borwells
started going dry. Water tanker
suppliers as a substitute source were not always reliable. The layout had to
respond. The Resident welfare
association (RWA) started taking the water
consumption meters seriously - and introduced increasing block tariffs. With increased occupancy they had more
treated waste-water and they ensured that no gardening was done with fresh
water. The RWA engaged with people to
control demand. And they brought down
the demand from around 500 lpcd down to a more acceptable 250 lpcd. “In our hydrpneumatic system a lot of water
goes down the flush”, acknowledges one of the RWA representatives. Water scarcity continued to be a reality, and
so was the search for augmenting supply.
Storing and using harvested rooftop rainwater was an option –
but given the hydro-pneumatic pumping systems they had, it was not easy to “plug”
this solution in easily. The
investigations of how rainwater harvesting could help solve the problems
continued. In around 5 years, however,
all their borewells went dry and they had to dig new borewells. In the last two years, 3 new borewells have
been dug. Notably, all these 3 new
borewells are between 800ft – 1000ft in depth – much deeper than their earlier
borewells. Rainwater harvesting now
recharges groundwater in this layout.
The dried borewells are being used as recharge structures – rainfall runoff
is diverted, filtered and recharged into some of these dried borewells. Apart from these 170 shallow 10 ft wells
recharge ground water too. “We
understand that the water recharged may not come to us”, says an RWA committee
member, “but as long as it recharges groundwater, we will not ask who is using
it. We will continue to recharge, and we
will try and continue to invest in recharge”.
Does this story not reflect what is happening in Bangalore
(and perhaps other cities in India)? And
does the action of this layout’s not represent some of the solutions Bangalore
needs for its water story to be fixed? And
I see these stories repeating itself in house after house, apartment after
apartment, layout after layout. Should
Bangalore fix its water problems a house, an apartment and a layout at a time? In every crisis, it is said, lies an
opportunity. Can Bangalore seize it?
Avinash Krishnamurthy
7 july 2012
