City on its last drop of water

The city is on the brink of a major water crisis. The increased dependency on borewells and the delay in the supply of the much-promised Cauvery water to key parts of the city is eating up Bangalore’s groundwater table reserves. In fact, the groundwater level has gone beyond 400 feet deep and has hit rock bottom.

The city is now thriving on what is called, fossil water.

“If the fossil water too is used up due to increasing demand, it would take about 1,500 years to recharge and replenish the city’s groundwater resources to normalcy!” AN Yellapa Reddy, environmentalist and former chairman of the High Court empowered committee on water told DNA.

The problem, according to experts, is mainly because of an intensively concretised Bangalore that does not allow rainwater to seep underground to replenish the water table.

Though the city receives an average 900 mm of rainfall annually, water does not reach the ground as the rainwater gushes out of the city within an hour, or remains stagnant causing inundation.

Capt S Raja Rao, a well-known water expert and the chairman of Environment and Power Technologiers Private Limited, blames it on poor monitoring system. “We are letting the entire rainwater go waste. There is no system developed to tap rainwater.”

Though the city’s core area of 300 sq kms receives a total volume of annual rainfall of an estimated 2,70,000 million litres in a year (740 million litres a day), most of it flows out of Bangalore.
The city’s water shortage problem just makes it worse.