Water bodies have shrunk in past five years

Water bodies have shrunk in past five years

The Hindu

Encroachments have reduced area of Bangalore's lakes and tanks by 35 p.c.

# Tanks formed a water security ring around Bangalore
# They were linked to facilitate drainage
# Their disappearance has contributed to flooding

BANGALORE: There has been a 35 per cent decline in the area and extent of water bodies in and around Bangalore over the past five years. Tanks such as Kamakshipalya and Amruthahalli have vanished without a trace and Rachenahalli is likely to disappear soon.

Saturday's breaching of three tanks was a disaster waiting to happen, T.V. Ramachandra of the Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, who has been tracking wetlands around Bangalore over the past decade, told The Hindu .

And it does not take rocket science to see the reasons for the disaster. We have messed with nature, altered the topography, virtually wiped out lakes and tanks, turned a blind eye to encroachments, choked tanks and disabled their capacity to recharge groundwater.

Ecosystem approach

Dr. Ramachandra, who has organised two conferences on the theme of wetlands, said, even five years ago it was not too late to see the writing on the wall. The ecosystem approach should be the mantra. The catchment areas should be maintained and kept under vigil at all times, so that inflow and outflow can be maintained at safe levels.

But politics, it appears, has willed otherwise. Encroachments have been condoned on nearly every vanished lake-bed and, in some cases, even lakes. The tanks of old, connected in a chain that formed a water security ring around Bangalore, which has no major river flowing close to it, are today sewage receptacles. End-of-the-pipe solutions in wastewater management have meant that the sewage inflow into a tank flows into the next link.

"What is the use of releasing funds for crisis management when the cause of the crisis can never be removed," Dr. Ramachandra wondered, since the Government has never had the will to clear the lake areas of illegal occupants.

Lake Development Authority (LDA) Chief Executive Officer B.K. Singh too says encroachments and human habitations close to or on tank-beds have turned nature's design on its head.

Mr. Singh said most of Bangalore's tanks were designed and engineered with a vision that was a century ahead. Every tank had a waste weir, a reservoir and outlet channel or drain to carry excess water along natural drainages using the topography of the land.

The LDA, mandated to a draft policy and programme on rejuvenation and conservation of tanks and lakes, is no fire-fighting agency. With most of the water bodies coming under the Forest Department, the Revenue Department, the Bangalore Development Authority or the Bangalore Mahanagara Palike, the LDA has been reduced to an agency that facilitates grants from funding agencies under the National Lake Conservation Programme or similar agencies, even in the best of times. Right now, with the crisis showing no signs of abating, it is the civic agencies that need to show action.

Poor planning

K.V. Narendra of Urban Research Centre, who has been involved in the first ever public-private initiative to save Bangalore's tanks, points out that callousness marks even the planning of upmarket residential layouts by the BDA. While HSR Layout was being formed, the drain connecting Agara and Madivala should have been widened. Instead, water was simply diverted to an area where slums have mushroomed. Today the drains are not enough to carry the water and the area is flooded.