Bengaluru water crisis: India’s most innovative cities are running out of water
At the time Egypt’s pyramids were being constructed, one of the cradles of global civilization grew up in the Indus Valley around the borders of Pakistan and India.
Its grid-planned cities produced sewerage networks, delicate artworks and an undeciphered writing system. Then a 900-year drought emptied its urban areas and sent its population back to a simpler, poorer village life on the plains of the Ganges.
Tech professionals are leaving India’s IT hub of Bengaluru amid an intensifying drought that has gripped the city as it sweats through another torrid pre-monsoon season, the Deccan Herald reported this month. More than half of the wells the city depends on for groundwater have dried up after failed rains last year, leaving businesses and citizens dependent on trucked-in water tankers.
In neighboring Kerala, which catches much of the monsoon rainfall before it reaches inland stretches of Bengaluru’s Karnataka state, a minister has even written to Bengaluru’s companies, suggesting they relocate because “water is not an issue at all” in his state, the Times of India reported.
That seems in poor taste in southern India, where fights over the distribution of river flows between parched states have gone on for decades. He’s not wrong, though. Indeed, these pressures are only going to grow as populations rise and climate change makes the cycles of drought and monsoon more pronounced.
That’s not just a regional problem, but an issue for the country as a whole, and the world at large. The southern states of Karnataka, Kerala, Telangana and Tamil Nadu account for barely more than 15% of India’s population, but they generate about a quarter of gross domestic product thanks to the strong performance of their technology and manufacturing sectors. The global economy is counting on that engine of growth to take over in the years ahead, as China slows toward stagnation.
Southern India lacks the huge reserves provided by the Himalayan snowpack in the north of the country, making water shortages a fact of life. Chennai in Tamil Nadu went through a comparable emergency in 2019, while the current drought is also biting in Telangana’s tech capital Hyderabad.
Urban experts attribute the water crisis in Bengaluru primarily to the proliferation of borewells coupled with the depletion of lakes. Read more
