The City That Was

The inveterate journalist maps what went wrong with Bangalore.

Tlhe rainy season has ended in most parts of the country. This vear, too, the monsoon made monkeys of our meteorologists. It would be on time, they first said. It wasn't. After it arrived, it behaved in an exemplary manner for a few days and then it began to play hooky. The people of Mumbai have a certain matter-of-fact attitude towards the monsoon, a sort of - "you do your worst, we can take care of ourselves" nonchalance. But this year their smugness was .... shaken as the monsoon sent down the country's heaviest downpour. More than 60 inches of rain fell from the skies in a mere three davs. Those who are youngsters in the citv now will be telling their grandchildren that it rained not just cats and dogs but elephants and rhinos.
Another citv that was shaken to its homes during this monsoon was Bangalore. It was as though a dam had burst in the heavens. Roads, parks, malls, estates housing Infor¬mation Technology firms, and stylish residential areas were all submerged under waist-deep water. For quite some time these has been considerable dissatisfaction with the shortcomings of Bangalore's infrastructure. The rains showed how primitive in fact Bangalore was beneath the veneer of modernity. A lively debate is going on among civic groups, the media and leaders of public opinion on the lessons to be draw from the terrible ordeal the city underwent.
Bangalore has several distinguished environmentalists. They point out that the citv is just paving the price for turning its back on some basic geographic factors. There is no river near Bangalore. The terrain is rockv and uneven. The rainfall is not negligible. It is a respectable 90 or 100 centimeters in the vear. In the old days the rainfall was drained into the numerous tanks that dotted the landscape. These tanks not only sustained agriculture but also provided water to the people for drinking, washing and evervthing. It was only in the last decade of the 19th centurv that Bangalore began to have protected water supplv. But the city began to grow.
And as it grew the tanks were drained and filled up. But don't think that this was done only because of anv land-grab plan on the part of municipalities and governments.
I remember when I was a schoolboy there was a tank right outside the city railway station in Bangalore. It was called Dharmambudhi. It stank and it bred the most vicious mosquitoes. In Mysore there was a large tank next to the Palace, which was called Doddakere [the big tank]. It was very picturesque, reflecting as it did the lights of the palace and the lights on the hill. At one time it was the principal source of drinking water for the people of Mvsore, but after the city got water from the Kaveri through taps, its onlv function seemed to be mosquito cultivation. By then the eradication of malaria had come to be accepted as a duty and do Dharmambudhi in Bangalore and the Big Tank in Mvsore were drained. There was no question of filling them up: the howls were too vast. Dharmambudhi was utilized for location Bangalore's central bus stand.
The population of Bangalore city in the early Thirties was 175,000, the Contonment, which was administra¬tively a part of Madras Presidency, had another 50,000. Since then Bangalore has grown at a gorgonian rate. These has been an insatiable demand for space for government offices, business premises, markets, schools, colleges and hospitals, as well as living houses. Tanks and lakes have been indiscriminatelv filled up, agricultural and horticultural lands acquired and scrub-lands reclaimed and leveled to meet the demands of rapid urbanization. In the process the municipalities have paid little attention to the fact that when there is rain only a small part is absorbed by the soil and the rest has to flow through natural drainage into a river or a lake.
In areas dependent wholly on rain-fed agriculture, tanks are built by governments, private landowners or communities to collect the rainwater for use in the dry months. When land is leveled and "developed" natural drainage gets clogged up and this creates serious problems of urban flooding.
This is what happened in Bangalore recently.
Even before this big daddy of flooding occurred, environmentalists in Bangalore had been aware of the nature of the problem and carried on a campaign for saving tanks wherever thev still exist and reclaiming old tanks wherever possible. Their approach can be said to be environ¬mental and aesthetic and not so much economic. When a voluntary groups comes forward to adopt a tank or lake, the danger is that there may be a certain flagging of interest after a time. Age takes a toll of the moving spirits. Then there is the other bane of voluntary activity namely factionalism. This is as bad as the bureaucratism which hounds projects handled by public works departmen*s of government.
Agricultural development and sound management of the environment require that we should make the best use of all available forms of water sources. But in our five-year plans we have tended to place too much to reliance on river vallev schemes and neglected our tanks. But tanks by themselves will not meet all our present needs. Even when our population was much smaller thev did not provide the answer to all our problems. Therefore we should restrain the tendency to over romaticise the role of tanks.
A most valuable and educative publication on the subject in Tanks of South India [edited by A. Vaidyanathan and published by the Centre for Science and Environment]. It tells us that there are around 250,000 tanks in the country, which irrigate about 2.4 per cent of net sown area. Their aggregate storage capacity is 15-20 million cubic meters, which is quite small relative to the cultivated land. Without resort to large storage it would not have been possible to increase it by over 200 billion cubic meters in the last four decades. The studv also dismisses as unproven the claim than tank irrigation is less expensive than large scale irrigation. But it concedes and in fact underlines the importance of integrated water¬shed management with the full participation of the community. Apart from irrigation, tanks have traditionally plaved an important role in fish production, especially in West Bengal and Orissa. The excesses of this year's monsoon have brought the contribution that tanks can make to flood control in urban areas. The efforts of civic groups to revive tanks deserve full support, if only because they will force civic authorities to realize that they will have to work with nature and not seek to enter it about Canute-like.
- HY ShanthaPrasad,