A new dawn in the making

It beggars belief that a revolutionary set of water reforms can come from a government agency like the BWSSB. What it has announced mid-June is far-reaching in the change that it will wreak on the very way we think of water and its use in Bangalore.
You have spent enough time reading the torrent of material that Crossover has—indeed all newspapers have—featured on water shortages, and on all things you should be doing to conserve and be use-conscious. You should now be weary of another turgid report on what you should be—or ought not to be—doing to harvest and conserve water.
Picture the new scenario that will soon emerge when BWSSB puts into practice the new regime.
The Board now says that it will ‘ration’ the supply of drinking and washing water.
This means that all new homes should have separate connections for the two ‘types’ of water. The Board says that it will supply only 30 litres of drinking water and 120 litres of treated water per person per day. Anything more than 30 litres of drinking water will be charged at a far higher price.
Clearly, this augurs a new dawn; a future where you prize water as you’ve never done before. Where this precious liquid will be monetised in a way that you will pay dearly if you are indulgent, wasteful, or not conscious of its value.
The Board has further thought this process out. So what happens to the water that goes down the drain at home? The new regime has made it mandatory for all new residential enclaves—and that includes apartments—to have small sewage tertiary treatment plants.
Typically such treatment systems claim no more than 300-500 sq. feet of space for a building that will house a small clutch of equipment that treats and clarifies the water, and even eliminates completely the pathogenic content of water with chlorination or the more effective ozonation process.
You can actually drink the water, as this writer did at one such treatment plant—but then, few humans will accept use of water for anything but garden irrigation.
Look at its impact on the city. The Board today supplies about 350 million litres a day [MLD]. The city draws upward of 450 MLD from borewells. The new order will make it sustainable because each enclave will now be self-sufficient, and use of water will fall by 50 per cent—that’s about 400 MLD—simply because all water used will be recycled and reused. Of course, this will take some time, may be five years.
This is a radical change from the past. And this is a future that will hugely ease the burden on supply of water.
This direction makes sense because the BWSSB has no magic wand. It is dependent on water from Cauvery, or a fistful of tanks, like TG Halli, that originally supplied water to a sleepy little town of another time. You cannot expect the Board to ‘manufacture’ water. Besides, there are many issues that dog BWSSB’s management, which is beyond this discussion’s pale.
If the pace at which water is being drawn by every resident from the rapidly depleting groundwater table—the city has about 100,000 borewells today—continues, we will have a city that will get as bad as it has got in Ahmedabad, or Chennai.
Remember, too, that use of these borewells has another disastrous implication: at an average of even two hours of use, it means an energy drain of 200,000 KWh, or about 200–250 MW of power every day, most of it in the peak load hours. At current energy consumption of the city, this represents a chunky 10 per cent.
If it is any consolation to you, stay a day or two in Dubai or Sharjah—it’s worse in other emirates. There is not a single tap in any home that gets anything but saline water. You have to buy fresh water in cans and bottles. Take Singapore. The regimen is as tough as it can get, because as a nation-state with virtually no landmass, it has to import water from neighboring Malaysia. God help Singapore if the world regressed to a point where the two neighbours went to war.
What the BWSSB has set out to do is an initiative that the world will wake up to, soon. As citizens of a beleaguered city, will we all see its significance? —Editor