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Desperately seeking water: An old Bengaluru story

Mar 28, 2024 07:31 AM IST

Water security, not just for agriculture but also for drinking, became a serious priority for the Mysore government in 1880s

In keeping with the long-standing Bengaluruean inability to begin any March conversation without referring to the ‘unbearable’ heat, let us talk about a related topic – thirst, the raging summer thirst of 14 million people in an elevated city through which no river runs. The current water crisis has brought that thirst back into sharp focus, but it has always been this way in Bengaluru, or at least, ever since it became a city to reckon with, circa the mid-nineteenth century.

Residents of Ambedkar Nagar collect potable water from a private tanker in Bengaluru amid a severe water crisis in the city. (AP)
Residents of Ambedkar Nagar collect potable water from a private tanker in Bengaluru amid a severe water crisis in the city. (AP)

In 1806, with a generous grant of land from the Maharaja of Mysore, Krishnaraja Wadiyar III, the British began the building of a Cantonment to the east of the 16th-century Bengaluru Pete. Beginning 1831, when the Maharaja was dismissed and the kingdom came under direct British rule, temperature-controlled Bangalore became the seat of administration, proceeding over the decades to outpace every other town in the kingdom, on every front. People poured into the city from every direction, hungry for employment and, inevitably, thirsty for water.

In 1881, after fifty years of petitioning, Mysore got what it wanted – another Wadiyar on the throne. But Chamarajendra X walked into a fraught situation – his Dewan, CV Rangacharlu, confirmed that Mysore had lost 20% of its population and livestock in the devastating famines that had racked the state from 1874 to 1878, brought on both by unseasonal rains that destroyed the ragi crop in Kolar and Bengaluru, and drought from a series of failed monsoons. Water security, not just for agriculture but also for drinking, became a serious priority for the Mysore government.

K Seshadri Iyer, who succeeded Rangacharlu as Dewan in 1893, was less concerned about Mysore’s water needs – with the Kaveri flowing alongside, the city had a well-established source of drinking water – than about burgeoning Bengaluru’s. In 1891, with the Ulsoor Tank, which supplied water to the Cantonment, entirely contaminated, and Chief Engineer Richard Sankey’s experiment to create a new source of water supply within the city (today’s Sankey Tank) having failed, Iyer, along with British engineers, identified a spot on the closest river, the Arkavathi (which rises in the Nandi Hills before flowing west and south to join the Kaveri at Mekedatu), for a new reservoir. The Hesaraghatta reservoir, 18 km outside the city, was inaugurated in 1894; the era of piped water had begun.

By 1921, Bengaluru’s population had grown from around 3.6 lakhs (estimate) to close to 5 lakhs (1921 census), already stretching the capacity of Hesaraghatta. In 1933, just a year after the inauguration of the state-of-the-art Krishna Raja Sagar (KRS) Dam across the Kaveri in Mysore, a new reservoir was inaugurated across the same Arkavathi, at Thippagondanahalli (TG Halli), 35 km away to the west of the city at Magadi. This project, like the KRS dam, was initiated by another Mysore Dewan, Sir M Visvesvaraya. In a repeat performance, the TG Halli reservoir reached capacity by 1956, when the city’s population stood at one million.

In 1974, right after Mysore became Karnataka and the city’s population hit 2 mn, the government took a bold decision – they would pump water into Bengaluru from the Kaveri, a whopping 90 km away, and 350 m below the city’s average elevation to boot. It worked! Today, the inner core of the metropolis still drinks deeply and contentedly of Kaveri water, having all but forgotten its longtime lifeline, the Arkavathi. But the 110 once-villages around it, which became part of the City Corporation in 2008 and include such eminences as Electronic City, Whitefield, Bellandur, and Kengeri, are in crisis now.

Not for long, hopefully – Phase V of the Cauvery Project, which will bring these ‘villages’ into the Kaveri’s sweet embrace, is due to be completed this year.

(Roopa Pai is a writer who has carried on a longtime love affair with her hometown Bengaluru)

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