Cleaned and recharged, six wells spring to life in B’luru suburb

After the rejuvenation, the Town Municipal Council (TMC) has initiated work to supply water from at least two of the wells

Left unused, underused, or reduced to litter pits for years, six open wells in Hunasamaranahalli in Yelahanka taluk have been rejuvenated with fresh inflows and a promise of replenished water supply for the surrounding areas.

After the rejuvenation, taken up under the Million Wells for Bengaluru campaign helmed by Biome Environmental Trust, the Town Municipal Council (TMC) has initiated work to supply water from at least two of the wells. Traditional well-diggers, the mannu vaddars, worked for weeks on the six wells — some of them more than 50 years old — before they were opened for the drawing of water.

The rejuvenation involved desilting, removal of vegetation and cleaning, pumping out of the water, and installation of grilles, pulleys and meters to measure the extraction of water. In Kodagalahatti village, the workers also increased the height of a well’s parapet wall by one foot.

Biome said two months after a 75-year-old open well was rejuvenated, the TMC supplies about a lakh litres of water from the 65 feet-deep well, every day, to three municipal wards. The council is also laying a pipeline to connect water from another rejuvenated well to an overhead tank, near Vidyanagar Cross.

The water from a 33 feet-deep well near Bettahalasur Cross is now being used by about 100 households. The mannu vaddars’ work here included the removal of vegetation on the battered grille, which was subsequently replaced with a new grille. “The largely Tamil-speaking community of the area has chosen to manually draw the water, instead of using a motor pump, to avoid wastage,” Shubha Ramachandran, water sustainability consultant at Biome, told DH.

The Million Wells project, launched in 2015, encourages communities to dig and maintain recharge wells and provides employment to the well-diggers. The project tries to address, through recharge wells, the problem of limited rainwater percolation in Bengaluru that contributes to the city’s groundwater table depletion.

In December 2022, the project was adjudged winner, in the water category, at the People’s Choice Awards instituted by international civil society collective, Transformative Cities.

Spreading the word

Biome is a technical partner in a pilot project on shallow aquifer management in 10 cities — Bengaluru, Chennai, Dhanbad, Gwalior, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Kolkata, Pune, Rajkot, and Thane — taken up by the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, under the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation.

Shubha said most of the cities have submitted the project plans. “The work on the ground is set to commence soon. The sites are being identified; training programmes and other capacity-building measures are being implemented,” she said.

The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike is the nodal agency for the project in Bengaluru.