Flaws to be fixed

It’s been nearly three years since the BWSSB passed a motion that made rainwater harvesting mandatory in the City.

Despite this, the City’s water crisis remains grave enough to warrant serious attention and harvesting measures don’t seem to have been taken up in a big way.

What really highlights the bleak nature of this situation is comparing it with Chennai — a city which receives much less rainfall than Bangalore, but has somehow managed to overcome water scarcity through compulsory harvesting.

Metrolife attempts to find out why the same initiatives don’t seem to be bearing fruit back home.

Two of the reasons are rather obvious: poor implementation of the law and indifference on the behalf of homeowners. Karan Singh, a member of the Rainwater Club, highlights a third. “Harvesting is a long-term measure.

Chennai took a good five years to recharge its groundwater level, and Bangalore’s barely had three,” he explains, adding, “on the other hand, the water board in Chennai actually used to help people figure out the logistics of starting up these systems; for instance, they would send people over to help install them. I don’t think the government is as proactive here.”

Interestingly, he points out that the BWSSB expects to push this initiative against the threat that defaulters will find their water supply — currently connected to the Cauvery line — cut.

But for people who live in areas which aren’t fed by the Cauvery line, this warning means nothing. “They don’t get the river water anyway, so they aren’t taking the law seriously. There’s nothing the government can hold against them,” says Karan.

On the other hand, this dynamic sometimes works in reverse. Shubha, also a part of the Rainwater Club, points out, “Areas which aren’t connected to the Cauvery line are dependent on tankers — which can work out to be very expensive. Because of this, many of them take to harvesting.”

Most of these areas are on the outskirts of the City, such as Sarjapur Road and colonies along Outer Ring Road and here, entire colonies have pitched in to install harvesting systems.

Another facet of the problem is that not everyone who takes up harvesting actually helps recharge the ground water level. Shubha explains, “The most productive way to harvest rainwater is to divert it to a recharge well, which puts the water back into the ground — thus recharging the groundwater level.

But people don’t take to this option because there’s no way of knowing whether the water you’re saving is coming to you or being drawn into your neighbour’s house; so they opt to simply store it instead.”

There have, however, been exceptions. Shubha has worked extensively with a layout in Doddanekkundi called Ferns Paradise, where the residents have contributed to build 23 recharge wells.

Rainwater is diverted from storm-water drains into these wells and then put back into the ground, as a result of which the community no longer uses any tanker water — despite being cut off from the Cauvery water supply.

Babita Saxena, a resident of the layout who spearheaded this initiative, admits that getting past the storage-versus-recharge conundrum was an uphill task. “The layout doesn’t receive any Cauvery water, so we’re completely dependent on groundwater.

Early on, we began to question how long we could last on that — so we started a water management community and began to build the recharge wells.

Initially, there were a few people who raised the issue of not knowing who actually gets the harvested water. But we realised that in the long run, diverting the rainwater to recharge wells would actually benefit us all,” she concludes.