When Bengaluru turned waterworld

A big question mark hangs over the credibility of Bengaluru’s civic agencies as life turned hell for residents of southeastern parts of the capital, the gateway to the IT hub, on Friday morning when they woke up to flooded homes and localities. A torren-tial downpour on the intervening night of Thursday and Friday was a tad too much for the city’s now infamous and crumbling infrastructure. The rain caused breaches in Madiwala, Kodichikkanahalli and Kasavanahalli lakes, flooding surrounding areas and causing traffic gridlocks that left people stranded for several hours. The Fire and Emergency Services personnel had to use rubber boats to provide food, water, medicine and also to move those stranded to safer areas. The tragedy touched comic proportions when people began fishing using cloth and mosquito nets on a flooded BTM Road, and the police resorted to mild lathi-charge to disperse the crowd.

The deluge is largely due to encroachment along the stormwater drains and indiscriminate dumping of garbage in the waste weirs. In the larger context, as the lure of a better life brought people from faraway to the IT hubs of Electronics City and Whitefield, construction activities boomed along the catchment areas, turning what was an open green space a decade ago into a virtual concrete jungle. With hardly any space for percolation, rain water now gushes into raja kaluves which in turn drains it into the network of lakes. As water from Thursday’s heavy rain stormed into the lakes, the sudden inflow of such a huge quantity of water, coupled with low storage capacity, as the height and width of tank bunds have not been improved over the years, led to the breach. The clogged waste weir, missing in some cases, didn’t help either. The waste weirs form a crucial network, interconnecting lakes and taking the excess water into the South Pinakini near Hosakote, forming a natural channel to drain out water from these parts of the city. Timely desilting of drains would have also gone a long way in reducing the impact of the disaster.

The buck stops with the government for allowing Bengaluru to crumble under its own weight. The deluge in toto has exposed the sheer indifference of the civic agencies to maintain even the most basic of standards to provide a habitable environment. Though the state government formed a separate department for Bengaluru Development, little has changed on the ground. The BBMP, BWSSB and the BDA have collectively failed in placing a pragmatic plan to ramp up Bengaluru’s infrastructure. There is a need to identify the officials responsible for the mess and hold them accountable as it is due to the politicians-officials-land mafia nexus that the city has come to such a pass.