Bengaluru lakes dying, one committee at a time

The report urged the government to prevent the ecological collapse of a city built around its water bodies by surveying lakes, clearing encroachments, fencing their boundaries, and preventing contamination.

Bengaluru: When Justice N K Patil submitted his committee’s report on Bengaluru’s lakes in 2011, he had warned with almost prophetic clarity: “A stitch in time saves nine.” 

The report, commissioned by the Karnataka High Court, came out when the scramble for land was at its peak, amidst Bengaluru’s IT boom. It urged the government to prevent the ecological collapse of a city built around its water bodies by surveying lakes, clearing encroachments, fencing their boundaries, and preventing contamination. 

Fourteen years later, the warnings lie buried beneath concrete, much like the lakes themselves. 

Take Chikka Kallasandra Lake in Uttarahalli, for instance. Revenue records mention it as a government kharab (which cannot be used for farming) water body spread over 12 acres and 26 guntas. However, it doesn’t appear in the list of 183 lakes maintained by the now-dissolved Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP).

In Whitefield’s Pattandur Agrahara, revival efforts of a 13-acre lake, officially recognised as a water body, have been stalled even as private encroachments continue to expand. The A T Ramaswamy report on land grabbing had in 2006 exposed how land grabbers used forged Land Reforms Tribunal documents from 1990 to falsely claim ownership. Though the High Court eventually stayed the transfer of lake land, fresh encroachments have since reappeared.

Over the years, several committees have studied Bengaluru’s vanishing lakes, each producing voluminous reports. The A T Ramaswamy Committee exposed how influential individuals grabbed government and lake land by forging documents. The Justice N K Patil Committee proposed a dedicated Lake Protection Cell.

Soon after, the V Balasubramanian Task Force (2011–12) surveyed 842 lakes and found 1,848 acres encroached by 2,488 people, while the 2014 K B Koliwad Committee calculated that over 4,500 acres of lake land in Bengaluru Urban district were under encroachment. In 2018, the Environmental Management and Policy Research Institute (EMPRI) issued a sobering state-wide assessment — nearly 43% of Karnataka’s lakes, it said, were polluted or encroached, many “beyond restoration.”

Despite these findings, the bulldozers rarely move. As per the BBMP data, still, about 197 acres of lake land in the now-dissolved BBMP limits have been encroached by government agencies themselves, while private encroachments account for another 121 acres. In Bengaluru Urban district, which has 857 lakes, 730 are encroached, covering 4,229 acres. Over the past decade, barely 250 acres have been reclaimed. Across the state, 14,269 of 41,849 lakes are encroached. 

Even as some lakes thrive, fenced on all sides, the future does not seem promising. Environmentalists say the rot runs deeper as many legislators have direct or indirect interests in real estate. Chances of clearing encroachment is high only when there is no political interest. 

V Ram Prasad, convener of Friends of Lakes, said the government’s recent proposal to reduce buffer zones around lakes and stormwater drains will be the final nail in the coffin. “When even the existing buffer zone norms are not sufficient, any further reduction will only increase flooding, deplete the groundwater table, and erase what little green space remains,” he said.