Tankers trying to fill their bellies bounced across the dry lakes of India’s booming tech capital. Their bleary-eyed drivers waited in line to sip what they could from wells dug a mile deep in dusty lots between application offices and apartment towers called bougainvilleas — all built before sewage and water lines arrived.
At a well, where neighbors mourned the loss of a mango grove, a handwritten diary listed the waters of a crisis: 3:15 and 4:10 one morning. 12:58, 2:27 and 3:29 the next.
“I get 50 calls a day,” said Prakash Chudegowda, a tanker driver in south Bangalore, also known as Bangalore, as he connected a pipe to the well. “I can only make it to 15.”
South Asia’s Silicon Valley has a nature problem—a pain point that software can’t solve. In the sprawl beyond Bangalore’s core, where dreams of tech riches usually thrive, schools don’t have water to flush toilets. The washing machines have been quiet. Showers are postponed and children with only dirty water to drink are hospitalized with typhoid fever.
The big problem plaguing Bangalore is not a lack of rain (it gets plenty, about as much as Seattle), but rather what often holds this giant, energetic nation back: arthritic governance. As the city raced toward the digital future, tripling its population to 15 million since the 1990s and building a vibrant tech ecosystem, water management lagged behind and never moved forward as otherwise healthy aquifers dried up from uncontrolled spread of urban drilling.
Failures of environmental management are common in a country with severe pollution and a strong need for economic growth to cater for 1.4 billion people, spanning political parties and India’s north-south divide. But Bangalore’s water fight is especially vexing for many — and motivating for some with water sales or reform on their minds — because the city sees itself as an innovator. And in this case, the causes and solutions are known.
“There is no water availability crisis,” said Viswanath Srikanthaya, a water researcher and urban planner in Bangalore. “It is a clear crisis of state failure.”
If we look at it another way, he added in an interview at his home, where books about water and rivers were stacked almost to the ceiling, it’s a crisis caused by a lack of imagination.
As public policy experts say, Bengaluru and the wider state of Karnataka have been too slow to plan for development, too divided among agencies and too rigid in their reliance on pumping water uphill from reservoirs along the Kaveri River that is more than 50 miles away.
Despite a long history of local hydrology — Nadaprabhu Kempegowda, Bengaluru’s 16th-century founder, built hundreds of cascading lakes for irrigation — officials have mostly stuck with the traditional engineering option their predecessors turned to in the 1950s and the 60’s.
This is despite its challenges and costs. Energy costs for pumping alone consume 75 percent of the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board’s revenue, while providing only about half of what the city needs.
The rest, for decades, has come from drilled wells — holes about six inches wide that act as straws for water from the aquifers below. An authority separate from the water board has drilled 14,000 of them into the ground, half of which are now dry, officials said. Experts estimate that residents have punched another 450,000 to 500,000 into the urban landscape, without the government knowing where or having a clear sense of their impact.
In much of the city, wells are like bells, plentiful but seemingly invisible until someone points them out. Bore failures appear as cut-out cycles on quieter roads. Hits are often covered in flowers, with a black hose going into a house down the road.
Spending a day in the cabin of Mr. Chudegowda’s tanker offered a taste of how the ad hoc system works. At one stop, drivers wrote down their times in a logbook while cameras tracked how much they got. In the other, the supply was slow and organized: Half a dozen drivers made 20-minute turns to fill about 6,000 liters, or about 1,600 gallons, just steps from a lake that had drained into a puddle. In the third, a building owner sold a load to Mr. Chudegowda without waiting.
“Every minute counts,” he said as he got out of the truck.
His clients ranged from a bra factory with 100 workers to a small apartment building, all within a few miles to maximize profit. He charged each as much as 1,500 rupees ($18) for each tanker load, more than double the tariff a few months ago, which he saw as justified because costs had risen.
Drillers — readily hired by companies with storefronts around town — often fail to find water or must go deeper now, which means more electricity and gas for the pumps that pull precious liquid from the earth.
The effects, while not at dune-like levels, have become more visible in recent weeks, especially in the tech corridors, with luxury apartments, slums, mobile phone shops, malls, IVF clinics and the glittering offices.
In Whitefield, a bustling software hub, Sumedha Rao, a teacher at a new public school, volunteered to ask her class of 12-year-olds about their experiences with water scarcity. The corridors were painted in bright colors with words of encouragement — resilience, citizenship, collaboration. In class, they were asked how often they have water at home.
“One day a week, ma’am,” said a girl with pigtails.
“We’ve just got a bucket,” said a boy near the back.
“There is no water in the wells,” cried another.
Many take small amounts of drinking water from the school taps for their families — only one bottle of water per child, because it is all the school can provide. Behind a play area the color and consistency of ground ginger sat a huge pile of metal: a broken well.
“The engine stopped working,” said Shekar Venkataswamy, a physical education teacher with a bandit mustache.
Walking home behind the school, he pointed to a dry hole where the drill failed and one where it worked. A few thousand families take turns using the water for an hour each, in a complex, tightly controlled schedule.
Community leaders expressed pride in how they handled the crisis, softening the blow of the sacrifices. Many others have been inspired to take wider action.
One morning, four tech workers turned water activists showed up at a northern corner of the city where Mr. Srikanthaya, the water researcher, had worked with the local community to revitalize a once trashed lake. A small network of gurgling filters and pipes sends 200,000 liters of drinking water a day.
“Soon it will be 600,000,” Mr Srikanthaya said. And the price per customer: almost a third of what tanker drivers charge.
Tech workers said they planned to share the details with neighbors and officials to spread the word that a lake, using rainwater and lightly treated sewage, could be turned into a safe, affordable, reliable water source.
In an interview in his office, water board chairman Ram Prasath Manohara, 43, a seasoned government administrator who installed three months ago, embraced the idea.
Acknowledging that some past officials have thought narrowly about water management, he said he hopes to attract public and private money for a more innovative approach, mixing data-driven methods that would rejuvenate lakes to let aquifers recharge and expand collection and rainwater conservation.
“We’re going for a greener solution,” he said. “A more efficient solution.”
So far, however, progress has been slow. He has been unable to hire additional staff, he said, and works from 6 a.m. to 2 a.m. every day.
Short-term relief, he prays, will come in the coming weeks, with reservoir water expanding to more parts of the city and expected spring rains. Above all, like many others in India’s Silicon Valley, he hopes that all the public attention to water scarcity will spur long-term change.
In a corner of his offices, a quote from Benjamin Franklin was printed on a piece of paper and taped to a window: “When the well is dry, we know the value of water.”
“This crisis,” he said, rubbing his tired eyes, “gives us a chance.”
Imran Khan Pathan contributed reporting.
