Cities, towns stare at ’Day Zero’ of water crisis

Mangalore Today News Network

Bengaluru, July 14, 2019: An unprecedented drinking water crisis, in several cities and towns like Bengaluru and its urban sisters across the State are in deep despair. Delayed, inconsistent and inadequate, the Southwest monsoon has offered little comfort thus far, as urban Karnataka’s near-total reliance on rains lies thoroughly exposed, apart from bad management of water by authorities - a total neglect in fact.

Making it to world wide news, the prospect of Bengaluru running out of water in the near future had triggered a frantic search for alternatives. But did that urgency dawn too late? It appears so, as the dangerously low levels of reservoirs feeding the city threaten to cut-off supplies by September.

This grim picture of over-dependence on surface water repeats disturbingly in Tier-2 cities and small towns of Karnataka. Dried up, silt-filled lakes; discarded borewells that could not find water even at depths of 1,000ft; tanker supplies once unheard of... in town after town, these scenes are now the norm.

In Hosapete, a town of over 2 lakh people in Ballari district, the close proximity of the Tungabhadra dam always gave comfort.

But in the height of this summer, water got so scarce that piped supply was limited to once in four days, only marginally better than the weekly distribution to Ballari town.

 Swathes of silt  :  Descending into the dam’s backwaters, vast swathes of silt greet you to tell a story of poor management and foresight. “This dam was designed to hold 130 thousand million cubic feet (TMCft) of water. But today, 30 TMCft is filled with silt, effectively reducing the reservoir’s capacity to 100 TMCft,” notes Janardhan Huligi, chief coordinator of a Koppal-based farmers collective.

In 2017, determined to upgrade the reservoir capacity, the collective took the lead to raise funds locally and launched a massive desilting exercise. “Deploying earth movers, 1.5 lakh cubic metres of silt was removed. The water that you see there today is due to that effort,” Huligi says pointing at a big pool on the otherwise dry bed.

This year, the election code of conduct had delayed the process. “But we restarted it on June 4, and have removed 40,000 cubic metres of silt so far. The funds were raised locally without any support from the government. The removed silt, rich in manure, is taken away for free by local farmers,” Huligi told DH.

Collective and individual efforts offer a ray of hope in an otherwise dismal landscape. Not far away from the dam, a Karnataka State Reserve Police (KSRP) battalion with over 600 personnel and their families has to rely on borewells fast running out of water.

Thanks to a KSRP inspector’s untiring efforts, a 210x80x10 metre tank is
now being built inside the battalion’s campus by Karnataka Neeravari Nigam Limited.

Fed by rainwater and inflow from the Tungabhadra dam, the tank could soon hold 9-crore litres of drinking water.

Can this be a model for the water-starved towns of Koppal, Ballari and Raichur?

No such tanks are anywhere in sight, as one enters Basapur, on the outskirts of Koppal town. Awaiting intermittent water supply from a panchayat tap, Gudadappa laments: “Although we sink a lot of borewells, there is absolutely no water. In the last four months alone, we have drilled seven wells in vain.”