When The Levee Breaks

Bangalore’s 200 lakes—how a boon became a bane

- Ajay Sukumaran

MUCH water flowed out of Bangalore’s Hulimavu lake without warning on a bright Sunday afternoon last week. It wasn’t the rain to blame, but someone had damaged the tank bund causing untold misery to hundreds of residents downstream. Many became refugees at a makeshift shelter and the list of belongings lost or destroyed—documents, household appliances, cars— only grew. As does Bangalore’s litany of lake woes—the Hulimavu lake breach near the southern fringe of the city was the third of a water body spilling over in about a month. None of them are as well known as the city’s biggest tank, Bellandur, which periodically makes news countrywide for its dramatic visuals of foam rising up several feet or, at the other extreme, seething water. But Bangalore has close to 200 lakes within its municipal limits and litigation over their upkeep is a perennial feature; encroachments and sewage inflow being the main challenge. Occasionally, fish deaths have occurred in some lakes because of sewage and low oxygen levels.

This June, the Karnataka High Court asked the state government to appoint the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI), a CSIR lab, to study the condition of lakes in Bangalore and suggest measures for their restoration.

In Bangalore’s software boom years of the early 2000s, the government created a Lake Development Authority (LDA) to protect and oversee water bodies that different public agencies managed. But the LDA was subsequently wound up. In 2011, the hight-court-appointed Justice N.K. Patil committee laid out an action plan for the preservation of the lakes following which, in 2014, the government passed the Karnataka Tank Conservation and Development Authority Act to create a new nodal agency.