Viral videos of a top corporate entrepreneur being evacuated along with his family members and pets on a tractor and luxury cars being submerged in a posh gated community due to a breach of the Halanayakanahalli lake in September last year following heavy rain sums up the state of affairs of the upkeep and maintenance of Bengaluru’s waterbodies by civic authorities, led by the incumbent government and its predecessors.
Several lakes in the city have been in a state of neglect and the so-called rejuvenation of them has been moving at a snail’s pace as the civic agencies responsible for their revival have not been able to meet the deadlines.
A classic example of this is the rejuvenation of the Bellandur and Varthur lakes. The Bangalore Development Authority (BDA), which is the custodian of the two lakes, was to complete the rejuvenation work by May 2022, but this deadline has not been met.
Similarly, the rejuvenation of the Kaggadasapura lake has been delayed. Desilting of the lake was taken up by the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) in February 2021. The rejuvenation package for the lake included improvements to the lakebed and wetland, and sewage diversion. When work commenced, a six-month deadline for the project was set by the local legislator. But this too has remained a distant dream as work is still in progress.
While this is the status of the lake rejuvenation programmes undertaken in recent years, the existing ones too have not been spared.
The recent case was that of the Hosakerehalli lake where the BBMP allegedly dumped truckloads of soil in the middle of the lake to lay a 25-foot-wide road. The construction work was started without the BBMP having sought approval from the Karnataka Tank and Conservation and Development Authority, raising questions about the intention of constructing the road.
Residents irked by this development protested, which led to stopping the construction of the road and the civic agency posting a notice that no permanent road will be constructed inside the lake.
“Orders with respect to protection of lakes came back in 2012 and subsequently, so many fantastic orders have come, but none of it has ever been implemented as there is no willpower and there is no interest. If they really want to make Bengaluru a water-secure region, the first thing they should have done is to secure these lakes, instead, they go on doing things that are completely violative of all orders,” said Bhargavi Rao, senior fellow and trustee at Environment Support Group.
With regard to the issue of loss of green cover and concretisation, there seems to be no end to it. Over the years, several projects have been proposed for decongesting the city’s perennial traffic woes, starting from the now-shelved steel flyover between Basaveshwara Circle and Hebbal to the recent plan for a flyover on Sankey Road.
These projects have been opposed by citizens, environmental activists as well as the Opposition parties.
When the steel flyover was proposed in 2016 by the Siddaramaiah-led Congress government, the Opposition parties — BJP and JD(S) opposed it. As per a study, around 2,244 trees would have been felled had the steel flyover been constructed.
The Sankey Road flyover proposed by the incumbent government too has been facing opposition from various residents’ organisations as well as from some leaders of the Congress. A political slugfest broke out between the government and the Opposition after an FIR was filed by the jurisdictional police against citizens who had participated in a walk to oppose the flyover.
“All three parties were in power during the last five years but none of them were interested in the environmental issues. All political parties have allowed unplanned urbanisation in the last three-and-a-half decades which has led to the decay of lakes and the loss of tree cover in the city. There has been a 1,055% increase in concrete area, and we have lost 79% of waterbodies and 88% of green cover,” said T.V. Ramachandra of the Centre for Ecological Sciences, IISc.
Bahutva Karnataka, a coalition of progressive organisations, in its report card on the environment sector, ranked the performance of the State government as “Grade E”.
(In this series, we look at the major infrastructural issues affecting the city and how recent governments have dealt with them.)
