By Dr. K. Javeed Nayeem, MD

Day in and day out, for the past so many days, we have been reading reports and seeing videos about the misery that is being wreaked because of rain, on people who have chosen to live in our State capital.

As we flick through our news channels, we see people desperately bailing out muddy rainwater in one, while in another we see high-end cars almost completely submerged in their underground parking places, under high-end residential and commercial buildings. And, this is not just the result of any unusually heavy rains but something that we have been seeing there over the past few years, every time it rains normally too.

The very pertinent question that one may be inclined to ask here, at this juncture and which defies convincing answers is, how much rain is the city capable of handling comfortably? The honest answer, from what is being seen and experienced is that Bengaluru just cannot handle any rain, heavy or light. With the slightest drizzle, traffic comes to a complete stop at all underpasses, while with a little more rain, life itself comes to a complete standstill at almost all the not-so-elevated areas, where roads become completely water-logged and unmotorable, for hours.

If it rains a little heavier, as it happens quite often, the rainwater will flow over your doorstep and enter your home, uninvited, making a complete mess of your life. And, the quantum of the mess that it is capable of making, is what we are seeing every passing day.

But we cannot blame rain or rainwater at all, for this misery because it is not raining more in Bengaluru now than what it was raining there twenty-five years ago. It is just that Bengaluru today is not what it was twenty-five years ago, having outstripped every inch of living space and relentlessly continuing to encroach upon every inch of unlivable space too.

We have built and are continuing to build houses, apartments, shops, malls and office blocks, not just on safe and firm ground but also on swamps, bogs, lakebeds, sewers, drains and garbage dumps too. Yes, many of the places where tall and posh apartment blocks stand today in Bengaluru, have been just landfills, filled with the city’s garbage, just a few years ago!

It is not just that their residents are living on giant heaps of garbage but they have also been using the groundwater drawn from these sites in their desperate bid for sustenance and survival. So, you can well imagine what quality of food and water they may be consuming, most helplessly, while putting up a brave pretence of living in style!

While talking of drawing groundwater to meet the continuously growing needs of a malignantly expanding city, the less said, the better. Let alone choices, today no one in Bengaluru has even the option of asking where the thousands of tankers that supply water to apartments, hotels, hospitals are procuring it from. Having sucked the ground completely dry from all over the city, with indiscriminately and illegally drilled borewells, these much sought after water-bearers have no other choice than to ply their now very lucrative trade by obtaining water from every possible source like tanks, ponds and even pools dug in swamps. This activity is plainly visible on the outskirts of the city, if only you have a seeing eye for such things. I happen to have one and so I see it all the time whenever I happen to visit Bengaluru.

In a desperately thirsty Bengaluru, you either have water of some kind, or you don’t have water of any kind. That’s all there’s to it. Bengaluru, a once most livable city has now become completely unlivable and the days to come are only bound to be worse for residents there. There is a limit to the supportive infrastructure that can be provided to any larger-than-life city and Bengaluru is already one.

Blaming the government of being corrupt or the developers or builders of being greedy, for the present mess, is completely pointless, when we happen to be needy and are willing to pay the price for it, both in cash and the quality of our life too.

Yes, Bengaluru is desperately gasping for breath now and it is a mess, of our own making, with just no easy way out. But there are certainly many lessons we can learn from it, because every disaster, is a learning experience! Do think about it!

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