By Mark Bergen
With summer fast approaching, Sanjay Vijayaraghavan is concerned that public pipelines won’t meet the water needs of his apartment complex in Bangalore.
In the past, he and other residential owners could dig wells to draw groundwater, but the municipal government in Bangalore is cracking down on this to manage the severe water shortage in the southern Indian city.
Mr. Vijayaraghavan says he had vaguely heard of a new rule from the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board requiring registration of borewells by March 31. But like many city residents, he remained uninformed of the law’s specifics and unsure how it would work.
As the registration deadline approaches, his cynicism may prove warranted: the process is well behind schedule and considered by many as inadequate to address the severity of Bangalore’s water woes.
On Dec. 3, the state government ordered compulsory registration of existing borewells under the Karnataka Groundwater Act of 2011. Borewell owners would pay a registration fee of 500 rupees ($10), or face a fine of up to 5,000 rupees. For new wells, individuals would need BWSSB permission to dig and they’d have to use registered contractors. No residency could have more than one well.
The BWSSB says there are 175,000 borewells in Bangalore, but a study by the Institute for Social and Economic Change back in 2005 suggested there could be three times that number. The wells are shrinking groundwater levels. One of Bangalore’s natural suppliers, the Krishnaraja Sagar Reservoir, reportedly hit “dead storage” dryness level this month.
A recent report from the Asian Development Bank revealed the severity of water management problems in India, where only 23% of homes receive public utilities. India ranked above only Vietnam and Bangladesh on metrics of “water-sensitive cities” in Asia.
In Bangalore, the strain on the groundwater table and the poor reach of piped water — extending to only about half of all households — has led to fears that the city will dry up this summer and force water rations.
Asked about the borewell registration plan, Rajesh Shah, who runs Bangalore NGO Peer Water Exchange and is head of water programs for the Blue Planet Network, said, “I think it’s a great initiative… But it’s set up for failure and loads of paper.”
Mr. Shah agrees that the shrinking groundwater supply needs regulation. According to data from environmental group Biome, 19% of residencies that have BWSSB connections still dug private wells to meet their water needs. In some neighborhoods, the rate exceeds one in every four homes.
Yet he and other water analysts panned the BWSSB program as an unnecessary bureaucratic layer, not a viable, enforceable policy to manage groundwater depletion.
“It’s a double count,” said S. Vishwanath, director of Biome. The BWSSB already levies fines on some 180,000 bore well owners, who now need to register again. And the groundwater management falls under the jurisdiction of a different bureaucratic agency, the state Mines and Geology Department, he said.
“The BWSSB does not have a single hydrogeologist,” he said. “They have no knowledge of groundwater.”
The agency disagreed, and maintains that its plan will ease the draining of the water beneath the city. BWSSB’s chief engineer T. Venkatraju said the agency has developed software to register wells and detect if residents have dug multiple spots on one property.
Still, as of last month, the BWSBB said it has registered only 302 borewells in Bangalore. As it registers the remaining wells, some residents are concerned about how the city will handle those that run dry.
Mr. Venkatraju estimated that more than a tenth, at the very least, of the existing wells run empty during the summer.
He said, under the new plan, many people with parched wells will have to use piped water, if available. “Otherwise, they have to buy water through tankers,” he said.
Mr. Vijayaraghavan, the man who had vaguely heard of the BWSSB’s plan, said three of the four wells at his apartment complex are nearly barren. As the summer heat sets in, and more of his neighbors get their first piped connection, he suspects he will need to resort to the pricier private tanks.
Private tankers charge around 26,000 rupees ($480) a day to deliver water to the complex, which has 500 apartments, in eastern Bangalore, Mr. Vijayaraghavan said.
Even in the bountiful times, before the groundwater table sank so low, wells only accounted for a tenth of the complex’s water. In his eyes, that makes the clampdown seem futile.
“I’m just not sure what the point of this whole exercise is,” Mr. Vijayaraghavan said.follow @WSJIndia