Bengaluru: In the last 40 years Bengaluru has lost 70 per cent of its green cover and 80 per cent of its water bodies. As if this was not enough, the remaining water bodies are witnessing a rapid decline in water quality and the air in last five years considerably deteriorated.
Researches point out that there has been a 925 per cent increase in built up area (concretisation, paved surfaces) in Bengaluru between 1973 and 2013, thereby exposing the unplanned development the city had gone through in the last forty years. The ecologists have now warned that the city must be decongested at the earliest to ensure that the remaining fauna in the Garden City survives.
Even industrialists are now encouraged to set up units in Bengaluru. The semi urban green buffer which had supported the central parts of city has been wiped out due to real estate boom. Thousands of new apartment complexes are being built, without even basic planning and the government is yet to address the issue of treating solid waste, which has been dogging the city for many years.
“We can talk of energy, waste and water. Recently (if you are a Bengaluru reader), you have been aware of the challenge that we as citizens have created for Mandur, a hamlet to the north of the city. There is curfew imposed in that village in order to see that people don’t demonstrate against the indiscriminate dumping of waste in the village. The poisoning of the soil, the contamination of the groundwater levels and the polluting of the air in the village is not something we want to actually care about. Is that the way we want to be creating livable cities?” said Chandrashekar Hariharan, head of Biodiversity Conservation India Ltd (BCIL).
“It does not take very much as will and as feasibility for the state government to be creating scientific landfills. Every city in most countries in the world have such landfills that are non-leachate and ensure that the waste is tucked away neatly enough in places that do not cause harm to people living on the city outskirts,” he added.
While the unplanned growth continues to put pressure on the natural resources in Bengaluru and other parts of the state, the government is not helping to ensure sustainable future for the state. The successive governments have been talking about drinking water projects such as Kalsa-Bhanduri and river diversion project of Ettinahole, but these projects are planned and being worked out without any proper plan.
The government cannot take away the water sources from some districts to provide it to other districts. For the last three decades the water bodies in Chikkaballapur and Kolar districts have been encroached upon and authorities allowed new layouts to come up on lakes beds. Today there has been a growing demand from the people of Kolar to get water from the Western Ghats.
(With inputs from DC student journalist Smriti Kumble)
