Bengaluru water crisis: Bengaluru’s water distress is no longer a summer headline. It is a structural failure that now threatens the city’s economic base and everyday habitability. Despite receiving annual rainfall comparable to several water-secure cities, Bengaluru repeatedly runs dry. The problem lies not in nature, but in governance: unplanned urbanisation, degraded natural systems, and a linear water-use model that extracts, consumes, and discards. The result is a city that depends heavily on distant river transfers and unsustainable groundwater extraction, while letting local rainwater and treated wastewater go to waste.
The city’s historic network of interconnected lakes and wetlands once functioned as a decentralised storage and recharge system. Over decades, these commons were encroached upon, polluted, or disconnected by road construction and real estate expansion. Stormwater drains, designed to feed lakes, now carry sewage. As recharge collapsed, groundwater became the default buffer.
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This ecological erosion has locked Bengaluru into dependence on the Cauvery, pumped over 100 km and nearly 300 metres uphill, and on private borewells. According to assessments by Bengaluru Water Supply and Sewerage Board, groundwater supplies close to half the city’s demand in a normal year, and far more in peripheral wards. Studies from Indian Institute of Science show falling water tables and widespread borewell failure, particularly in peri-urban layouts that grew faster than civic infrastructure.
Bengaluru water crisis: Inequality and cost of failure
The summer of acute shortages laid bare the social cost of this model. Several neighbourhoods faced restricted supply, forcing households to rely on tanker water priced many times higher than piped supply. Water became a positional good: those who could pay managed, those who could not queued or rationed.
This is not an episodic shock. High non-revenue water including losses from leakages, theft, and poor metering, combined with inequitable distribution ensures that scarcity is experienced unevenly. Climate variability, with shorter intense rainfall events and longer dry spells, compounds these stresses but does not explain them. The crisis predates climate change; climate risk merely exposes institutional weakness.
Why the linear water model no longer works
Bengaluru’s prevailing approach treats water as a one-way flow: extract freshwater, use it once, discharge it as waste. In a dense, growing city, this model is economically and ecologically untenable. It increases dependence on distant sources, raises energy costs, and depletes aquifers faster than they can recharge.
Data from BWSSB indicate that the city already generates large volumes of wastewater—enough, if treated and reused, to substitute a significant share of non-potable demand in construction, landscaping, and industry. Yet reuse remains limited, while treated water is often discharged downstream. This is not a technology gap; it is a policy and incentive failure.
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Circular water systems: From concept to necessity
A circular approach reframes water as a continuously managed resource rather than a consumable input. It prioritises reduction of demand, reuse of treated wastewater, recycling at multiple scales, and recovery of value from sewage. Rainwater harvesting, when linked to storage and recharge rather than token compliance, can substantially supplement supply.
Decentralised wastewater treatment plants at ward or community level reduce load on trunk infrastructure and allow reuse close to source. Mandatory dual plumbing in large developments, already on paper, needs enforcement. Construction and industrial users should be required to substitute freshwater with treated wastewater wherever feasible. These measures lower pressure on the Cauvery and slow groundwater depletion.
Institutions and behaviour must move together
Infrastructure alone will not deliver water security. Civic agencies such as BWSSB and Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike must reduce distribution losses, expand sewage treatment capacity, and deploy real-time monitoring to improve accountability. Lake rejuvenation should focus on restoring hydrological function, not cosmetic beautification.
At the household level, consumption choices matter. The Union government’s Lifestyle for Environment (LiFE) framework usefully emphasises behavioural change, but its impact depends on urban adoption: water-efficient fixtures, segregation of grey and black water, and participation in local recharge and lake-care efforts. Water literacy is not an add-on; it is central to demand management.
Industry and large commercial establishments also have a role. Water stewardship should be treated as core to environmental, social, and governance commitments, not as corporate philanthropy. Zero-liquid-discharge systems, reuse targets, and investment in nature-based solutions can reduce system-wide risk. Well-designed public–private partnerships can accelerate financing and innovation, provided regulation sets clear reuse obligations.
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A governance test Bengaluru cannot postpone
International frameworks such as BS 8001:2017 offer useful principles such as systems thinking, stewardship, and value optimisation, but the test for Bengaluru is domestic execution. Coordination across planning, water supply, sewage, and land use remains weak. Without integration, even well-funded projects underperform.
Bengaluru’s water crisis is not about scarcity alone. It is about the failure to close loops in a city that can no longer afford linear thinking. A shift to circular water governance, backed by regulation, pricing reform, institutional capacity, and citizen participation, is now unavoidable. The choice is between managed transition and repeated emergency.
TJ Joseph is Associate Professor, Department of Economics, Central University of Kerala, Kasaragod. Savitha KL is Assistant Professor, Christ University, Yeshwanthpur Campus, Bangalore.