Bangalore CDP 2031: City grows without a father Part-2
Bangalore CDP 2031: City grows without a father Part 1 | The City Cries for Sanity contd..
The next seven years of this decade is expected to witness an increase in Bangalore’s population of nearly 2 million. The numbers are staggering. The governance is non-existent.
The four vitals that support a city are energy, water, waste, and transportation. The city’s average energy loads are running at about 1600 megawatts with no hope of securing the additional 400 to 600 megawatts that the city will need if it has to manage the growth in population and business that the city is relentlessly seeking.
The water demand is currently lying at about 1 billion liters a day with no more than about 25 per cent coming from Cauvery, as an organized water supply source. The rest of the 75 per cent of water is got through bore wells. With groundwater resources being depleted so rapidly, particularly in the last 9-10 years, we have seen the city water table falling from 2000 feet to a dismaying 1000 feet in the north and eastern parts of Bangalore, which have been traditionally drought-prone. Hoskote, Whitefield, Doddaballapur, Devanahalli are all parts of the city which were declared drought-prone way back in the 1960s.
When it comes to waste, the city is now third in the country, in the generation of trash. At 4500 tonnes per day, the city barely knows what to do with it. There are no scientific landfills even after the Supreme Court directive of 2006 made it explicit that every city corporation and urban local body has to mandatorily set up scientific landfills to ensure that no poisonous leachates contaminate the soil.
Fresh water in the city is facing a dire threat. Nearly one-half of the apartments in the north and the east of the city rely completely, all through the year, on tankers that bring in water from sources that are not known and are perhaps suspect. Water treatment is a thriving business in Bangalore—from clunky project-sized systems to dinky little appliances that fit the faucet in your kitchen.
Builders, hoteliers and hospitals are not willing to conform to basic regulations that seeks 100 per cent treatment of the water that is to be treated and put back into loops for recycle, up-cycle and reuse. This simple expedient of getting every service and infrastructure industry segment to loop in water and to manage their own waste will ensure that the city’s burden of central management of these waste resources will be more than halved. There are, of course, no takers for the proposition. The government looks the other way, builders and promoters of businesses are not willing to act unless there is a stick that is wielded visibly.
When it comes to transportation, there are experts right here in the city who are willing to see how they can voluntarily contribute to plans that can make commuting civilized. The CDP 2015 that was drawn up in 2005, and now the CDP 2031, have outlined the creation of infrastructure for a circular railway, dedicated bus lanes, mass public transport systems and such elements as part of the Plan objectives. These plans and their enunciation are indeed very impressive, on paper. To get the government to act on simple solutions that will get the state and central governments and the ministry of railways, in particular, to agree on how they can use existing rail infrastructure for connecting many parts of the city that are now transporting thousands every hour with overfilled buses, is simple, yet not even taken up for implementation.
A rail link between Hebbal and Yashwantpur to the north, Kengeri to the south, and Whitefield to the east, will connect the city in a way that many thousands would not want to burden the roads and the bus traffic. Dedicated bus lanes is a model that is viable as many cities in the world, and right here in Ahmedabad and Delhi have shown. That will deter car population. The city carries 4 million vehicles to a population of 8 million. That’s a per capita ownership of vehicles that no city in India matches.
Simple things like bus bays, GPS, and other such technologies which will make bus traffic a lot more organized, with info displays at terminals and bus stops, will make life so much easier for people. There are monitors already installed in many of the TTMCs; but they are not working as the equipment is not commissioned yet for reasons that at least this writer does not know about.
To make drivers as civil as the traffic cops have become over the last 5 years does not require the knowledge of rocket science. Rudeness and discourtesy among drivers and conductors marks the bus transport services across nearly every route. They abuse the passenger when they feel that he doesn’t know Kannada. There are no labels showing their staff number and names. While there are complaints recorded, there are no inquires held that are meaningful and censuring. There is no effort from transport officials to bring in a human face to the service. What the traffic cops achieved over the last five years can easily be achieved by these public utilities. That includes officers of the Water Supply Board and of the electricity supply company, BESCOM.
As much as the development plan is comprehensive in its writing, it is completely oblivious of the ground realities in terms of implementation. The city chugs along in the sweet state of anarchy that it has managed to survive over the last 20 years.
With one-half of the current population moving into Bangalore in the next 15 years, there is simply no hope for the city if all the agencies don’t get together to talk regularly on implementation and to get their act together. Time only can tell if this will happen.
