Providing Supplementary Water for Bangalore, India: Towards Water Sensitive Urban Design

Bangalore city is the capital of Karnataka state in South India. The population of the city in the 2001 census was 5.10 million. The greater metropolitan area is however is estimated to have a population of nearly 7 million in 2005. As in the case of many other urban areas in India, the piped water to the city comes from a fairly long distance and has to be pumped to a higher altitude. In the city’s case this water is transported over 90 kilometres and a head of 300 metres. The importance of water for the city and its sustainable supply can be realized from the following statement of the draft Master Plan – 2015 a vision statement “ Bangalore City, today, a city in the process of expansion, offers, on the whole, a satisfying range but faces difficulties in keeping with the pace of its own economic and demographic growth. In some domains, the situation may even be considered worrying. This is most true of infrastructure: and critical in the case of water supply. Though the available quantity of water should be sufficient, cuts are getting worse, a large part of the population lives in poverty, and the ground water table is in danger of exhaustion due to massive and accelerated over pumping. We are headed towards a water crisis in due course if an urgent change in direction is not affected. “ The Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB) the institutional water service provider, recognizes a ceiling to the availability of water for the city at 1494 million litres per day (Table 1). It therefore has adopted a strategy of reducing demand, plugging leakages in the system, recycling water and rainwater harvesting to ensure sustainability of water supply in the city. (www.bwssb.org) 

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