With water bodies polluted, grim future ahead
The large fish kill in Bangalore's Ulsoor lake is another warning against the continued damage to the city's natural lake system. Usually the result of a fatal drop in the level of dissolved oxygen, a fish kill, such as the one seen on Monday with hundreds of dead fish being washed ashore, raising an unbearable stench, is a definite indicator of the water body being contaminated, and that too at a level which should send alarm bells ringing. locals involved with the conservation of the lake believe that Ulsoor was being steadily poisoned since the check dam, which was to prevent sewage water from flowing into the lake, broke two years ago.
A blame game is currently underway between different urban authorities, but this isn't the first time that a Bangalore lake has hit back. In May last year, Bellandur lake, the city's largest, burst into flames — twice in three days. A month earlier, white bubbling froth, of the sort you'd expect to see out of a washing machine with too much detergent in the load, rose out of another large Bangalore lake, Varthur, and spilled onto the streets. Environmentalists believe that the froth was in fact the result of washing machine detergent which had either come untreated from households or more likely been dumped by detergent-producing factories.
The Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board is reportedly constructing a sewage treatment plant nearby but until that is up and running, raw sewage will continue to flow into the lake. Another major factor that has ruined Bangalore's lakes is encroachment. A Karnataka Assembly panel, set up in 2014, found that one third of the lake area — about 11,000 acres from 1,545 lakes — had been encroached upon by none other than the main Government agency responsible for the city's upkeep, the Bangalore Development Agency. The BDA also turned a blind eye to real estate developers as they built massive offices and residential colonies in recent years.
The need to restore Bangalore's ecosystem of lakes need not be underlined — anyone who has seen how the city, supposedly an icon of new age India, goes under water during the monsoons, will be acutely aware of the scale of the problem. Bangalore was born out of rain-water harvesting, made possible through its intricate network of lakes. In the late 16th century, the city's founding father Kempegowda built the Ulsoor tank to sustain Petta area. He impounded water-catchment areas, which in turn helped to check floods and recharge and maintain groundwater table.
Today, all that work is being systematically reversed. Worse still, efforts to contain the damage have had mixed results. Public-private partnerships to beautify the lakes and turn them into tourist spots have also meant changes in the natural flow of the water-bodies, which have left them disconnected from the larger ecosystem. Similarly, a 2012 Karnataka High Court prohibiting the dumping of sewage in lakes is mostly followed in the breach.