What happens when it rains?

Hello readers

Hope you are doing great.

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

W. H. Auden

Bengaluru is located in the South Indian peninsula, which is almost at the equidistant from both eastern and western coast. It is situated at an altitude of 920 m above the sea level. It receives an annual rainfall of 850mm.

Basically Bengaluru was designed to hold more water for agriculture purpose ,we can see this by the planning of Banashankari where  the water was directed towards Chennammanakere ,but as years passed by ,the city advanced towards a growing economy and all the lakes were encroached and converted into layouts and residential areas.

Rapid and unplanned urbanization has created this problem. It has altered the drainage characteristics of drainage areas. Since then, the drainage systems are incapable to cope with increased volume of water and are facing the problems of blockages. Following methods which are primitive for disposal solid wastes could be one of the reasons for the blockages.

All these make way for flooding.Which is a serious threat for the people and as well the materials.

What happens when it rains?

This blog is actually our personal experience in Bengaluru, which is also one of the IT hubs In India.

We observed that even if it rains for a short interval of 10 minutes our drainage system is not able to handle it ,is this not very sad?no one is taking responsibility to clean these drains.

It is very miserable to see commuters struggling on the road when it rains, actually the roads look like oceans where we may have to start swimming, for instance a popular area called that central silk board, which is a major junction, which leads to many important places and also a state highway looks very messy during rainy season.

So when we were thinking about the root cause for this problem, we listed out some factors like, poor storm water management, no research and development towards stormwater harvesting.

Awareness among people is too less, leading to accumulation of waste, plastic covers which clog the drains. Never-ending gutter reconstruction projects which have only one motto which is just profit making.

There should be future thinking by the officials as the city is expanding, the commuters are increasing ,there has to a proportional development of roads and sewage systems ,also there is an increase in the pollution of our lakes which are used as drainage now which is very sad .

If we look at our neighbors China whose population ratio is more than us ,have recently signed a water recycling system which is said to absorb all the rainwater from the roads and it is used for cleaning of vehicles and gardening purposes.

We must adopt such technologies, as we receive more rain than China, we can definitely build a better system, if we think productively it is possible, we can save so much waters and also send the surplus to the rural areas where there is water scarcity.

We feel the slush can be avoided in our roads and converted into useful water if we at least start some dynamic planning from now on.

Thanks for your time.

Living with Hope

Tejus R.S and Harish Murthy.