The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : As city expands, sanitation declines

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Saturday, Mar 22, 2008
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Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

As city expands, sanitation declines

Swathi Shivanand

World Water Day calls for effective sanitation management

— Photo: K. Bhagya Prakash

Take stock: It seems fitting to celebrate World Water Day with the city receiving rain in the last few days.

BANGALORE: With Bangalore growing after the addition of eight local bodies, only 40 per cent of the total area is covered by a satisfactory sanitation network, a fact that is a cause for concern for the town planners. This is by the State Government’s own admission in the City Development Plan brought out last year.

This is not forgetting the 110 villages that have been added to help cope with the pressures of urbanisation. Even as the city readies itself to observe the World Water Day in this International Year of Sanitation, these villages have little or no sanitation network and agencies are still in the process of estimating their needs and drawing up a financial outlay.

The people live with sewers flowing in front of their small houses. They have to manually clean their homes of flooding sewage from manholes that overflow when it rains. Others find that sewage has leaked into their water pipes, causing health problems.

Most of the 1,000 odd million litres of sewage generated every day is let into lakes. The irony, however, is that we have treatment plants with a capacity to recycle sewage up to 718 million litres a day, but in actual fact, only 350 million litres a day are treated.

‘Re-work network’

“Not all the sewage finds its way into the treatment plants. We still need to re-engineer our sewerage network so that it can be diverted not into lakes but to the plants,” said R. Vasudevan, Chief Engineer of the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board.

Contamination

While the practice of laying sewage lines started way back in 1922, not many of them have been changed since then. Even as the city grows, sewage lines unable to bear the pressure crack up and, as the Karnataka State Pollution Control Board (KSPCB) found out recently, with significant contamination of the groundwater.

The KSPCB tested 161 water samples in 116 borewells and open wells along the three major valleys of Bangalore, namely, Vrishabhavati valley, Koramanagala and Challaghatta valley and Hebbal valley. It found that all 161 samples exceeded the permissible limit for fecal coliforms, a type of bacteria which “indicates constant percolation of sewage” the KSPCB said in its summary report.

Groundwater contamination is particularly disastrous as they serve a significant portion of Bangalore’s water needs.

No takers

The private sector is not interested in the management of sewerage systems.

“There is no revenue generated from sewage management. This is why we don’t find private sector participation in sewage management. But we do have some private sector involvement in the running of our sewage treatment plants,” Mr. Vasudevan said.

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