Headline July 07, 2017/ ''' *BUGLES & BUNGLES* : B A N G A L O R E '''

''' *BUGLES & BUNGLES* : 

B A N G A L O R E '''

BANGALORE  WAS ONCE, AND NOT so long ago,  the very icon of a globalized,  *High Technology Future*.

AND NOW,  and now it's a very, very thirsty sign of an unfolding, and growing by the very minute, of a huge  Global Catastrophe.

Water tankers, fleets of them, await their turn at  filling stations, that have begun sprouting all over the landscape. And the  Water Mafia, snarl and gnarl their teeth for the predictable and mushrooming personal wealth to be created.

On The Outskirts of Bangalore, as this master research unfolds, one morning last summer, a sullen young man named  Manjunath stood high atop a cocoa colored 1,850-gallon water tanker truck, waiting for it's belly to fill with direly needed water.

The source of the liquid was a bore well, a cylindrical metal shaft puncturing hundreds of feet down into the earth.

An electric pump pulled the water up from the depths and into a concrete cistern; from there, a hose snaked across the mud and weeds and plugged into Manjunath's truck. As the water gushed into the tanker, a mufffled sound emerged, like rain on a  tin-sheet roof.

Once the tank was full, Manjunath disconnected the hose, climbed down, and settled into the truck's cab. Then he dove out through a web of newly tarred back streets in the suburb of Whitefield.

He passed-rows of half finished buildings, still raw from gray cement, and he honked often so that ,motorcycles and pedestrians could scurry out of the way. Whitefield's roadways are almost always coagulated with traffic.

Over the past two decades, the area has become home to major outposts of Oracle, Dell, IBM, and GE, as well as  -countless IT parks   -proud, gleaming edifices that Uber drivers, have recognized as major landmarks.

When people describe Bangalore as India's  Silicon Valley, they're really talking about  Whitefield. From the altitude of the truck's cab, though, Whitefield looked somewhat less impressive  -smaller and flimsier, even more starved for space than it already was.

After a quarter of an hour, Manjunath turned through a back gate of the campus belonging to  Huawei, the Chinese communications giant also known for its sleek, inexpensive smartphones.

He made his way to a corner of the parking lot . By the wall, under some plants, he found a metal water pipe that poked out of the soil. A length of the rubber tubing had been affixed shoddily to the pipe's inlet valve, and Manjunath spent a few minutes using a handy rock to hammer the tubing tight over the valve's mouth.

Then he fastened the other end of the tube over his tanker's outlet, turned on the spigot and sat down near his truck to pick his teeth as his cargo unloaded.

B FOR BANGALORE : And Bangalore has a problem: It is running out of water fast, very fast. 

As a matter of fact,  Cities all over the world, from those in the American West to nearly every major Indian metropolis, have been struggling with drought and water deficits in recent years. But Bangalore is an extreme case.

Two summers ago, a professor from the  Indian Institute of Science declared that the  city will be  unlivable by 2020. 

He later backed off  his prediction of the exact time of  death   -but even so, says P.N. Ravindra, an official of the  Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board,    ''the projections are relatively correct. Our groundwater levels are approaching zero.''

Every year since 2012, Bangalore has been hit by drought. Last year Karnataka, of which Bangalore is the capital, received its lowest rainfall level in four decades. But the changing climate is not exclusively to blame for Bangalore's water problems.

The city's growth,  hustled  along by its  tech sector, made it ripe for crisis, Echoing urban patterns around the world,  Bangalore's population nearly doubled from  5.7 million in 2001  to  10.5 million today. By 2020 more than 2 million  IT professionals are expected to live here.

Through the 2000s, Bangalore's urban landscape expanded so quickly that the city had no time to expand and extend its subcutaneous network of water pipes into the fastest-growing areas, like Whitefield. Layers of concrete and tarmac crept out across the city, sopping water from seeping into the ground.

Bangalore, once famous for its hundreds of lakes, now has only 81. The rest have been filled and paved over. Of the 81 remaining, more than half are contaminated with sewage.

Not only has the   municipal water system  been slow to branch out, it also leaks like a cheescloth. In the established neighbourhoods that enjoy  the relative reliability  of a  municipal hookup,  44 %  of the city's water supply wither seeps out through aging pipes or gets siphoned away by thieves.

Summers bring shortages, even those served by the city's plumbing. Everywhere, the steep ascent of demand has caused a run on groundwater. Well owners drill deeper and deeper, chasing the water table downward as the they all keep draining  it further. 

The groundwater level has sunk from a depth of 150 feet or 200 feet  to 1,000  feet or more in many places.

The job of distributing water from ever-shifting array of dying wells has been takenup, in the large part, by informal armadas of private tanker trucks like the one Manjunath  drives.

There are between  1,000  and  3,000  of these trucks, according to varying estimates, hauling tens of millions of  gallons per day through Bangalore.

The Honour and Serving of the latest  ''operational research''  on Technology World  continues. Thank Ya all for reading and sharing forward. And see you on the following one:

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of India,    and the World.    See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society and Twitter-!E-WOW!   -the Ecosystem 2011:

''' Unguided Tour '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless