Headline July 10, 2017/ ''' BANGALORE TO BANIGHALA '''

''' BANGALORE TO BANIGHALA '''

*YEAR AFTER YEAR*   -the  *water shortage situation*  on the entire sub-continent,  has swung  from worse to worst  to utter  calamity.

Draw a line from  *Bangalore to Banighala*  and you are on to the worst conceivable situations, with no solutions in sight, no solutions whatsoever. 

''All Talk, Talk,'' Zilli tells me. ''This extreme tension riddled  problem, totally immersed in violence, in  the meanwhile, creates  *master dynamics*   of its own.

 Zilli, works up a figure of over $58 billion, and at least two decades of executions,   for India and Pakistan  to conquer this problem and leave the future generations with safety and quality. 

In the meantime, all I can say is that these  Water Barons  actually perform a very, a very valuable service.    

ACCORDING TO ONE THEORY  :  this parched apocalypse is avoidable, but only if  Bangalore  makes some dramatic changes to the way it manages its water.

S. Vishwanath, an urban planner who has become the city's chief evangelist for sustainable water use, believes that implicitly. 

A lanky man with long hair and a beard that he refuses to tame, Vishwanath discusses Bangalore's water crisis in the style of a minor prophet proclaiming the road to redemption.

On Instagram, as @zenrainman, he posts photos of water; wells and lakes, puddles and rivers, all surroundings so bucolic and pristine that they feel like they must date from a bygone India.

If buildings across Bangalore installed rainwater harvesting systems; of the city recycled its wastewater; if it pared back its husk of concrete and and revived its lakes so that they could, in turn, recharge the water table, than Bangalore would have enough to drink, Vishwanath argues.

The challenge lies in getting any of these reforms to stick, In 2008, for instance,  Bangalore  passed a law demanding that buildings capture and reuse rainwater. But compliance has been spotty.

Only half of the buildings governed by this rule now follow it. Inspectors can be bribed; rules can be bent. As with the tankers, this law too has melded into the chaotic, jury-rigged, malformed mechanisms by which Bangalore deals with its water.

Fending off climate change is, famously, a problem of collective action; so too is mitigating its damage.

As for the armadas of  private water tankers, Vishwanath actually sees a place for them in his vision of the future.

''Why is there a notion in our head that water has to come in pipes?'' he wonders.

The truck, he believes, ought to be regulated  -no small challenge in itself, given the  bureaucracy's taste for graft  -but not outlawed, There should be more of a market for water, he says, one in which the state oversees distribution but does not serve as the only supplier.

In India there still is  ''a left liberal'',  namby-pamby''  dependence on the government  subsidized water, Vishwanath says,     and as a result:

''no one asks what the true cost of water is.''

For tanker barons and their customers alike, the true cost of water is climbing. 

In  WhiteField, I met  Bhaskat Gowda,  who with his brother owns  Himalaya Water Supply, the company that employs Manjunath and helps keep Huawei's reservoirs full.

Gowda is not among the industry's major, or even medium-size, water barons; he is one of the hundreds of operators who fly solo, running two or three trucks apiece.

He lives in a village called Hoskote. 10 miles farther out of Bangalore, where his family's  6 acre farm once suffered as its water table declined from 300 to 1,200 feet.

A decade ago, Gowda used his savings to buy the first of his three tanker trucks. For an office, he rented a matchbox of a room on a roof in a neighbourhood buried deep within  Whitefield.

A small television was parked in a corner, amidst hillocks of clothes; more clothes hung from pegs on the wall. 

On a June morning blessed with rain, Gowda sat me down on the floor of this room and gave me thimble sized cups of tea and lessons on the difficulties of his business:

''The money you make from water,'' he said, ''is like water itself''   -thin and insubstantial, he meant, and so very swift to leave your hands.

A burly man with a mustache and a soul patch, he wore a chain and earrings of dull gold. When he lit a cigarette, he held it in a manner of a dart, pinched between his thumb and first finger.

Gowda owns three tanker trucks, two of them holding 1,850 gallons each and the third nearly 4,000.

Purchasing these requited  bank loans  of $10,500 to $27,000 apiece. He pays his own water supplier $3 a load   -$3.75 in the summer, when the *electricity fails*   several times a day   -and sells them for $7.50.

The Honour and Serving of the latest  *Operational Research"  on  *World & Disasters  in the Making*   continues. Thank Ya all for reading and sharing forward and see you on the following one.

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

'''Rockspace'''

Good Night and God Bless

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