BENGALURU: Despite stringent regulations and penalties in place for storing rainwater and utilising it well, the city continues to have flooded drains overflowing onto the roads due to heavy rains as witnessed recently. Merely installing Rain Water Harvesting (RWH) since it is mandatory but letting the water go waste is one of the key reasons, say officials.
As per data given by the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB), a total of 2,10,000 houses need to compulsorily install RWH. Of them, 1,55,200 have installed them while the rest continue to pay the penalty for non-installation. Two categories of houses must install RWH structures in Bengaluru: 1) houses of 60x40 sq ft and above, built before 2014 and 2) houses of 30x40 sq ft and above built after 2014.
BWSSB Chairman N Jayaram told The New Indian Express, “We are doing our best to make people understand the value of utilising the copious rainwater. We conduct checks wherever bulk connections are there and penalise them if the RWH structures are not found. However, a considerable section has them in place for namesake but instead of connecting the water to use it for toilet, washing or other cleaning purposes, they release it into our underground network flooding it completely.” The worst part is that this pure rainwater was again treated by BWSSB through its sewage treatment plants, adding to its electricity bills, the Chairman added.
Chief Engineer, Waste Water Management, B C Gangadhar, conceded that this was happening often ruining their sewage connection network. “The drains are flooded due to the sudden discharge by hundreds of homes into them after rains,” he said.
K N Rajiv, Additional Chief Engineer, Maintenance, says the flash floods in Koramangala and Wilson Garden last month were caused by this behaviour by households. He adds that nothing could be done by the BWSSB in case of houses where law does not mandate them to have RWH. “Core areas in the city like Avenue Road, Chikpet, KR Market, Shanti Nagar, Wilson Garden among others have small houses which have been exempted. Water from there directly flows into our network as there is no storm water drain in these areas,” he said.
The government is taking RWH very seriously with present penalties levied for non-installation of RWH structures being 50% of the water bill for the first three months for domestic purposes and 100% of the bill for the same period for non-domestic consumption, he explained. “We collect Rs 1.5 crore as penalty every month. We are trying to ensure the remaining 50,000-plus houses which have not installed them do so by March 2022,” he added.