Bengaluru is in the middle of a water crisis. The management in the gated communities have asked the residents to use water judiciously while some have asked residents to start looking from private water supply tankers. Every day in Bengaluru one can see thousands of these water tankers ferrying water to different localities, working beyond schedules and always ending up leaving a few unsatisfied customers. These water tankers do not come cheap and the steep demand-supply curve was allowing them to get away even after charging two to three times the government allotted price.
Now the government has taken over the command of these water tankers it means water supply would be rationalized which essentially means that apartment owners with a huge Payscale would be as eligible for a water tanker as a common man. This would essentially mean a lot of top talent in the city opting for “work from hometown” kind of arrangement. This essentially also means that a lot of foreign talent would lose the confidence in Bengaluru being a top IT destination with such crappy infrastructure.
Bengaluru is the IT hub of India with a GDP just 35 percent less than Dubai. However, Bengaluru has no rivers. It is at an altitude of about 800 metres from sea level making it difficult to arrange water from downstream. Now the biggest problem is that it is expanding horizontally and is now effectively a city of 16 million people.
There lies the lesson for Srinagar. With a bustling city of around two million people, it would not be long when Srinagar becomes a city of three million people and there on to four million. However, what remains to be seen is whether this horizontal expansion would continue. If Srinagar city continues to grow horizontally with every citizen adamant at a house of his own the effectively at four million the area of Srinagar would be equal to any metropolitan city in India.
Is our infrastructure growing at the same pace? Would we be able to provide power supply, clean drinking water, healthcare facilities to such a huge area? These are some of the questions about which we have to start thinking right from today because even tomorrow could be too late.
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