The Year the Rain Didn't Come

In the latest episode of From The Marginlands: What happens to "management, not scarcity" when the scarcity is real — a second conversation with S. Vishwanath

When S. Vishwanath sat with us in the first season of From the Marginlands, he did something rare for a man who has spent thirty-five years monitoring crises for a living: he gave us hope.

Bengaluru’s water problem, he told us then, was not really a problem of scarcity. It was rather a problem of management. His argument was that if a city learns to hold its rain, to revive its lakes, to treat wastewater as a resource, that will suffice for its needs.

That was a little over a year ago. It is early July — and by this time our reservoirs should be filling, if not overflowing. Instead, they are in an alarming state. The Krishna Raja Sagar dam barely holds enough for two months. Kodagu — Coorg, the green heart of the catchment — is sixty percent short of rain. So we brought back the man who told us it was all about management, to ask him the only fair question: what happens when the scarcity is real? And does your argument survive?

“It needs a lot of revision,” he said.

We listened as Vishwanath, with refreshing honesty, revised a thesis he is known for, without flinching. His optimism, he reminded us, was not divorced from the river basin. The trouble is we never built the institution to look after the basin itself.

He gave us the number that reframes everything. KRS holds about eleven TMC, against 43 TMC this time last year. But even that 11 TMC number is deceptive. 7.5 of that is dead storage — water below the level the dam can actually deliver. Strip that away and the live storage available to the city is roughly four TMC. Bengaluru drinks 2.2 TMC a month at current pumping rates. So KRS holds two months worth, in other words.

“Climate change, El Niño, is flipping the argument very incredibly, at a very quick rate,” he said.

If there is one point that separates this conversation from the last, it is this: the city has to stop obsessing over its lakes and start worrying about the river.

Not that the lakes don’t matter. But Bengaluru, Vishwanath argued, has trained itself to look at Bellandur and Jakkur and Yelahanka and mistake their condition for its own water security.

“We are so deeply connected to the Cauvery,” he said, “and it’s the health of the Cauvery that is keeping us alive.”

The river begins in the forest. Old-growth forests, he explained, feed a river high-quality water and, just as crucially, feed the groundwater that sustains the river’s summertime flows. The tributaries that keep the Cauvery alive in the dry months — the Lakshmanatirtha, the Shimsha, the Lokapavani — flow in summer only because the water table in their catchments is high. The Lokapavani, where it joins the Cauvery at Srirangapatna, is almost entirely groundwater-fed. Kill the catchment, and you kill the summer river.

That, Vishwanath argues, is precisely what we are doing. In Kodagu, the human-elephant conflict is worsening; animals are pushed out of shrinking, degraded forests and are drifting toward people in search of water. Upstream, land use is turning from forest to resort, catering to weekend crowds from Bengaluru. And at Srirangapatna, Vishwanath watched construction debris and solid waste being dumped directly into the river basin.

“We are doing both,” he said — degrading the old-growth forest and changing the land into entertainment — and both hit the river’s quantity and its quality at once.

In the earlier sit-down with Vishwanath, Arati Kumar-Rao had opened with a photograph of the Teesta in the dry season in Bangladesh — an idyllic scene, with a boat, people, water, except the water was only a foot deep and a river once uncrossable on foot was now being waded by a seven-year-old.

The idyll image hid the truth. Now Bengaluru poses the same trap in reverse: the city looks fine, gets decent rain, sees water in its lakes, and concludes it is hunky-dory.

“How do we now tell ourselves, and tell people,” Vishwanath asked, “that the health of the river — that’s more crucial — is the million-dollar question.”

We then got to the point where the tone changed to something close to anger. There is, in the interstate framework the Supreme Court has put in place, a logic that forces Karnataka to empty its dams by June 1st, when the water year’s stock-taking begins. So the state drives its reservoirs toward empty, believing the rains will come. And when the rains don’t come, you are left holding nothing.

“This is the political ecology that is — not even the political ecology, let me use a harsh word — the stupidity of river water allocation and tribunal awards,” Vishwanath said.

We knew an El Niño was coming. We knew the monsoon would be hit. And we planned our reservoirs on the past, because the past is what the court’s formula encodes.

Worse, he argued, the body meant to manage this — the Cauvery Water Management Authority — moves in reaction, never in anticipation. It should have met in April to forecast and plan for a distress year. Instead it met only because Tamil Nadu complained that Karnataka wasn’t releasing water.

“The narrative is not of planning, or disaster management, or being aware of a future scenario,” he said.

And who sits on it? Central Water Commission officials, water resource engineers from the states. “I did not see meteorologists.” A body governing water in the age of a wrecked monsoon, with no one in the room whose job is to read the sky.

It reminded me of the 2015 Chennai floods, when dam operators sat on their water fearing the forecast rain wouldn’t come (there were political/governance reasons too, but that is another story). The rain came exactly as predicted, however: twenty-four hours of non-stop rain. Now the city was inundated from both sides — the sky above and the dam they finally opened mid-deluge.

Dam water held when it should have been released and released when it should have been held — why is it that we have people in control who seem incapable of applying plain common sense?

Vishwanath’s response was eye-opening. Reservoirs are run on something called a rule curve — a schedule of how much to hold and release, keyed to the dam’s inflows. But the rule curve is not tied to weather prediction. And the predictions themselves can’t be trusted at a granular level — partly, Vishwanath noted, because roughly forty percent of the state’s meteorological stations aren’t functioning. Someone built a shed over one. Nobody checks another.

“Especially in an El Niño year, you would have calibrated your weather stations ten times,” he said, “because that data is invaluable.”

Such conversations tend to curdle into despair. Arati pulled it back with the question: What, actually, can a citizen do?

There is a website, Vishwanath told us — the Karnataka State Natural Disaster Monitoring Centre, ksndmc.org — which posts reservoir levels daily, usually around 4:30 in the afternoon. He checks it obsessively. “It causes me great anxiety if that number doesn’t come up,” he admitted. It should be, he said, the first dashboard every citizen in Bengaluru looks at.

And then the many small, unglamorous acts of everyday life. Full loads in the washing machine, not quarter loads. Don’t wash the car daily. Water the garden in the early morning or at night, when there is less evaporation. If your apartment has a sewage treatment plant — and most do — make sure it actually runs, and that the treated water is actually used. Go down to the lake near you and help get it cleaned up.

Listening to him, I thought of something from our first conversation — his worry about a generation growing up believing milk comes from a tetra pack. We already live in a world, Arati said, where we turn on a tap and water appears, with no sense of where it comes from or how. That severance, between the tap and the river, may be the deepest problem of all.

“The only value we now seem to place” on water, Vishwanath said, “is the price that we pay for it.”

Which brought us, inevitably, to the wastewater — and to one of his oldest arguments, that our squeamishness about reusing it is cultural, not scientific. Devanahalli now has India’s first indirect potable reuse project; people are, in effect, drinking recycled water. Is public acceptance the last frontier? And might a drought year be the moment the barrier finally breaks?

“The yuck factor will remain,” he said. But there is a way to dissolve it — by letting nature launder both the water and the psychology. Send treated wastewater first into a lake. Let it build a wetland, draw birds, hold fish, host frogs and tortoises. The lake then recharges the wells around it, and now no one is drinking wastewater — they are drinking clean well water. The sequence matters, and he has a hierarchy for it: ecological use first, then agricultural, then industrial and urban. Each step puts distance between the water and its origin, and the yuck dissolves along the way.

This is not pie in the sky — the infrastructure is further along than most people realise. The BWSSB has promised forty lakes filled with treated water and has done about twenty. The KC Valley and Hebbal Valley projects have, for years now, been pumping treated wastewater out to Kolar, Chikkaballapur and Anekal — more than four hundred lakes receiving it. What’s missing, again, is the study and the transparency: how much each lake actually recharges, how the quality changes, whether it’s safe to bring back to the water table.

Woven through all of it, though, ran the same complaint, sharpening each time it surfaced: nobody communicates. What we have instead, Vishwanath said, is LinkedIn — but “in typical Indian style, it’s hagiographic,” glorifying the leader, announcing how well the board is working. “This is not what communication is all about.”

The conversation then veered off into the newer pressures on water — particularly AI. Data centres, the new Holy Grail of “development” and GDP, are furnaces generating immense heat, and we are planting them in places already stressed for both water and cooling. Can we justify that?

“The trade-off is a wickedly complex one,” Vishwanath admitted. “It’s not an easy answer.”

But as always, he had a model, a solution. Look at the Yelahanka power plant: it paid the BWSSB sixty crore rupees to upgrade a sewage treatment plant, pays ten to fifteen crore a year to run it, and in exchange draws fifteen million litres a day of treated water — which it polishes further on its own campus, using no groundwater and no fresh Cauvery water. Scale that logic, he suggested, and perhaps a thousand million litres a day of treated wastewater could be ring-fenced for AI and other thirsty industries — with those industries paying for the infrastructure and its running. The city gets paid; the water gets treated; the machines get their coolant.

The problem is that this isn’t the thinking on the ground. We are still allocating fresh Cauvery water to some industries. Nobody is enforcing treated wastewater as the only source for water-intensive industry. And when he asked who is talking across the silos — the industries department, the environment department, the housing and water affairs department — the answer was: no one.

Such conversations, he said, can only really happen at the level of the chief secretary, and they aren’t happening. His own experience of being invited into policy rooms? “Most of it tends to be tokenism. You are the useful idiot in the room. The decision is already taken,” and your presence becomes a rubber stamp.

We didn’t want to end in the dark, so we asked him to describe the best case — his vision of what Bengaluru could be.

It returned, as his thinking always does, to alignment: six lenses of sustainability — social, technical, institutional, political, economic, cultural — brought into line by political will. See the Cauvery not as a pipe to the city but as an ecosystem — water plus silt plus fish plus birds, something to nurture rather than merely tap. Recognise that the river, the lakes and the groundwater are one interlinked system: rain fills the lakes, the lakes recharge the ground, we draw from the ground through wells, and the lakes’ overflow feeds the river its summer flow. Manage them as the single system they are, “not only for our economic benefit but also for the benefit of future generations” — through, he said, “the lens of the rights of rivers, the rights of other living beings.”

“I hope the rains come,” he said towards the end, “and I hope that next season, when you have me back for a third time, we are not talking about this same problem.”

From his mouth to God’s ears — though, as he’d remind us, he’s an atheist, and can’t even pray.

Which leaves the work. A river basin institution. A city that sees the Cauvery as an ecosystem and not a pipe. Ten lakh wells. Treated water flowing to the lakes. And a collective realization that just because water flows when we turn on the tap, it does not mean there is no problem to be solved.

Listen to the conversation — and tell us what you think, how you experience water this monsoon season, both in excess and in scarcity.

PS: To those who mailed/messaged asking about the missing Craft Essays — hang on. What with all-nighters on World Cup watch, edits to do in the mornings, podcasts to record etc, time has been at a premium. Hopefully, #8 in the series will arrive by the end of this week.