In Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley, issues related to city’s unbridled growth froth up
The city with a thousand lakes is faced with a massive pollution problem that has seen some of its largest lakes frothing up and even catching fire
What do you do when water catches fire? That’s exactly what Bangaloreans are scratching their heads over – the water in their lakes is catching fire, and nobody knows how exactly to put the flames out.
For a city that once boasted close to a thousand lakes, this is something of a problem.
Bangalore or Bengaluru, India’s Garden City, a quiet backwater once known as “The City of Lakes”, has been losing perspective lately. It’s once beautiful, temperate, lake-filled landscape has stumbled into something of a drunken stupor, frothing around the edges.
A snow-like froth has been bubbling from several of Bangalore’s lakes, making them look more like an enormous fuzzy bubble bath. But anyone nearby these lakes now needs to cover their mouths and eyes – because that froth is a toxic cocktail of untreated chemicals and sewage. Whenever it rains, wind carries the flammable foam into the city.
To make things worse, various incidents in which lakes – including the city’s largest lake – the 890-acre Bellandur – have been catching fire as a result of chain reactions; nearby garbage mounds are set alight, the blaze lighting up in nearby weeds. In January this year, 5,000 soldiers were called in to fight a blaze that broke out in Bellandur lake. How to deal with such fires is a question that has been perplexing residents and firefighters alike.
A 2016 issue of Current Science magazine, published by the Indian Academy of Sciences, released a report saying that unplanned development in the city would make Bangalore uninhabitable within the next five years.