Cities are complex geographies. Within a relatively small area, you have some of the richest citizens living in posh villas juxtaposed with the urban poor that lack access to basic amenities. Some of the highest earning businesses are housed within feet of daily wage labourers. Areas with high biodiversity adjacent to slums and degraded landscapes. The contrasts are jarring and a-plenty, which makes for a complex public policy problem.
It can be tempting to isolate these contrasting features and study them separately, in fact this has been the status quo for decades. We now know that all these systems are highly interconnected. The revenue earning business cannot function without the daily wage worker. Similarly, the daily wage worker will not have jobs in the city if not for an initial capital investment by the large business. This small feedback loop connects to the housing sector. Villas will not be built if not for rich business people in the IT sector, and its construction depends on the labourers. Finally, all these socio-economic systems ultimately depend on the ecology of the city. Rainfall in the catchment area of the Cauvery basin supplies the KRS reservoir which serves at least 50% or more of the city. Additionally, the aquifers that supply the rest 50% of the city with groundwater is dependent on multiple ecological variables - rainfall, wetlands and lakes, hydraulic gradient etc to name a few.
It then follows that to understand water, one needs to understand how it is interconnected with the social and economic world. Resilience thinking has lately been gathering momentum in order to bridge the economic, social and environmental spheres to see it as one coherent system. Its genesis is traced back to engineers in the 1800's who were trying to understand how much disturbance a material can endure before it breaks. Other disciplines started to take note of the idea of resilience as a metaphor and started using it within their own disciplines. Psychologists used resilience to understand how one can bounce back from a negative emotional experience. Ecologists used it to understand how ecological systems such as a rainforest can absorb and recover from a shock. Resilience is now widely being used within the social sciences to understand societal problems such as poverty alleviation, development and so on. Therefore, resilience as a concept can be used to bridge the gaps between the social and natural sciences and view systems as a whole.
While I have demonstrated the use of resilience in a few disciplines, I have not actually explained the concept to any satisfactory degree. I shall do so below.
Fig 1 demonstrates the concept of resilience via a simple ball and trough diagram. State 1 and State 2 are two systems- let us think of them as a rainforest (State 1) and a savannah (State 2). Resilience is the ability of this rainforest to absorb shocks and yet remain within the state 1 trough, i.e remain as a rainforest. Let’s imagine that the rainforest faces a shock in the form of deforestation. In all likelihood the rainforest will not completely collapse but will start to heal itself. The degraded patch of land will in time re-grow its trees and shrubs that were once part of the forest and will eventually be restored to a rainforest. The question we now ask is - how much destruction (shocks) can this rainforest take before it is not able to heal itself and return to being a rainforest. There exists a threshold level as indicated by the peak in Fig 1, once crossed, the rainforest is lost, and changes to another system, perhaps a grassland/savannah represented by state 2. This threshold is often termed as the ‘tipping point’. This ecological example can be extended to society, the economy and polity, as we shall see below.
Fig 1
The ball represents a system. Nudging the ball within the basins represent disturbances to the system.
Source: Morelli and Tryjanowski 2016
Environmental Resilience:
Bangalore is second only to Chennai in implementing rain water harvesting within its city limits. Using rain water reduces the demand on Cauvery water that comes from 100 km away at a huge ecological and environmental cost. The energy to bring Cauvery water is via non-renewables and hence, the entire Cauvery project is unsustainable (energy wise). Secondly, closely tied to rain water harvesting is the adoption of recharge wells through the city. This nature based solution serves the purpose of directing rain water overflow from houses and/or from storm water drains into wells that recharge the aquifer. The health of the aquifer is improved and will serve as a viable source of water through all seasons. Thirdly, a few lakes in Bangalore have an attached constructed wetland at the site of the inputs to the lake. The wetland treats the primary or secondary treated wastewater which can then flow into the lake. These lakes serve as incredible biodiversity hotspots as often remarked by birding enthusiasts across Bangalore. One of the impacts of climate change in urban areas will be the unpredictability of rainfall. With a constant input of treated used water into the lake, a certain level of water can be maintained throughout the year. Finally, following from the previous point, much of our treated used water is sent to the hinterlands around Bangalore which are drought prone agricultural belts. Bangalore is fed due to these regions and as a city we have an obligation towards our farmers. The used water is allowed to infiltrate into the soil and be used as groundwater for agriculture.
Using these examples we see that in the case of an environmental shock (there will be a fare share considering climate change), we will still have water to drink if we collect the rain, the lakes will not completely dry up in the case in case of a draught (due to the treated used water inputs), and environmental shocks to the hinterland will be dampened to some extent by the supply of treated water supply from the city.
Economic Resilience:
I shall try to tease out economic resilience by understanding it to be the ability of the city to recover from an economic shock (financial crash, demonetisation, inflation etc). An economic shock should not imply that you cannot access the basic necessities to a dignified life, water being one of the main components. The BWSSB in its policies have invoked a ‘pro-poor’ water policy that has largely subsidised connection charges (connections charges are often the biggest financial barrier to piped water connections) to residents in slums. Secondly, the usage of rain water harvesting and recharge wells by citizens reduces their water tariffs. Biome has proven that rainwater is the cheapest source of water even considering the initial capital investments. The citizen now saves that money which would have otherwise been used to pay the Cauvery water bill. Finally, the construction of recharge wells is done by a traditional well digging community that lost their livelihood when bore wells became the norm. By constructing more recharge wells we are supporting the livelihoods of this traditional community.
Therefore, economic resilience is built by helping the citizenry save money that would have otherwise been used for connection charges, water tariffs etc. Meaningful livelihoods are promoted by employing traditional well diggers.
Social Resilience:
The word ‘social’ here implies cultural and religious as well. A city is not just a physical space that one lives and works in, but citizens have an emotional and spiritual connection to it. These aspects to a city life are often overlooked in many urban discourses where planners and engineers dominate. A positive step in the right direction especially with regard to water is the nature in which lake conservation has been happening in our city. The citizens of the city are well aware that the state does not have the capacity to revive these lakes in any satisfactory manner, if the state were to work alone. Hence, citizens formed groups that would articulate what the stakeholders of the lake actually wanted and work with the government to meet some sort of a compromise. Most times, these groups did involve marginalised stakeholders whose needs are often forgotten. There are more values one derives from a lake than mere utility. It is a spiritual place for many, religious ceremonies are often conducted on its banks. It is a social place to ‘hang out’. All of these aspects contribute towards building social resilience - the ability of a society to recover from a shock and continue to derive social, cultural and religious benefits from the natural world. This ensures that the governance of the lake does not lie only with the state but with the citizens as well.
Political Resilience:
The concept of political resilience was brought up at a recent interns discussion with the Biome team. The question was - do we want the governance of water to be completely controlled by the state? Essentially all water would be supplied by the state and they would have a complete monopoly. Hopefully our discussion about resilience in the preceding sections should already give you an inkling that this is a bad idea. On the flip side an argument can be made as Mr Viswanath did, that having a completely decentralised system of water supply might not be as efficient as having one body (the state) controlling all water supply. This is true. However, we need to ask ourselves what sort of efficiency we want. Is the highest efficiency always desirable in all situations? Economists and engineers would cross their hearts and tell you so. But in matters of governance, it is much more nuanced. I would argue that the added effort needed in organising citizen efforts, investing in your rain water harvesting set up, digging a recharge well in your compound, contributing towards lake rejuvenation and taking governance into your own hands, while being less ‘efficient’, brings you closer to the sacredness of water. You will hopefully start to place a value on water that cannot be captured monetarily. This is where we need to be. Water is a shared substance not just between humans but all life on earth. Our values that we place on water must be congruent with the natural world.
In conclusion, Bangalore is a city that is exhibiting resilience in many spheres. We have a long way to go, but we certainly seem to have a toe-nail in the right direction. As we’ve been seeing the climate change related catastrophes this year has brought, the topic of resilience should be at the forefront. While we previously adhered to engineering and scientific rules to make water work for us, we will now have to use our knowledge to learn to live under nature’s rules and adapt to water. Adopting resilience thinking into ongoing urban discourses will steer water policy in this direction and would hopefully acknowledge the multi-dimensionality and interconnectedness of water.
References:
Morelli, F., & Tryjanowski, P. (2016). The dark side of the “redundancy hypothesis” and ecosystem assessment. Ecological Complexity, 28, 222–229. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecocom.2016.07.005
Sahil Regi Mathew
