The State government is in the final stages of finalising an action plan for a World Bank project to prevent floods in the city. The project will make a whopping ₹3000 crore available for flood mitigation in the city, parts of which have been flooded over the years including in 2022. The project was first announced by former Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai in the budget he presented earlier this year.
Revenue Minister Krishna Byre Gowda held a review meeting of the project with representatives of the World Bank on Tuesday. “The World Bank is very positive about the project and we are working towards taking it off the ground at the earliest,” he said. The project will not only focus on the creation of physical assets but also takes a multi-sectoral approach to find a holistic solution to build climate change resilience in the city, including building a robust support system for decision-making, he added.
The project will focus on three broad pillars - rebuilding storm-water drains (SWDs), desilting lakes in the areas that flood and install sluice gates at these lakes to ensure they act as balancing reservoirs, and augment the Sewage Treatment Plant (STP) capacity and take the treated water out of the city water system to fill tanks in drought-hit neighbouring districts.
Mr. Bommai had in his budget speech also said: “Sluice Gates will be installed at all the tanks to control the flood situation under this scheme. It will help in controlling the speed and quantity of flow of water”.
“It is meaningless to speak about flood prevention untill we have a robust SWD network,” Mr. Byre Gowda said. Presently of the 860 k.m. SWD network, nearly 686 k.m. of SWDs has been rebuilt or work is underway, and work to rebuild the rest of the network will be taken up on a priority basis, sources said.
Civic officials said that the 2022 floods pushed the state government to provide ₹1900 Crore for rebuilding drains, which has helped Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) to take up rebuilding 195 k.m. of SWDs, the highest for any single year. This has left another 174 k.m. of drains to be redeveloped. The World Bank Project will provide a big fillip to rebuilding drains and may help the civic body to finish rebuilding the entire network finally, a process that picked up pace in 2016 after parts of the city were flooded.
Lastly, the project funds will be used not only to plug gaps in STP capacity in the city but also Under Ground Drainage (UGD) in areas that still do not have this facility. “We live in a paradox - while there will be flooding in the city, neighbouring districts will be reeling under drought. Treating water in the city and taking it out of the city’s water system to fill tanks in the neighbouring districts like the K.C. Valley, and H.N. Valley projects, will mitigate the crisis at both ends,” Mr. Byre Gowda said.
