Bengaluru is fated to run out of water. When will the crisis hit?

Editor’s note: The last two decades have been witness to the rapid and devastating march of unchecked urbanisation and climate change in India’s cities. Among the first victims of this change is freshwater and access to it—from rivers which sustained local ecosystems, to lakes and groundwater which quenched the thirst of residents. In this series, the Good Food Movement examines the everyday realities of neglect and pollution. It documents the vanishing and revival of water bodies, and community action that made a difference.

In an ever-expanding city of 1.4 crore people, where food, language, and socioeconomic class can range wildly from district to district, no question animates the entirety of Bengaluru quite like this one, even if the danger is not the same for everyone. 

In 2024, the city was reminded of just how close it lives to disaster. Around 40% of Bengaluru relies on groundwater, which plummeted after little rain fell in 2023 and the early months of 2024. Roughly half of the city’s 13,900 borewells ran dry. Private tanker trucks jacked up their prices, forcing residents to pool their cash to buy water just so they could shower every other day.

Even the city’s wealthy residents started using their own bathrooms sparingly, showering at work or at nearby gyms. Those who rely on piped water from the Kaveri River were better off–but they, too, were told to use only wastewater when watering their plants.

The onset of rains in late 2024 and early 2025 has prevented a repeat of the crisis this year, but the base condition of Bengaluru’s water supply is nonetheless getting worse. Still, if the city got through last year largely unscathed, what would it take to bring about a genuine catastrophe? Is there a point at which Bengaluru could actually run out of water? 

If you’re looking for a specific date, you’re going to be disappointed–but the randomness of the actual answer is only a little less concerning. For Bengaluru, a water crisis is never more than a few fallen dominoes away.

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Shrinking green cover, unchecked development

Like most other cities in India, Bengaluru’s water supply (or lack thereof) hinges primarily on rainfall. There’s evidence that climate change has actually delivered more rain to the city than it would otherwise have received over the past few years–but this rain often comes in rough torrents that are difficult for the Kaveri and the earth to absorb, as opposed to steady showers that lead to a stable recharge and supply. 

Rampant and unplanned development has not helped. The Kaveri’s water comes from the Western Ghats, where the expansion of coffee plantations and tourist resorts has ripped up so many trees that the ground funneling water into the river can no longer hold much moisture, according to Krishna Raj, a water supply expert at the Institute for Social and Economic Change.

Rain can’t refresh groundwater at the rate it’s being extracted, because the rain simply can’t find the ground.

Chaotic, unplanned development is also an enormous problem for Bengalurueans who get their water from underneath their feet. Bengaluru’s population has exploded since the turn of the millennium, and the city has responded by expanding like an overflowing lake. In 2007, administrators inflated the official size of the city to encompass all the new communities popping up in the outskirts, which were even less planned than the old ones. A lot of these newly included areas were “revenue layouts”—areas that were originally agricultural land that hadn’t been formally converted to residential use. So, at the time, none of these districts had access to a piped water supply. 

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Private tankers filled this gap, plundering groundwater in an ever-expanding radius and selling it to residents at prices that go up as water levels go down. Groundwater is replenishable, but an estimated 93% of the city’s earth will be paved over with asphalt or concrete by the end of 2025. Bengaluru’s green cover has also shriveled from 68% in the 1970s down to just 3% today. Rain can’t refresh groundwater at the rate it’s being extracted, because the rain simply can’t find the ground. It flows down streets and tries to escape through overwhelmed stormwater drains, which is why parts of the city flood about 20 minutes into a decent downpour. 

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Unsustainable reliance on groundwater

It’s easy to think of groundwater as an infinite resource. We can’t see it, and officials who have the tools to measure groundwater and its extraction just aren’t doing it accurately. Earlier this year, for instance, the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB) reported that extraction is at 800 million litres per day (MLD), while an independent report identified it as 1,392 MLD. There is also a severe lack of adequate monitoring systems and manpower that can span the intricate network of borewells in the city.

What we do know is that groundwater levels are nosediving. According to KC Subhash Chandra, an urban groundwater management expert who used to work for Karnataka’s Department of Mines and Geology, borewells are now being drilled beyond depths of 500 meters. Borewells that deep have likely dug 100-200 meters into Bengaluru’s layer of hard rock, which means they are sucking up possibly ancient water from an underground region that probably can’t be replenished within many human lifetimes. 

Even if the water below the city never dries up, pulling it to the surface will cost more and more money, which will make it increasingly difficult for residents to afford. 

“If the extraction and mining of groundwater is taking place continuously, about three-four times more than the recharge, then naturally there will not be any water,” Chandra says. The city is consistently extracting water from the ground at an unsustainable rate: in 2023, extraction was reported to be over 1300 MLD, when nature only replenishes 148 MLD through green spaces and water bodies. Even if the water below the city never dries up, pulling it to the surface will cost more and more money, which will make it increasingly difficult for residents to afford. 

Groundwater can also be a dangerous thing to rely on even before it begins to run out. Most lakes in Bengaluru are clouded with sewage, and some tankers draw their groundwater from wells that rely on those lakes for their supply, according to Priyanka Jamwal, a water quality expert at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment. "People don’t have any option,” Jamwal says. “Even if groundwater is contaminated, what do we do?”

The prescriptions for these problems are all things you’ve probably read before. Developers should stop chopping down trees in parts of the Western Ghats that are important to the Kaveri. Apartments, hotels, houses, and other buildings should all be fitted with rainwater storage tanks, and the government should make sure that this actually happens. Lakes need to be allowed to expand into areas that have been paved over, and they should be cleaned up so that the water seeping underground is safe to drink. Several experts were at pains to point out that Bengaluru actually gets enough water to satisfy the demands of its booming population–for one, through a stormwater flow of nearly 17,500 hectare metres of rainwater every monsoon season. It just wastes the vast majority of it. 

It would be easy to invoke a sense of urgency about all this if the city’s water supply had a definitive endpoint, but the nebulousness of the truth is in some ways more frightening. 

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Bengaluru’s water supply is threatened by a range of problems, and these problems can compound at any time to plunge the city into crisis. Let’s say Bengaluru gets very little rain in 2026. People on the outskirts will have to drill more borewells to compensate, depleting the groundwater supply even further. The city manages to get through the year, but 2027 also brings hardly any rain. A few big storms dump massive amounts of water on the city in a matter of hours, but almost all of it rushes off the pavement and into polluted sewers. Borewells were already drying up, and now they are failing at catastrophic rates. The city can’t dig enough new wells to keep up with demand, and suddenly, that demand includes the center of the city, because the piped water supply from the Kaveri is failing. Decades of deforestation have dried out the river’s supply of water, and two years of little rain have turned the artery of South India into a shriveled creek. Bottled water becomes Bengaluru’s last resort, but prices are so high that only the wealthy can afford to stock up, and even they soon struggle to find any.

Bengaluru will not necessarily run out of water in five, 10, or even 100 years, but so long as the city wastes its supply, the possibility of running dry will never be more than a few years away. 

Illustration by: Kaushani Mufti

Produced by Nevin Thomas and Neerja Deodhar