 For a number of years a group of us have been trying to understand the various nuances of the water conundrum in Bangalore. I think there is hardly anybody who lives in Bangalore who doesn't believe we actually have a water problem. For obvious reasons we are a bunch of academics and our principal goal has been to characterize the relationship between people and water. I think before we start speaking about water in Bangalore it's useful to sort of make sure we are all on the same page as far as the city itself goes. So Bangalore or Bangaluru as it is known today is a tabletop city. It sits at a considerable elevation from its primary surface water source. Kaveri River which is today the only surface water source that Bangalore draws upon. It's a river that is 100 kilometers away even more crucially about half a kilometer below the city. Bangalore is also amongst the world's fastest growing metropolises. Between 2001 and 2011 Bangalore grew from a city of 5.5 million to a city of 8.5 million. As we speak in September 2017 approximately 12 million people live in Bangalore. So this is unprecedented growth. In terms of how we've been building up the city most estimates suggest that close to 80% of the city by area is actually built up. And so we are basically looking at a city that has been fundamentally altered and reshaped by 12 million people who live here. Let me begin with probably elementary school hydrology. I mean at the end of the day stripped of all the obviously necessary details hydrologists are interested in just one question. It's a question of mass balance and it goes back to what kids in elementary classrooms are learning about the water cycle. Water rises from the rivers and lakes and ponds through the process of evaporation goes up and comes down as rain and that rain water part of it ends up at stream flow and part of it penetrates into the ground as groundwater. What hydrologists are interested in is trying to understand of all the water that falls in Bangalore in terms of rainfall to begin with. How is it partitioned between surface water and groundwater? But these are very hard questions. Questions of mass balance or what is called water balance in the context of hydrology is extremely hard in an urban context. That's because you don't have a quote unquote natural background system alone. You have these 12 million people who have altered the city in very fundamental ways. Your elementary school account of hydrology that I've been talking about looks at rain, looks at the background natural water cycle. But that's not the only game in town quite literally. At Bangalore as a city approximately receives 1700 million liters a day of rainfall. Keep the 1700 million liters a day in your mind. In addition to this, we also import 1400 million liters a day of water from Kaveri River. Try and focus your attention on these two numbers. 1400 million liters a day is what people in Bangalore bring in. 1700 million liters a day is the background rainfall. To a first approximation, these are very close numbers. You're more or less creating another rainfall system. That's a huge infrastructure. So what we have been arguing and we've been trying to characterize different facets of this argument is prima facie you need to look at urban hydrology. Certainly hydrology in Bangalore as social hydrology because human drivers. In the case of Bangalore, they actually overwhelm background drivers of the hydrological cycle. In addition to bringing in 1400 million liters a day of water into Bangalore, we are also pumping out really an indeterminate amount of groundwater. And so once you factor these two in and also the fact that bringing in 1400 million liters a day of water into the city and distributing it among 12 million residents and several hundreds and thousands of businesses is a massive infrastructural undertaking. A direct hydrological consequence of this huge infrastructure is that there are bound to be leaks in the system. Bangalore can and should do all it can to minimize these leaks. But you are going to have leaks just as a consequence of this very complicated infrastructure that's been built over several decades and you are going to have a leaky pipe. Where does this water leaking from all these pipes end up? Well, it's recharging your groundwater. So we need to account for this groundwater recharge. It's not a term that I'm terribly happy with but we call this the artificial recharge. To distinguish it from quote unquote natural recharge which is what happens since people in the picture. And this artificial recharge that is attributable to leaking water pipe is roughly 30% of all the water that we bring in. What happens to water after it is used? So called return flows and that has to end up somewhere. And that's contributing to the recharge as well. So we have the basic hydrological portrait of Bangalore. So what we have is a rainfall system. In addition to that, very strong anthropological drivers or more accurately anthropocentric drivers, human drivers of the hydrological cycle. And on this picture that I've painted for you, you also want to juxtapose what is happening politically, socially, economically. And in order to be able to do this, we have looked at water as a metabolic flow. And metabolism is again something a second grade science student understands. I mean you eat something and it's digested, you grow and then a part of it is excreted. The key with any metabolic flow is that the outflows are qualitatively different from the inflows. So what we've tried to do is to conceive of a city as a living, thriving, breathing and certainly excreting entity. And once you look at the city as a living entity, you want to understand the various systems of this living beast. Like with every other city, with Bangalore too, we understand quite a bit about the circulatory system. We understand how rupee flows through the economy. We certainly understand how dollar flows through the Bangalore economy. What we don't fully understand is the digestive system. I mean that's where metabolism comes in. So we are going to characterize Bangalore's hydrology as a urban metabolism problem. And we are going to be looking at urban metabolism through three different lenses. First off, we are going to ask the question, are these metabolic flows biophysically sustainable? Which is to say, is this physically simply tenable in the long run? The second question to ask is a political question. Question of who gets what? And who are the people getting water? Who are the people excluded from water? What are the economic, social, political drivers of inequity in access to water? We are also interested in the third question, which is the question of efficiency. If equity, you're asking who gets what? With efficiency, you're asking how is water allocated between different sectors of the city? You're basically asking the question, is there a relationship between what people pay and how water is allocated between different sectors of the economy? The starting point for our project, and then I actually don't need to make a case at all. I don't need to make a scientific case because it's patently clear to anybody who's lived in Bangalore for even a short while, Bangalore as a city, as a living organism is sick on all these three friends. It is a diseased organism, which is to say the metabolic flow of water is not biophysically sustainable. It is highly inequitable, and it is not economically efficient either. But the case that we are trying to make through this project, and one of the principal findings of our project is that you cannot treat these three diseases as though they are not linked to each other. What we've been attempting to do is to ask the question, if you're interested in questions of biophysical sustainability, interested in questions of equity, and interested in questions of economic efficiency, how are these three entities? These are really three symptoms of the common underlying disease. Instead of trying to do this piecewise, is there something common that undergrids equity, efficiency, and sustainability? That in many ways is the principal objective of our project. Water metabolism or any urban metabolism problem is inherently a spatial problem. So one of the first things you want to do is to understand the spatial characteristics of this problem. Now let's begin to spatially characterize Bangalore. There's been what we call a major spatial flip in how population is distributed across Bangalore. So if only 16, 17 years ago, most of the people in Bangalore lived in the center of the city, today it's the exact opposite. Most of the people live in the periphery. This flip is very stark and this is a flip that anybody interested in water or for that matter, any urban governance problem has to take seriously. This is one of the principal structural drivers of everything from transport to energy and certainly water. Water infrastructure obviously hasn't flipped. Just in terms of raw arithmetic, Bangalore adds approximately 800 new people every single day. No infrastructure system can keep up with this influence. So what we have is mulk of the public utility water infrastructure in the center of the city. But that's not where most people live today. Most people live in the periphery of the city. So there is an infrastructure mismatch. Once you start juxtaposing this spatial pattern of infrastructural mismatch with the sort of nexus between background drivers of the hydrological cycle and the human drivers of the hydrological cycle, you have a fairly complex picture of what's happening. In certain parts of the city, the water table is actually rising. And so you wonder why? After all you've been pumping water out at prodigal rates, so why is water table rising? This is where this kind of a spatial characterization is important. All the water infrastructure, i.e. the piping network is concentrated in the center of the city. That's not where most people live. So people there have relatively easier access to surface water distributed by the public utility. In this case, the BWSSP or the Bangalore Water Supply and the Silver Age Pool. So what this means is that this is also the place where you see the most leakage that we talked about, the most return flows that we talked about, so on and so forth. So the net result of all this is that the groundwater table is actually rising in the center of the city and falling in the periphery. Given the topography of the city, you would expect groundwater tables that are closer to the ground in the periphery because they are at a lower elevation and the other way around at the center of the city which is at a higher elevation. That's also in many ways a million people have actually managed to flip the background water cycle. So in order to characterize this nexus between human systems, human, social, economic, political systems and the biophysical, hydrological system, about five years ago in collaboration with several institutes, the Stockholm Environment Institute, the Indian Institute of Science and York University, we embark on what we have called the Bump Project. Bump stands for Bangalore Urban Metabolism Project.