The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike marked the completion of its fiftieth lake restoration on Tuesday, at a ceremony beside a water body that most residents of the neighbourhood had, until about 2015, assumed was a landfill.
Somasundarapalya Lake now holds water year-round. It has a walking path, a bund that does not collapse in the monsoon, and a population of spot-billed pelicans that arrived without being invited. By the standards the programme set for itself in 2011, it is a success.
By the standard that matters to the people living below it, the question is less settled.
What restoration actually means
A restored lake in Bengaluru is, in practice, four things: the encroachment is cleared, the silt is dredged, the bund is rebuilt, and a sewage diversion drain is laid around the perimeter so that untreated effluent goes somewhere other than into the water.
That fourth item is where the programme's arithmetic gets uncomfortable. The diversion drain does not treat anything. It moves the problem downstream, to a sewage treatment plant that may or may not have capacity, and on the days it does not, to the next lake in the chain.
We have become very good at the first three. The fourth one is not an engineering problem. It is a question of whether the treatment plant upstream of you was built, and whether it is running today.
Vasanthi Kumar, engineer
Bengaluru's lakes are not independent basins. They are a cascade: a series of tanks built over several centuries, each one spilling into the next through a channel called a raja kaluve. Restoring one lake in the middle of a cascade improves that lake. It does not improve the cascade.
The fifty and the seven hundred
The city's own survey counts 204 lakes within municipal limits. Older revenue records, which include water bodies now built over, count more than 700.
| Source | Count | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Municipal survey, 2024 | 204 | Within current city limits |
| Revenue records, pre-1960 | 700+ | Includes water bodies now built over |
| Restored to date | 50 | Programme completion criteria |
Fifty restorations against 204 surviving lakes is real progress by any reasonable measure, and considerably better than the programme's critics predicted a decade ago. It is also, as the programme's own officials acknowledge privately, the easier half.
What residents are asking for now
At Tuesday's ceremony, the questions from the floor were not about the lake that had just been finished. They were about Bellandur, eleven kilometres away, which catches the outflow of a catchment holding roughly a third of the city's population, and which has caught fire more than once.
“Fifty is a number for a press release,” said Shobha Rangappa, who has lived beside a lake in the same cascade for thirty-one years and has attended, by her count, nineteen public consultations. “Tell me the number for how many treatment plants are running at capacity this week. That is the number I want.”
The municipal commissioner, asked directly, said the figure was being compiled.
What happens next
The programme's next phase, approved in principle but not yet funded, would shift spending from individual lake restoration toward catchment-level sewage infrastructure: a less photogenic proposition, and one with no ribbon to cut.
Whether it survives the next budget cycle is, as Kumar put it, “the entire story, and nobody will report it, because there is nothing to photograph.”
The BBMP has published the treatment-plant utilisation figures requested at Tuesday's ceremony. Of 33 plants in the affected catchment, 21 reported operating at or above 80 percent of design capacity during the week of 12 August. Four reported being offline for maintenance.
A spokesperson for the state pollution control board said the four offline plants are expected to return to service before the end of the month, and disputed the characterisation of the diversion drains as moving the problem downstream, saying the drains are “an interim measure within a sequenced plan.”