Note4Students

From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :

Prelims level: Not Much

Mains level: Urban floods in India

This newscard is an excerpt from the original article published in the D2E.

Try this question for mains:

Q.Shrinking water bodies and floods in urban landscapes are mutually induced by each other. Analyse.

Lakes and wetlands are an important part of the urban ecosystem.
They perform significant environmental, social and economic functions — from being a source of drinking water and recharging groundwater to supporting biodiversity and providing livelihoods.
Their role becomes even more critical in the present context when cities are facing the challenge of rapid unplanned urbanisation.
Their numbers are declining rapidly. For example, Bangalore had 262 lakes in the 1960s; now only 10 of them hold water.

Natural streams and watercourses, formed over thousands of years due to the forces of flowing water in the respective watersheds, have been altered because of urbanisation.
As a result, the flow of water has increased in proportion to the urbanisation of watersheds.
Ideally, natural drains should have been widened to accommodate the higher flows of stormwater.
But, on the contrary, they have been a victim of various unlawful activities:

(1) Pollution

There has been an explosive increase in the urban population without a corresponding expansion of civic facilities such as infrastructure for the disposal of waste.
As more people are migrating to cities, urban civic services are becoming less adequate.
As a result, most urban water bodies in India are suffering because of pollution. The water bodies have been turned into landfills in several cases.
Guwahati’s Deepor Beel, for example, is used by the municipal corporation to dump solid waste since 2006. Even the Pallikarni marshland in Chennai is used for solid waste dumping.

(2) Encroachment

This is another major threat to urban water bodies. As more people have been migrating to cities, the availability of land has been getting scarce.
Today, even a small piece of land in urban areas has a high economic value.
These urban water bodies are not only acknowledged for their ecosystem services but for their real estate value as well.
Charkop Lake in Maharashtra, Ousteri Lake in Puducherry, Deepor beel in Guwahati are well-known examples of water bodies that were encroached.

(3) Illegal mining activities

Illegal mining for building material such as sand and quartzite on the catchment and bed of the lake have an extremely damaging impact on the water body.
For example, the Jaisamand Lake in Jodhpur, once the only source of drinking water for the city, has been suffering from illegal mining in the catchment area.
Unmindful sand mining from the catchment of Vembanad Lake on the outskirts of Kochi has decreased the water level in the lake.

(4) Unplanned tourism activities

Using water bodies to attract tourists has become a threat to several urban lakes in India.
Tso Morari and Pongsho lakes in Ladakh have become polluted because of unplanned and unregulated tourism.
Another example is that of Ashtamudi Lake in Kerala’s Kollam city, which has become polluted due to spillage of oil from motorboats.

(5) Absence of administrative framework

The biggest challenge is the government apathy towards water bodies.
This can be understood from the fact that it does not even have any data on the total number of urban water bodies in the country.
Further, CPCB had not identified major aquatic species, birds, plants and animals that faced threat due to pollution of rivers and lakes.

https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/urbanisation/two-sides-of-the-same-coin-shrinking-water-bodies-and-urban-floods-72702

Twin issues: Shrinking water bodies and floods in urban landscapes

JOIN THE COMMUNITY