India’s tech hub of Bengaluru is struggling with water shortages amid a drought, with the crisis expected to escalate as summer approaches.
Authorities are supplying water to residents in the city of 13 million people using tankers as a lack of rainfall dries up thousands of underground water sources. The Karnataka government has imposed a cap on how much the tanker suppliers can charge to prevent price gouging.
Bengaluru is home to the country’s US$194 billion information technology services industry. The crisis was a long time coming, said Shashank Palur, a Bengaluru-based hydrologist with the think tank Water, Environment, Land and Livelihood Labs.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“Bengaluru is one of the fastest growing cities in the world and the infrastructure for fresh water supply is not able to keep up with a growing population,” he said.
Indian cities have intermittently struggled with water shortages due to the over-use of groundwater and climate change causing a shift in the weather and reducing much-needed rainfall. With summer approaching, temperatures can climb to as high as 40°C, exacerbating the situation.
El Nino, a natural phenomenon that affects weather patterns worldwide, along with the city receiving less rainfall in recent years mean “recharge of groundwater levels did not happen as expected,” Palur said.
A new piped water supply from the Cauvery River, about 100km from the city, has also not been completed, he said.
Residents should use water “very judiciously” and for essential purposes only, Bengaluru Water Supply and Sewerage Board chairman Ram Manohar told a news channel earlier this month.
About a third of the city’s residents depend on groundwater, the Associated Press reported, citing authorities as saying some of the 13,900 wells in the city have been drilled to 457m.
About 7,000 wells have dried but authorities are making other arrangements, Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar said last week, adding that there is no crisis.
Identifying other sources and using them smartly, for example by reusing treated wastewater in the city “so that the demand for fresh water reduces,” could also help, Palur said.
Rapid urbanization has also contributed to the water shortage in the country. In 2019, Chennai in Tamil Nadu had a water crisis for weeks due to heatwaves and a bad monsoon in 2018.
United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電) expects its addressable market to grow by a low single-digit percentage this year, lower than the overall foundry industry’s 15 percent expansion and the global semiconductor industry’s 10 percent growth, the contract chipmaker said yesterday after reporting the worst profit in four-and-a-half years in the fourth quarter of last year. Growth would be fueled by demand for artificial intelligence (AI) servers, a moderate recovery in consumer electronics and an increase in semiconductor content, UMC said. “UMC’s goal is to outgrow our addressable market while maintaining our structural profitability,” UMC copresident Jason Wang (王石) told an online earnings
The US Federal Reserve is expected to announce a pause in rate cuts on Wednesday, as policymakers look to continue tackling inflation under close and vocal scrutiny from US President Donald Trump. The Fed cut its key lending rate by a full percentage point in the final four months of last year and indicated it would move more cautiously going forward amid an uptick in inflation away from its long-term target of 2 percent. “I think they will do nothing, and I think they should do nothing,” Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis former president Jim Bullard said. “I think the
The TAIEX ended the Year of the Dragon yesterday up about 30 percent, led by contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電). The benchmark index closed up 225.40 points, or 0.97 percent, at 23,525.41 on the last trading session of the Year of the Dragon before the Lunar New Year holiday ushers in the Year of the Snake. During the Year of the Dragon, the TAIEX rose 5,429.34 points, the highest ever, while the 30 percent increase in the year was the second-highest behind only a 30.84 percent gain in the Year of the Rat from Jan. 25, 2020, to Feb.
Cryptocurrencies gave a lukewarm reception to US President Donald Trump’s first policy moves on digital assets, notching small gains after he commissioned a report on regulation and a crypto reserve. Bitcoin has been broadly steady since Trump took office on Monday and was trading at about US$105,000 yesterday as some of the euphoria around a hoped-for revolution in cryptocurrency regulation ebbed. Smaller cryptocurrency ether has likewise had a fairly steady week, although was up 5 percent in the Asia day to US$3,420. Bitcoin had been one of the most spectacular “Trump trades” in financial markets, gaining 50 percent to break above US$100,000 and
RSS