Why a megacity in India is reviving the humble water well

Vishwanath Srikantiah, an urban planner in Bengaluru, India’s tech hub, sat on the edge of a 50-year-old water well in a quiet neighborhood near the airport. 

When Vishwanath first encountered the well several years ago, he said it was full of garbage. His organization, Biome Environmental Trust, helped clean and restore the well, which is now adorned with artwork. It also has a protective metal cover and a pulley for residents to draw water for washing or bathing.

“Even during the crisis when there was no water in the city, this well always had water,” Vishwanath said, referring to a looming water emergency in Bengaluru earlier this year. 

Vishwanath’s organization brings many of these humble wells back to life through the Million Wells for Bengaluru project. Vishwanath estimated that they’ve gotten to around 280,000 of them over the past decade. 

Small, shallow wells could hold the key to alleviating Bengaluru’s ongoing water problems. Using age-old, well-digging techniques, they help residents tap into a forgotten water source: the shallow aquifer. 

For centuries, Indians depended on open wells. However, with the advent of deep drilling technology, traditional wells fell out of use. 

Now, in an era of climate change, Vishwanath said, wells are a simple yet effective choice to make the city more water-secure: “Truly, it’s a low, shallow-hanging fruit.” 

Today, Bengaluru gets most of its water from the Cauvery River, about 60 miles away and at a lower elevation than the city. The municipal piped network delivers this water to homes. But newer parts of the ever-expanding city don’t have government water connections yet. 

“The infrastructure is barely able to match the city’s growth, and so, where the piped network does not reach, the dependency is completely on groundwater,”  Vishwanath said.

Groundwater is pumped up from great depths through borewells — narrow shafts that dig as deep as 1,800 feet below the ground to extract water, much farther down than traditional wells. Bengaluru has an indiscriminate number of borewells, and new ones are being drilled constantly. 

“When you go deeper into the ground, the water becomes more saline, more unreliable, and the borewells tend to dry out,” Vishwanath said. 

That’s precisely what happened earlier this year — many of the city’s borewells ran dry. Traditional, open wells, on the other hand, go less than 100 feet below the ground. This part of the earth is like a sponge, Vishwanath said: “It can hold water and release water, provided we understand the recharge zones and make sure that rainwater percolates.” 

Water from a well requires much less energy because it only needs to be drawn up to 20 feet or 30 feet. 

“It’s very energy efficient. It’s cheap water. It has less carbon emissions,” Vishwanath said. 

The Million Wells initiative harnesses the knowledge of traditional well-diggers called Mannu Vaddars, many of whom lost work when India shifted to mechanically dug borewells.

Sahana Goswami is a senior program manager for urban water and climate resilience at the World Resources Institute India.

“This sort of campaign is very important because you’re widening our scope and saying, ‘Here’s another resource that we can tap into when we need,’” she said. 

After all, relying too much on one source of water is at the root of Bengaluru’s water problems. 

“You should have a diverse set of sources of water,” Goswami said. “So, if one is diminished, you still have the other one that you can draw from.”

In the face of climate change, she said, solutions like the Million Wells initiative become all the more urgent, especially as summers in Bengaluru are getting hotter and rainfall is becoming more erratic. 

At the same time, the city is urbanizing rapidly. 

“The way we have developed, we have all these paved surfaces. The natural capacity of water to get absorbed into the ground is also getting diminished,” Goswami said. “We have had more incidences of acute rainfall but short duration, high rainfall, which usually flows away. So, how much water has been absorbed into the ground has been a bit lesser.”

Capturing rainwater is essential to recharge the shallow aquifer, something lakes do naturally. While Bengaluru has many lakes, some are drying up.  

But Vishwanath pointed to the successful rehabilitation of Sihineeru Kere (“Sweet Water Lake”) on the outskirts of Bengaluru, and a nearby well. The Environmental Foundation of India intervened in 2022, filling it with rainwater and treated wastewater. 

Through Vishwanath’s Biome Environmental Trust, a treatment plant next to the lake purifies water from the shallow aquifer, which will soon be supplied directly to locals, and well-diggers cleaned and de-silted the well. 

Vishwanath described the collaboration as a success, but he’s eager to see it replicated because climate change “is coming like a tsunami, so we don’t have time to be able to deal with it,” he said. “So, that’s the impatience that I feel as much as the satisfaction.”