The importance of Bengaluru’s lakes and their associated land Premium

Bengaluru city has come into focus recently due to the flooding caused by unexpected, excess rains from the north-east monsoon. The flooding has taken place at diverse locations across the city. This has in turn led attention to the causes of flooding which many ascribe to the disturbed or encroached canals that carry rain water including storm water drains and rajakaluves or canals that connect lakes to each other.

Bengaluru

Bengaluru city has come into focus recently due to the flooding caused by unexpected, excess rains from the north-east monsoon. The flooding has taken place at diverse locations across the city. This has in turn led attention to the causes of flooding which many ascribe to the disturbed or encroached canals that carry rain water including storm water drains and rajakaluves or canals that connect lakes to each other.

However, what is lost in this discourse is the land that is downstream of each lake in the cascading chains of lakes spread across the city also had a role in channelling rainwater down the slopes of the three valleys that Bengaluru has. How this land has lost that role due to it getting built up on and what caused the large scale conversion of that land is the unspoken history of the lake system of Bengaluru.

Located on an average 920 metres above sea level on a plateau, there are three valleys in Bengaluru, along which a cascading series of lakes or manmade irrigation tanks have been constructed over centuries. These irrigation tanks or keres are a part of the larger history and culture of water management in South India. When these lakes or keres were constructed in the past, there was an intricate management system which tied it to lands around it, which we could call associated lands. There were two types of such lands, the wetlands or moist lands downstream of the kere locally called gadde jameen and the dry lands of which the most common type were the common grazing lands or gomala lands.

Maintenance of the kere or the lake was done locally by different communities living in villages near the lakes. For example there was a community called the Neeruganti who managed the canals or rajakalauves that carried overflow from one lake to the next lake and in the process channelled water into the moist lands downstream. These moist lands were used to cultivate various crops including rice and sugarcane. Located in the bundh or embankment of the lake were sluice mechanisms, smaller versions of those seen in dams, to regulate the flow of water into the cultivated moist lands. The bundh was maintained by yet another community historically. All of these maintenance systems were recorded by British gazetteer B.L Rice in the Mysore Gazette in 1897 and was further encountered by this writer when he researched the lakes of Bengaluru.

Connected to this maintenance system of the lakes was a land tenure system called the Inam system. Under this system, lands associated with the lakes were granted to people living in the village based on the livelihoods that they pursued.

The various inam tenure lands included service inams, thotti/neeruganti inams, and poojari inams. Service inams included land granted to those who provided services to the village such as hair cutting, disposal of carcasses, playing of the tamte, a drum during announcements and special occasions. Thotti/neeruganti inams enabled those who maintained the kere and the canal system to be granted land in return for their services. Poojari inams were given to the priestly class.