The encroachment and conversion of Bengaluru’s wetlands into alienable property is not a new phenomenon. Until the mid-20th century, a network of engineered and naturally occurring water reservoirs called keres in Kannada or “lakes/tanks” in English extended across the landscape. More than a thousand such tanks interconnected through canals (today’s raja kaluves) once crisscrossed the urban district of Bengaluru. As anthropologist David Mosse has chronicled, village-managed tanks were developed all over South India four centuries ago in response to the vagaries of monsoonal rainfall and the cultural and political traits of pre-colonial agrarian states.
Malini Ranganathan, ‘Why Bengaluru is not immune to floods: It’s all about land (and money)’, Citizen Matters