The Lakes of Bayaluseeme

History and Geography are the two things that fascinated me since childhood, god knows how I ended up being a Medical Doctor. I go to a bookstore and buy History and Geography books, when doing nothing I open up the Google Earth and look up at different geographic features of different countries.

Geography has played a major part in the development of different civilisations throughout History and slight changes in the Geography had led to the extinction of civilisations, example being the Indus valley Civilisation which thrived when the mighty Saraswathi river was at full flow until an earhtquake diverted the flow of river and the civilisation just ended.

Similarly the fertile valleys of Ganga and Bhrmaputra are teeming with life, abundance of water and fertile land has led to explosion of population, around 50 crore people live in this region. Compare it to the dry, monsoon dependent Bayaluseeme of Karnataka and Rayalaseema of Andhrapradesh. These regions receive less rainfall compared to other regions of India and that the rains are unpredictable, probably receive couple of years of good rainfall and then several years of drought.

Bayaluseeme is the region to the east of the Western Ghats or Malenaadu. The south west monsoon hits the western ghats and most of the rain it carries is dumped on the hills and so the Bayaluseeme receives less rain, thanks to the huge wall created by the mountainous westernghats, Bayaluseeme is in the rain shadow region. But that has not prevented the people of Bayaluseeme not to make the most of when the mother nature gives them. There are no major rivers in the region, the minor ones like Palar and Pennar have water only in the rainy season. So the people of Bayaluseeme have built artificial lakes to store water all round the year, the undivided Kolar District alone has about 5000 lakes, the largest number in India.

These Lakes provided water for cultivation all year round and also prevented the water flowing down the Deccan Plateau into the plains of Tamil Nadu, thus helping boost the underground water level. These lakes were built many hundreds of years ago and provided people with life giving water, but today its sad to see that these lakes have been neglected to the extent that even the largest of the lakes fail to fill up completely even during years of good rainfall. The reasons being too many bore wells - pumping out ground water continuously, large Eucalyptus plantations sucking out large amounts of water, lakes getting filled with slit and other garbage and blocking of the water channels.

If the Government and people of these districts don't take this problem seriously, this region is going to turn into a Desert soon. The best example is the Kolaramma lake, its a massive lake adjoining Kolar town and the last time I saw it over flow was about 15 yrs ago, this year in the middle of Monsoon season, there is not even a drop of water in the lake, omnious signs for the future. I sincerely hope they do something about this sooner or later.