Daybreak - Why Bengaluru’s apartment complexes would rather rely on the “tanker mafia” than subsidised water

Episode Date: March 27, 2026

Bengaluru's water utility loses a third of everything it pumps. It owes Tokyo Rs 10,000 crore. It bleeds Rs 80 crore every month.Its answer to all of this was an app — GPS-tracked tankers, government-backed, 40% cheaper than the market.But nine months later the all the app has to show is 10,000 downloads and a 2.8 rating in a city of 14 million. So why are Bangalore's residents saying no to the state's efforts?Tune in.  🚨The Ken's Zero Shot podcast is hosting a live event! This is a speculative yet realistic discussion built around one premise: what happens when AI agents take off in India? How will they rewire existing habits, business models and profit pools? Since nobody knows for sure, we won't pretend to have all the answers. Instead we are going to break the narrative. Click here for details. 

Every year, around the end of March, which is right about now, something shifts in Bangalore. And it is not very visible at first. But if you pay attention, you will notice that the bore well in your building starts taking longer to fill the tank. And the water tanker that your apartment complex books starts arriving later than usual. And the price per tanker also goes up. By April, it's a full-blown scramble. WhatsApp groups in housing societies light up, people start storing water in buckets, in drums, in whatever they have.

Tanker operators, at least the good ones, and I mean the ones your neighbours swears by, start getting booked out days in advance. And then the summer passes, the rains come and Bangalore exhales until the next year, when the same cycle starts again. This has been the rhythm of the city for years now. If you hear people talking about it, just the annual condition of living in one of the world's fastest-growing tech-forward cities.

But you know what makes Bangalore's water story stranger than it first appears? This is not one city with one water problem. It is actually three cities layered on top of each other, each with a completely different relationship to water. So you have the old city. These are the areas, BWSSB or the Bangalore Water Supply and Seweridge Board has always served. Here, the pipes and connections already exist

and water comes through. Maybe with some interruptions sometimes. But it comes. And then there is the new city, the IT corridor. These are apartment towers that went up in the 2000s and the 2010s. They added millions of residents in a span of a decade. And never got a water connection. There was no infrastructure for supply.

And then there's a third Bangalore that never got. gets the limelight. This one pays the most for water and gets the least. Our colleague, Mutasim Khan, found that families in these slums here pay around 400 rupees a month for water, which is almost double of the usual rate, and this on household incomes of 8,000 to 10,000 rupees. So, when the government decided it was finally going to fix Bangalore's water problem, as expected, it was a tech-first solution. They launched an app called Sanchari Kaweiri. GPS tracked tankers BIS certified water prices at a 40% discount. D.K. Shivakumar announced it himself. And the pitch was simple. We are going to bring order

to this chaos and get rid of the tanker mafia. Nine months later, the app has 10,000 downloads in a city of 14 million people. It has a 2.8 rating on Google Play. And if you open it right now and try to book a tanker, there's a good chance you'll spend the next few days staring at the words driver not assigned. So, the private tankers are still out there, still getting booked out, and still charging whatever they want.

And Mutasim, who is here in the studio with us today, tried to understand why. And what he found goes well beyond the obvious explanation you'd expect, that the app did not work. Hi, Mutasim, thank you for joining us on daybreak today. So you did a very interesting story on Bangalore's water crisis and like the parallel economy that has come up with the tanker providers. So my first question to you is this.

So we're both from Mumbai. So we both know that during the summers, especially there's like a massive crisis of water. But there's something about the crisis in Bangalore that makes it unique. So can you tell us a bit more about that? Sure, no problem. High racialized, Nikda, thank you. for having me.

So actually the context for this is interesting and I'll draw the comparison with Mumbai in a little bit. But first a little bit about how I came to think of pursuing this story because this is one of the more spontaneous sort of stories that came to me. I have recently moved to Bangalore. It's been just over a month

and I was at a French place in Belendur and we had ordered a lot of pizzas and had pretty heavy dinner and I wanted to go to the restroom. but it turned out that for hours their restroom did not have any kind of running water the kitchen did not have any kind of running water

and this came to me as a surprise because I would have thought that you know city like Bangalore especially around this IT corridor where you have a lot of these people working in corporates and tech living I would have thought that you know water supply wouldn't have been a problem there

but that was not actually true so that is what first led me to look into okay ask the question or you know what is going on now the comparison with Mumbai actually there is a bunch of things to it. And this is, I think, to contextualize this whole issue more,

it's like a lot of interconnected structural things which go into making this water crisis the way it is today. But so one, important comparison with Mumbai would be the topography of Bangalore and the other aspect is also its history. So Bangalore, I think, was called the city of lakes, I think at least in the 20th century. It was a city sprawling with a lot of different water bodies

for those who want to see a more visual account of this can go to the story and check right at the end. We have added like a GIF tracking what happened to Bangalore's Lakes. So these water bodies started drying up partly because of this rapid construction spree that happened with tech parks and a lot of high-rise residential complexes. Partly also they were paved over because you needed land for more construction. Now, that left Bangalore with Kaveri as its only source. And the topography works in a way that Bangalore is actually uphill from the Kaveri River. So any way to transport water be trucks or be pipelines, you require more force and hence more electricity to get that water up and running. So that is, I think, something that sits at the center of what makes this water crisis you need to Bangalore compared to a city like Mumbai or Delhi.

Matasam, there was this, your opening line of the story was so good. I'll just read it out for listeners. You said, Bangal's water utility loses two things at a remarkable rate. Water and money. That's such a great line. So, you know, most people, when we talk about Bangalore's water issue, we think of it as a scarcity problem, right?

Especially in summers, like we imagine, obviously the lakes have dried up. So is the river. But through your reporting, you actually found out that was, a very convenient answer and it was not entirely true, right? Can you tell us a little bit about this? Exactly. So while scarcity is obviously a part of the problem, I found that there are a lot of other things at play as well. For example, Bangalore's Water Utility, which is called the BW SSB, there are a bunch of things going on there. One, unlike your typical water utilities with which other states have. It is not

subsidized or paid for using the state's budget. It is supposed to be this standalone body that operates on a no profit, no loss model, and it earns its revenue through supplying water to consumers across the city. Now with Bangalore growing so fast, BWSSSB obviously couldn't catch up as fast in terms of laying pipelines to this outer corporate tech park

corridor, you know, like Belendur or Sarjapur and these places. And so what ended up happening was two things. One, the BWSSSB, at least my investigation will appear to suggest, has a lot of inefficiencies, both in terms of its engineering and in terms of it management. If you look at it's like the engineering, you see that even today one third of the water that BWSSB sort of that enters into BWSSB. these pipelines qualify as non-revenue water, which means that this is water which either leaks through the pipes or which is stolen through illegal means, right?

In fact, stage five was supposed to get about 400 million litres of water. Stage five recovery is this outer ring road, Belendur area, which we are talking about, the corporate corridor. But Bangalore's current water utility actually loses 5.50 million million liters of water. So it is losing more water than it is supposed to supply to this stage five corridor. So again, partly that is that is one issue. The second is like I said, it is not funded by the state or at least not completely funded by the state. It's a very small portion that comes from the state budget. Much of it comes from this loan that BWSSB took from what is called the Japan Infrastructure Corporation. This is like state infrastructure fund from

Japan and they've borrowed over 10,000 crores in the last decade or so and they're borrowing I think 6,000 crores more for the next part of the project. This is just specifically for Bangalore and its water supply. Just specifically for Bangalore and its water supply. And so partly if you just look at their finances, they are one, like I said, they are running at a loss of about 80 crores a month, which has to do with all these things. Very high electricity costs. A lot of water is lost in terms of non-revenue water.

and then they also have to repay this loan this loan that they have taken from Japan. So it's a very tight situation from them. And I think that is where all the other implications that I've explored later in the article start coming out of. So for all these IT corridors for which like the water supply was not set up, since your article discusses like the water tanker mafia, I'm guessing that was part of the, you know,

that's what came in to fill that gap right of the supply. So can you tell us a little bit about this, you know, parallel economy that came up because of this shortage and crisis? Right. So there were a lot of people like we said who ended up settling down in this outer ring road area very rapidly. And note that this is not just people. Also talking about huge buildings, office buildings and residential buildings. So there is water demand from there as well. But BWSSSB's pipelines had not yet reached those areas. So there was demand and the supply had to come from somewhere. And so what essentially happened is you had this parallel water economy grow. Interesting fact which it does not feature in my article, I think, is that a lot of these private tanker operators were actually small-time farmers and people working agricultural fields.

And then they thought why not enter this business. So what these people usually would do is they would own a small number of tankers, maybe a tanker fleet of three to four. They would dig bore wells, often illegally, which is partly where the mafia thing comes from. they would dig bore wells illegally, take out water from these bore wells, and then fill it up in their tucks, which had huge tankers behind them, and then supply it to these consumers.

Now, obviously, not all of it was illegal, but that is sort of what the discourse has made them out to be. So anyways, this continued for a few years. And what also happened parallelly was that consumers felt that the price at which private tanker operator was selling this water was very, very high. How much was it? Right.

So the price varies per season because, for example, in summer, the bore wells run dry. Water table is lower. So you need more electricity to pump up water. Likewise, then you have diesel prices, etc. So the price keeps fluctuating, but typically stays between 1,500 to 2,500 for a 12-kileliter tanker, which is sort of the typical unit that households will buy. Now, this was the problem. And interesting context also is that Bangaluru has not had municipal elections for the last 10 years, right?

It has been run by government-appointed bureaucrats. And water has always been sort of this politically charged election theme in Bangalore. And so, D.K. Shiv Kumar last year, early last year, came up with what he called Kaveri on wheels. The idea was that they would set up, the government would set up their own tanker service and would offer water at about 40 to 60% discount to what these private anchor operators were selling at. So that is how Sanchari Kaveri came about to be. The app.

So, yeah. So the way consumers would order through the Sanjari Kaveri scheme was that the government built an application. It was called Kaveri on Wheels. You could just log on to the application, say that you want this much water at this time and the government would deliver it. However, it's been nine months since then.

and it has Sanchari Kaveri had not, has not seen a summer yet. It was released right after summer last year. So summer is already started. And what I found was this app was not really doing well at all. On Google Play, it had about 10,000 downloads in a city of 14 million. It had a 2.8 star rating and reviews were just, like they get progressively worse as you scrolled down. Did you speak to any people who had downloaded this app about their experience of trying to get water through it? I did actually. I spoke to a resident welfare. So there are these committees that

these apartments have. I spoke to someone who tried and her experience was equally bad with the app. She would order today and then for two weeks there would be no response and then in some places the service would not even work. Right. Which also you mentioned in the story right which is why people went back to the old dependable source which was these water tankers. You also spoke about like all these residents of these areas had over the years developed relationships with these private suppliers, right? Can you tell us a little bit about that? Right. So partly the answer to this question was that water is not merely a price product.

It's also a reliability product, which means that if you don't trust your water supplier, you won't mind paying a higher price for it. At least that is what we have seen. And with these private water tankers, they offer very reliable service because they were filling up water from nearby bore wells. Water would come very quickly. And then you could just like pick up your phone call and the water would be there. And so that is a relationship that had been set up over a long time. And the app could not really disrupt that kind of customer relationship. Right.

You know, you wrote this very interesting line, right? Which is the operators were the problem and Sanchari Kaweri was the solution, except the solution turned around. and hired the problem. And apparently 60% of BWSSB's own fleet is leased from these private supply. So also tell us a little bit about this twist of the story. Yes. So this is where actually this whole tanker mafia discourse comes in. So when Sanchari Kaveri was announced,

the discourse around it was that there is this tanker mafia, this other sort of these private tanker operators who are greedy and are charging excessive amounts. so we will come up and offer to you at an affordable service. That actually turned out not to be very true. We have a detailed breakdown of how much a private tanker operator makes, what their margins look like. And they have about 10, 15% margin at best,

which is not a scandalous number for any kind of logistics business. But yeah, the way this Sanchari-Kavery scheme operated behind the scenes was again, very interesting because to supply this water, you need tankers. To get tankers, you need money. Which the BWSSSB did not have enough. of. So they thought, why not we can just rent these tankers out?

And where do you rent these tankers out from? You only had the private tanker operators. So they had to sort of approach these same private tanker operators who were, who they were calling the mafia on the other side of the table. But yeah, so that happened. 60% of their vehicles were leased from these private tanker operators. And what was the incentive that the government gave these private tankers to join the

Sanchari Kavari scheme? Not much actually and the private tanker operators were not very thrilled in joining them either so there is

a very basic like economics comparison on both these sides so for a private tanker operator who's operating independently

one they don't have to follow all these guidelines that you have to follow with Sanchari Kavari Kavari. For example the water was supposed to be

GPS tracked then you had to go to these Kaverri filling centres which were far away compared to, well, if you would just get the water from the bore wells. So all in all, it was a much more like full of hassle experience for these tanker operators to just get this water.

But even on the side of economics, whatever 15, 10, 15% margins they were making in their current business, they were not making nearly enough with if they just lease their truck because they would get like a fixed amount of daily sort of rental fee. And that compared with like changing diesel costs. So they had much less control over their business. And in fact, a private tanker operator who I spoke with, explicitly said that for him, whatever tankers he had leads up to the government,

were making a loss. So then the question is, why would then these tanker operators do it? And I mean, I found out that they were not, they were not very thrilled about it. In fact, these people got together.

They unionized. They had these meetings. But the government sort of, like I said, it brought muscle to a market dispute. which is to say is they started using other kinds of tactics. One, if you were a private anchor operator and you did not lease at least some of your fleet to the government, then they did these things where they threatened these private anchor operators with legal action.

So a lot of these people won't have proper documents or whatever. And so that was one threat. Then they were stopped at signals and there was checking. And so the government was trying to make their lives difficult. But even at these cavalry filling stations, when a private tanker operator went, they had to pay a bribe to the officials there to get their truck first in line. Otherwise, they had to wait for hours. Otherwise, they had to wait for hours, which just means that you're losing more money.

Exactly. Because you could have supplied your private customers in that time period. So yeah, private tankers were not at all thrilled about this, which I think is a huge part of the reason of why it didn't work. So if a consumer is ordering water on this Sanchari Kaveri app, but you don't have private tanker operators and who are benefiting from this, that means you have. have supply on trucks. And that is part of the reason why the thing didn't work. Right. Right.

So, I mean, the supply side is obviously very confused and, you know, it's a not. But also on the consumer side, like apartment complexes were also not signing up for government connections, right? So because they, not just because they found tankers more reliable in the case that you call once and they're there the next day, but also on a, you know, like, a monetary basis. So can you explain what that was also about? Sure.

So, okay, a lot of these apartments also did not want to sign up to the pipeline. Because the pipeline has reached some areas. I think about 40% of the project is complete in terms of laying out pipes. But a lot of these apartments are not even buying piped water. And that was even more surprising is because now pipe water is very reliable. You get it whenever it's probably way cheaper than private anchor operator. So why is that happening? turns out that it's actually not way cheaper for a bunch of reasons.

First is obviously that BWSSSB is in a lot of debt. So they have to figure out pricing so that they can at least sustain their business operations. They're already making huge losses. But I think they're trying everything they can to not leave any money on the table and better their bottom line. So what happened as a result is that the pricing that comes with pipeline water is what they call slab-based pricing, which means that if I am using exactly the same amount of water,

how much I pay goes up exponentially depending on where I live. So if I live in an independent house, I pay X amount. But if I move to an apartment complex with 300 apartments, that X becomes 5x. And if I move to a 500 apartment, it becomes 8x. But it should be the opposite, no?

It should be the opposite for two reasons. One, because these buildings, naturally save a lot more water because their water systems are much more robust and they have these STPs which sort of recycle water and second, for these buildings the way they're built

you don't have to take the pipeline out to each flat you can just have a pipeline connected to the main pipeline and the building has already built the rest of the pipeline which is not the case with an independent house or a set of 300 independent houses so this is where my conversation

with the founder of the Bengaluru Apartments Federation which is like this congregation of apartment representatives. They said that, you know, they didn't make sense to them. And they were like, why should we pay so much more?

And there is no logic behind it. So how much was the connection fee that BWSSB was asking for, for these apartments? Right. So one is the price that you pay for using water daily. The second is also the fee to lay out the initial connection itself.

And that, for a 200 apartment complex, came out to be about 1.5 crores or something. And now that these so the way these buildings work is you have a landlord they release their rooms out and then they are someplace else so now many of these apartment complexes have tenants who don't own the flats and now to pay this 1.5 crore you have to convince each landlord of the building who's not even in the city of 200 flats which comes out to about one and a half two lakhs just to lay the initial connection and so a lot of the people were just not even if even if like a bunch of flats didn't agree in an apartment to pay

You just could not lay the connection out. So basically the price gap that would have incentivized you to take pipe water over water tankers was just narrowing down and the incentive was narrowing down. Yeah. So, you know, it's quite bizarre, no. On one hand, they set up this whole Sanchar recovery project so that they could get water to people, especially in the IT corridors, for less, like 40% cheaper. And then on the other hand, when it's actually happening, they're asking 1.5 crores just for connection fee.

Right. So you also tried to speak to people at BWSSB unsuccessfully. But you did say something that was interesting that the chairman had said in an interview or something somewhere, where he was very proud of it and he said the pricing structure was like meant for rich to pay more and poor to get subsidized water, like this Robin Hood arrangement. But you found out that was not entirely. true. Yeah, so the BWSSHB chairman tended to justify this slab-based pricing by saying that they're cross-subsidizing across demographics. They want water to be cheaper for people who are less economically advantaged. And so they are sort of taking that revenue from the rich and giving it to the poor,

which is what I call the Robin Hood arrangement. However, there are been multiple investigations by other media bodies, especially this investigation from citizens. citizen matters which I link in my article, talks about the actually plower in Bangalore, the slown dwellers, people who are living in these pockets which do not have covery pipe connections at all. So, and they have to literally buy this water from local shopkeepers who sell it at a much higher predatory rate. So even as the chairman is arguing for a Robin Hood arrangement, that works only if people actually

have pipe connections to pay a cheaper rate for it. but that was evidently not the case. So based on your research and, you know, investigation, what do you think could be, you know, the way forward? Does an answer lie in perhaps another tech-based solution if it's not the app? Well, a tech-based solution in the form of an app is just an interface, right? I mean, it is powered by whatever infrastructure is behind it. For now, I think what is happening is, and this is my sense,

around it because I visited a couple of these Baf, Bangalore Apartment Federation events. And it seems that people are sort of trying to come together and push back against this kind of pricing by the BWSSSB. In fact, recently there was a case in the Karnataka High Court where an apartment actually sued BWSSB for these connection charges. And the high court actually ruled in favor of the apartment saying that these charges were

illegal. Yeah. It has since gone to the Supreme Court. The prices continue to. remain the same until that is sorted out. But yes, I think there is a sort of the sort of a community building around this issue and people more collectively, all kinds of stakeholders, slowly trying to figure out what to do because otherwise the problem just keeps getting worse.

Even in the Cavary River, water is limited. And the groundwater is anyways like falling at a very, very rapid rate. So I did get the sense that it's a very, it's a problem with a lot of urgency. And people who are like immediately facing the problem on a day to day, are, increasingly feeling like, you know, we have to come together and do something about it. So that might open up a few doors in the future. Do you have any advice for individual listeners? Like, Summer's almost here in Bangal, which means this is happening again.

Again, yeah. As always. So what can we do till, you know, because this is such a huge systemic problem that's going to take years in a country like ours. Yeah. So what can we do at an individual level? I think, I mean, I mean, Partly you could actually help in this kind of unionizing of apartments where you're coming together, maybe from looking at your RWAs and seeing, okay, how can we join Baf in what it's doing?

But partly, and something this is I have done on an individual level is after this investigation, I'm much less careless about the water that I'm wasting. So I think sort of a mixture of both of these things is something I would say. Right. Thank you so much, Matasem, for finding time to talk to us. Thank you. And we're looking forward to your next story. Thank you so much.