The Better India · 16 hours ago

How an Ex-Army Officer Is Reviving Bengaluru's Forgotten Drains to Prevent Floods

When retired Army officer Captain Santosh Kumar returned home to Muthanallur and watched Bengaluru's roads flood while its nearby lakes sat dry, he recognized the contradiction as a question worth answering. His search led him to century-old British maps from 1923, which revealed an intricate network of ancient channels - Raja Kaluves - that had once guided rainwater through the city's natural valleys, lake to lake, for over 500 years, before roads and buildings quietly erased them. Working with local residents and government departments, he restored nearly four kilometers of one such channel, and when the next monsoon arrived, neighboring areas flooded while Muthanallur did not. That single season of proof expanded into a decade of work: 14 ancient lakes, some nearly a thousand years old, brought back to life. "In natural settings," Captain Santosh observed, "rainwater either gets soaked into the soil or makes its way to rain streams, lakes and rivers" - and his quiet insistence on recovering those pathways suggests that what a city most needs, it sometimes only has to remember.