Lessons on dealing with Cauvery water supply issue at home in Bengaluru

After moving back from the US a few years ago, my wife and I have been living in the house that my dad had built nearly three decades ago – after all, the house now belongs to me and is centrally located in a nice neighborhood in Bengaluru.  

During the years since we built the house, the neighborhood has transformed. Our house has enjoyed continuous water supply for decades since my parents moved in. Therefore, I was rather surprised to find water supply from the mains had become rather erratic during the past few weeks. 

Houses in urban India are designed with a large ‘sump’ to store water from civic supply, that is supplied alternative days along with an overhead water pump. We had the supply routine noted in our calendars, but for a week or so in early January our sump started running out of water. Water supply in urban Bengaluru is managed by BWSSB, colloquially known as ‘Cauvery water,’ since the water is pumped upstream from Cauvery River. 

I checked around with our neighbors and was told they didn’t face any issues. It was only our house that was facing issue with water supply, which felt rather strange. 

I decided to call the local BWSSB line-man Avinash, who came and inspected the meter and pipe coming from the mains. Local line-men are the first point of contact since they operate the ‘valves’ from water mains into residential neighborhoods. Avinash didn’t find have any issues or blockage that perplexed us further. He suggested that I lodge a written complain at the local BWSSB office that he would review with the area AE (Assistant Engineer).

The issue continued to persist for weeks and in the interim I had to call for a local water-tanker to come and supply water into our sump. 

The sump at home had been designed to store about 2-3000 liters of water, just sufficient for a couple of days for our family of four. In the meantime, I took to social media and began tweeting about the issue too. 

Family in Central Bengaluru's 30-yr-old house are victims of #BWSSB Water meter scam?

HELP @chairmanbwssb @BBMPCOMM @bwssbdirector @BBMPAdmn

Written complain given to BWSSB, Engineer and Lineman
Sahaya Complaint - 20019027#bengaluru #water #BBMP #rtItBot @byrathi_suresh https://t.co/lZmwzGaCTK pic.twitter.com/HocM24xq2D

— Mohan (@mohan_author) January 28, 2023

While the tweet generated a few likes, comments and re-tweets, it didn’t lead to action or a response from officials. During the weeks following, I also lodged a complain in BBMP’s complaint management system and also on Sahaaya 2.0 (Namma Bengaluru) city corporation’s complaint App. These systems simply generated a ticket number, but didn’t lead to any action. 

In the meantime, I continued to call the lineman every couple of days to see if there was a follow up. He came home with his supervisor who asked me to record the meager flow of water that we were receiving on my smartphone. I also got the phone number of the local AE and sent him a message with my issue along with the video of the water supply.

Lessons on dealing with BWSSB water supply issue

During the last weekend in January, I read about a ‘Water Adalat’ (complaint hearing) that the commissioner of BBMP was conducting that day between 9 an 11 AM. 

I called the hotline at 9 AM and found the line was busy but I persisted and continued to call the phone line every few minutes. I finally got through at about 10 AM. An official took down my Water supply account number, name and address and connected me to his superior. The officer heard my rather brief request and promised to send the local engineer to resolve our issue. 

About 2 hours after my call with the commissioner, the lineman, his supervisor and the Engineer came by our house. The AE asked a few pertinent questions and speculated that our water line, drawn from the mains by the main road years ago may have changed. 

The Engineer suggested that could draw water from the water mains that had now come winding by adjacent to our compound. He agreed that the change of line would be the responsibility of BWSSB, while I would have to pay to get the pipe inside our compound re-routed to the new inlet from the mains. 

I called my plumber to figure out the re-routing of inlet pipes from the mains and the lineman brought in labor to work on the connection to the water mains from the road.

In India, unlike in the west, cartography of public water, sewage and other services aren’t well mapped or documented. This leads to a lot of guess-work while digging roads and other public areas for utilities. The guys dug a 3-feet wide circle adjacent to the road about 3-feet deep but weren’t able to strike the mains. 

They left after covering up the dig and said they’d be back the next day, but didn’t come back as promised. They came back after a week citing other work emergencies by which I had to order another tanker of water. When they started digging a bit deeper in the same spot, they found the water mains and went on to connect it to the line my plumber had already extended from our house.

That evening, when the water was supplied to the mains, water supply to our house resumed. Finally; after about 3-4 weeks of complains and calling.

Lesson learnt: 

• While dealing with public officials, be persistent and pursue the matter at the top and also work with local officials 
• If you are able to reach a top official, it will streamline the communication and ensure your work gets done promptly. 

Life certificate saga: Digital India fails Veterans and senior citizen?

It is November, a month when most Central government retirees and pensioners in India need to submit a ‘life certificate.’ This enables them to continue receiving their pension without interruption. In most cases, the process is rather simple: one just walks into the local bank, meets the manager or assistant manager and signs the form and hands it off.

This ‘simple’ process can become a challenging paper chasing exercise for the unfortunate pensioner who is bedridden or unable to move out of home. Take the case of my father, a retired Indian Air Force officer who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Plus syndrome, a neural disease that gradually impairs motor skills. In previous years, he used to walk down to the local SBI branch near our house from where he draws his pension and sign the papers in person. This year, due to the progressive degeneration of his condition, he is unable to move out of home unassisted, and is unable to use his wrists to write or sign papers.

Go digital? Last mile is still the challenge !

A few weeks ago, I began researching options to help complete his "life certificate" and reviewed the option of "Jeevan Pramaan: Digital Life Certificate for Pensioners"

The intent behind the digital initiative is great and probably works for some people, especially those who are able to 'seed' the biometric data and information before they are incapacitated. I downloaded the app and tried to authenticate my father’s signature against the government’s database and failed.

Lesson: People like my father may not faced this predicament if they pre-register and verify their bio-metric data when they are young, fit-and-able. Now, when I aid his shaking thumb to record the digital-biometric data, it fails.

RBI directive ? Sorry, we don’t have a process yet!

A few weeks ago, I came across an article in the media  "Provide Doorstep Banking to Those Above 70 by December 31: RBI"

I decided to email SBI’s customer service a couple of times, requesting them to help in the matter and pointed to the RBI directive. My emails to "chairman@sbi.co.in" went into their cyber-black-hole and I never heard back from customer service or the branch.

I stopped by the branch a few days ago and met the assistant manager asking for his suggestion. I mentioned the ‘RBI Directive’ on “Doorstep Banking” and he began laughing. The manager explained that there were a couple of challenges:

• SBI (his bank) had got the RBI directive but had yet to formulate a ‘process’ for rollout across branches 
• The manager and his team had their hands full. Even assuming the process were rolled-out, it would be hard to implement (meaning: his team wasnt in any urgency to oblige on this matter0

He said that since my father had been signing papers till recently, his thumb impression would have to be ‘attested’ and accompanied by a doctor’s letter stating his condition. This began my paperwork chase.

Call the doctor…  Call the doctor… just now !

My dad, as I mentioned earlier, is homebound with a catheter attached. To take him to a doctor would require an ambulance and all the stress and strain that comes with it. The other viable option was to request a doctor to come home.

We live in the heart of Bangalore, home of digital startups and entrepreneurs. There are digital services like Portea Medical and other startups that provide in-home nursing care, at a cost. On calling, a few of them, I was told that I would have to ‘register’ and ‘book’ a service to get a home-visit that would take a few days.

I asked around and a friendly doctor in our neighborhood obliged. She came home to see Dad and wrote up a letter, and didn’t even charge for it!  I also had to get my father's thumb-impression on the Life-certificate attested. So, I requested a local Notary to come home to attest the certificate.

Armed with these documents - doctor's letter and life certificate with my dad's thumb impression duly attested  - I stopped by the SBI branch this morning. After looking through the documents, the ‘Service manager’ asked me to meet the manager. The manager politely asked me to sit and looked at the documents and remarked that notarizing wasn't necessary. Any Gazetted officer’s signature would have sufficed. The irony - that my dad himself is a retired senior Gazette officer ! – was lost on him. He continued scanning the papers and asked for a copy of my dad’s Adhaar card.

I was peeved and mentioned that my dad’s bank account was already linked to his Adhaar account, but the manager still insisted on that photocopy.

After another trip back home, I returned with that piece of paper…. I sighed with relief at the end of this saga. For now.

I was left scratching my head over the media hype about "RBI directive" to banks. Even with globalization and all the cash infusion into nationalized banks, parochial managers want to continue with status-quo. Pensioners, veterans and customers be damned!

The attitude of parochial managers at nationalized banks is perhaps the main reason my primary banking needs are serviced by a responsive private bank.

Bottomline: If a tech savvy kin of an elderly veteran pensioner living in an urban metro must jump through so many hoops for a simple ‘life certificate,’ one shudders to think of the plight of hundreds of thousands of less fortunate mortals living in other cities and in rural India. 

Acronyms: 

SBI - State Bank of India

RBI - Reserve Bank of India

[ Edited original title: SBI manager laughs off RBI ‘directive’ to banks to “Provide Doorstep Banking to Those Above 70” ]

Business, Government and Technology : Observations of large IS stagey in execution

The US government continues to be in partial “shut down” this week. Most analysts and political pundits are unclear on what the negotiation between Republicans and Democrats is going to be about, or when it will happen. However, the focus on government shutdown has distracted media attention from two key technology enablers in the US government landscape that will have far reaching consequences, impacting lives of citizen here much after the current debate fades from memory.

The rollout of obamacare and meltdown of NSA’s super data center, both of which made the front pages of Wall Street Journal this week, only to give way to news of US government shutdown.

Affordable healthcare (aka Obamacare). While the focus of politicians and media is on the socialist angle, role of government in healthcare of citizen, it is really about use of modern Information Technology and tools of integration. The complex health exchange engines are designed to be powered by equally complex software and IT systems. There are always challenges when new systems are rolled out to the extent proposed. Timothy Lee blogs in Washington Post “Here’s why getting theObamacare exchanges to work was so difficult”

“This week, the new health-care exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act, dubbed Obamacare, have come in for a lot of criticism. The sites cost millions — in some cases hundreds of millions — of dollars to create. And some of them weren't ready for the traffic they received on Oct. 1, the day Obamacare went into effect.”

The blog quotes a healthcare IT expert reflecting on the challenge: "It wasn't because of the complexity of building high-volume websites—that's their bread and butter—but because of the complexity of the contracting and project arrangements with all the prime contractor and subcontractor relationships. …… Everybody who's on the inside has really expected it to be pretty rocky at the start. It's a very large undertaking, and there are so many players involved. Such fixed deadlines. Everyone has expected it to be quite a challenge.”

Another interesting observation from the blog post: cost of corporate websites is a question I hear often. Why does a corporate website cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions, when I could go to goddy and get a website hosted for a mere hundred plus dollars?  [California's exchange, for example, reportedly cost $313 million to build.]

“There are lots of different reasons. Part of it is these are large IT projects being conducted by government agencies, by large contractors with large teams. There are a lot of layers of project management, of requirements, design, coding. It looks very different than your small start-up where you've got 10 people in the room working closely together and rapidly developing things.

Even though in this type of setting the development teams are using what you might call agile methods, there's still a huge layer of requirements and review and sign-off. There's lots of policy decisions that have to be made that shape ever step of the way. There's much more overhead involved in this sort of thing than if you're trying to have a small set of people developing the Web site.”

US Government’s NSA and massive data crunching needs: This was another issue that made headlines this week “Meltdowns HobbleNSA Data Center” (WSJ) : The Utah facility, one of the Pentagon's biggest U.S. construction projects, has become a symbol of the spy agency's surveillance prowess, which gained broad attention in the wake of leaks from NSA contractor Edward Snowden. It spans more than one-million square feet, with construction costs pegged at $1.4 billion—not counting the Cray supercomputers that will reside there.

NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines acknowledged problems but said "the failures that occurred during testing have been mitigated. A project of this magnitude requires stringent management, oversight, and testing before the government accepts any building."

The reason for reflecting on these problems is obvious: Though still early in the rollout, there are lessons for technology strategists and Enterprise Architects in both scenarios.

Governments and society: Rape in Delhi and children gunned down in Connecticut

Two recent incidents, a world apart seem to be grabbing headlines and shocking communities. One is “a Brutal Gang Rape In Delhi Has Shaken India To The Core” while the other is the senseless shooting of innocent children in an elementary school that sent shock waves through the United States.

Both instances of senseless crime have received much needed spotlight from traditional media and digerati. Political leaders of all stripes have taken the stage promising constituents some action coming out of the respective tragedies. There was a slight difference, however, in the way the media reacted to statement by leaders: while the media in the US highlighted President Obama shedding some tears during his press conference, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s ‘Theek Hai’ comment after his statement on the Rape had a polarizing effect at least among digirati

While the media attention on both cases slowly dwindles away from these incidents, one wonders if any action will really come of it? Probably not. And why?

Underfunded, highly overstretched, inept and sometimes corrupt bureaucracy in India. Enough said?! Anyone with some familiarity to India and Indian bureaucracy will surely have their favorite anecdote on dealing with the bureaucracy. I guess it is not just one factor at play in India, like the need to change the law as some in the media are suggesting, or just additional policing: the already overstretched police force probably has its hands full with chasing the bad guys, providing security to VIPs and of course trying hard to address the omni-present terrorist threat in India.

There is a similar Gordian Knot plaguing the government and society in the other part of the world. United States is a nation divided on the "second amendment" that protects the right of the people to keep and bear arms. Controlling gun violence is not as simple as having additional security checks or policing…or as the powerful American lobby group NRA has suggested: Put armed police in every school (ref: Washington Post). Literally fighting fire with fire!

Like rest of the digirati, bloggers and others voicing opinions, I would like to believe that change is around the corner. In the New Year all that legislators and bureaucrats will have to do is to wave a magic wand and pesto, we will have better, more peaceful societies!

The business of Internet, Government and society

In a span of about 15 years or so, internet and wireless communication technologies have become globally ubiquitous and pervasive. And like other utilities - access to electricity, water and telephones - people in western societies have taken access to internet and wireless for granted. Even in developing countries where access to basic utilities is spotty at best, wireless and internet technologies are becoming more pervasive largely due to a combination of commercialization and a laissez faire attitude of governments.

Most consumers have come to expect that breakdown in “service,” even for a short span of time can only be due to a major force majeure - hurricane Sandy for example – nothing less

While many governments have taken a laissez faire attitude towards developing infrastructure for internet and wireless communication, they are not exactly being hands off. Government policy planners and bureaucrats, just like their counterpart business leaders and executives have come to realize the significance of “controlling” access to the infrastructures and access to these technologies.

Internet and wireless infrastructure is increasingly being viewed as a strategic asset that can impact National security. Shutting or disrupting access to wireless and internet in essence also shuts down

• Commerce: Businesses and international commerce increasingly relies on pervasive internet technologies and access to wireless communication. Rather than develop their private LAN, WAN, MAN and area networks, corporations are more than eager to ride on top of public internet infrastructure. Public internet infrastructure is thought to be inherently more reliable since the points of failure are widely dissipated. It is also much cheaper to use than to develop private infrastructure. 
• Communication: According to U.N. Telecom Agency report, the world has about 6 Billion cell phone subscribers. A mind boggling number when you consider the population of about 7 billion people
• Entertainment: Entertainment, streaming movies, videos, games, music, social media etc etc all depend on pervasiveness of internet and wireless technologies. A disruption to either backbone can shut down the sources of entertainment.

Till recently, the primary risk to commerce on public internet networks was the threat to Network neutrality. However, recent incidents are making Digirati and corporate strategists reflect on broader risk to businesses that are increasingly dependent on public internet and wireless infrastructure for global commerce

• Government’s shutting down access to internet: Censorship on the internet is just tip of the iceberg. The risk to businesses is a complete shutdown of access to the internet in a country or region! Just Last week, Syrian government briefly  managed to return its citizen to the digital dark ages. One can be certain that other governments are assessing their capabilities in this regard. (Ref Forbes article : These Are The 61 Countries Most Vulnerable To An Internet Shutdown)
• Governments are increasingly relying on cyber-warfare as a powerful tool in their arsenals “in June 2009, someone had silently unleashed a sophisticated and destructive digital worm that had been slithering its way through computers in Iran with just one aim — to sabotage the country’s uranium enrichment program and prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon. (ref Wired article: Digital Detectives Deciphered Stuxnet, the Most Menacing Malware in History)

Business strategists and corporate policy makers are only starting to assess all the dimensions of the risk of leveraging public internet and wireless infrastructures. However, there a more prosaic way of looking at the risks: Much as we liked to think otherwise, risks inherent to “traditional infrastructures” (supply of water, electricity etc) apply to next generation infrastructures too. If we take this argument, traditional risk mitigation strategies should be applicable to technology infrastructure management too?

Ethics and Globalization of Businesses: Business Government and Society 101

Harvard University recently Prof. Nitin Nohria as dean of its influential Business School. Prof. Nohria has been active in promoting business ethics, a value that seems more relevant now than at any other time in the past. This move by a premier business school is timely. There is an urgent need for business leaders to learn to focus on crisis management and to reflect on their values, ethics and transparency. Business, Government and Society 101, along with fundamentals of ethics and transparency is (or should be) required reading for future business leaders. Case in point is the automotive value chain where crisis after crisis seems to be playing out in the global circus



A year after major auto makers in America went bankrupt, prompting the federal government to step in and bail them out, Toyota was making headlines with runaway cars and quality problems. This month Toyota ceded its spot on national headlines to BP.

Managing crisis while in a global media spotlight is not an enviable task for any executive. A few facts, based we are seeing and reading in the media:
* BP says it will pay for Gulf spill's cleanup. It is certainly pulling all the stops in crisis management. Too bad the attempt to use the oil containment box technology failed this week, right in front of us and the global media
* The US Government and most other major oil companies are pooling in resources, technologies and brainpower to attempt a solution. It is a matter of time, but till then we will continue to watch the drama unfold

Observing the drama in the Automotive industry unfold, I began reflecting on how technocrats in my industry - the offshoring tech sector - got a first-hand lesson in Business Government and Society during the restructure of offshoring giant Satyam after the accounting scandal a couple of years ago. A few key lessons in crisis that could apply in most scenarios:

• Start with a clean mea culpa during the first 72 hours. There is nothing the media and public loath more than the ‘big ugly faceless corporation.’ If you are at fault, the first thing your senior executive should do is to say ‘I am sorry’


• Managing the media: We live in a 24 X 7 world in which the media, aided by web 2.0 technologies bring information to consumers round the clock. One cannot ‘manage’ the media without participating in it. Of course the question executives may ask themselves: “Should I shut up and focus on the efforts or address the impact of political and media onslaught?” Surely large companies facing crisis should try and address the diverging goals of stakeholders. With billions of dollars and access to a wide spectrum of experts, they should also do more than one thing at once: share information with media, bloggers and public WHILE fixing the problem.


• Government is a key stakeholder, and can be an ally. Government is also composed of politicians, whith their vested interests, lobbies and political constituencies. Managing expectations of governments – Federal, state, local – is as important as managing media and public perception during a crisis.

Bottomline: Though it is too soon for us to be looking for lessons in the current crisis, managers of tomorrow are certainly looking to learn their way out of disasters