Land, Water and Local people

‘Bangalore’, in the process of becoming ‘World Class city’ has initiated several infrastructure projects such as the mega-Bangalore Mysore Infrastructure Corridor. This involves land use change from agricultural rural and peri-urban areas to predominantly urban land uses under centralised ‘State’ level agency. In this process, landscape surrounding the lake in the village appears to have transformed from a wetland-lake ecosystem, which acted as a village commons, to private property owned by private entity or fenced system disconnected from ecosystem. Thus, this has resulted in changing perceptions of the traditional local community usage of the lakes as they are increasingly looked as ‘land property’ for profit-making. There is also a differential impact on the local village community as those marginalised section of local village community who don’t have legal ‘land tenure rights’ are denied legal ‘water rights’. This marks a paradigm shift of viewing lakes as ‘common property’ to ‘private property’ or ‘social use’ to ‘economic good’.