Adjustments

The Proposal

The arguments were finally ending. Faiz and the other man (who Umesha learned was called Asif), had agreed that having outsiders in the room didn't violate their contracts with the other collectives, provided certain financial details were not disclosed. Ramamurthy scowled at this, since it meant that the woman from the core-city could continue to sit at the meeting. The woman, whose name was Swarna, had continued to stay silent, merely listening to everything being discussed.

"Let's get started, we've already wasted an hour." Faiz said impatiently. "Krishnaswamy, why don't you start, man? Give everyone a gist of the proposal. But keep it short."

Krishnaswamy, a tall, burly man with a clean-shaven face, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles, leaned forward. As he placed his elbows on the table, a 3D image appeared above the centre of the table and began to slowly rotate on its axis. It was a three dimensional contour map of Bengloor. A ridge of land ran through the centre of the city, splitting the map into three parts. Encircling these three was the ring road, the single piece of infrastructure that connected all the Ring communities together. The communities themselves were marked in yellow, showing up starkly against the browns and greys of the landscape. Krishnaswamy began his explanation, pointing and highlighting various sections of the map as he did so.

Umesha watched, fascinated. If he understood Krishnaswamy correctly, the new water project imagined a radical restructuring of Bengloor's landscape itself. Krishnaswamy explained how the funds provided by the Shanghai Harbourfront Association would be used to hire some cutting-edge landscape designing machines from a collective in Silicon Valley. The machines, about fifty of them, would hover in the sky above the city, emitting bursts of compressed air, fine-tuned to hit the ground with a predetermined force, displacing earth and rock. Over two years, these solar-powered machines would reshape the contours of the city, enough to create vast depressions, artificial lake-beds, to be eventually filled with water.

"If all goes well..." Krishnaswamy concluded. "...we should have three large lake-beds, one in each of the three watersheds, in two years. Regional climate models suggest that the next year of flood will hit us around the same time. If we time it right, the lake-beds would be filled up within six months of completion."

"If we time it right." said Faiz. "We need to get this right, people. We only get one or two flood-years a decade on average. We miss this, we may miss out on ten years' worth of water."

"The long-term plan..." said Krishnaswamy. "...is to eventually combine the three different lakes into a single water body, about a hundred and fifty square kilometres in surface area, about a hundred to two hundred metres in average depth. We calculate that in the end, we should get about 900 Thousand Million Cubic feet of water in storage.

That's 90 TMC a year for a decade of deficient rain. The Ring only uses about 18 TMC a year. You can imagine the opportunities that open up, with the remaining 72 TMC."

Umesha put up his hand. It glowed red, pulsing eerily. Krishnaswamy looked at him expectantly.

"What I'm about to ask may sound foolish." said Umesha uncertainly. "But why are you choosing to build your reservoir here, in Bengloor?"

"What do you mean?" asked Faiz.

"Well, look at the landscape." said Umesha pointing at the 3D Map. "You're planning to build three large reservoirs in each of the three valleys...er, watersheds you call them? You eventually want to connect these into a single large lake. But the elevation is all wrong. The land rises towards the centre of the city, sloping upwards into a ridge right at the centre. Why are you planning to build your lakes on slopes rather than low-lying land?"

"That's what the machines are for." beamed Krishnaswamy. "The machines will reshape the contours of the land. The ridge will remain, but the slope will be made much steeper. Meanwhile, displaced earth from the slopes will be relocated to the edges, on the inner side of the ring road, to form new circular ridges. What we'll get at the end are bowl-shaped depressions, perfectly functioning lake-beds."