Waterscapes of Bengaluru

This initiative seeks to bridge the growing disconnect between people and river ecosystems, helping citizens see rivers not merely as channels of water, but as living, interconnected systems. The exhibition highlights how polluted rivers affect our food systems, and how interventions such as river linking can disrupt critical wildlife corridors and the ecologically fragile Western Ghats, among other concerns.

At the heart of the exhibition is a story map that traces the journey of a raindrop from the street or rooftop where it falls in Bengaluru, through lakes and drains, into the largely unacknowledged river systems of the city. It also explores the reasons for our disconnect from these systems and the urgent need to reconnect.

This work sits at the intersection of community and ecology. Water is central to our lives, yet our freshwater ecosystems are in deep crisis. To respond meaningfully, we must first understand these systems, then reconnect with them, and finally act. Before we restore a river in the landscape, we must restore it in people’s hearts. When a city begins to care for its river, restoration ceases to be a project and becomes a culture.

At Paani Earth Foundation, we have been building evidence to support this shift by developing detailed river maps that compile data on stressors, government monitoring stations, sewage treatment infrastructure, hazardous waste facilities, and more. This work is fundamentally data-driven i.e it synthesizes datasets that exist in silos into a coherent, basin-level understanding of river health and governance gaps.

The exhibition format is a deliberate extension of our work that is data intensive. It allows complex evidence to be translated into visual, spatial, and narrative formats that non-technical audiences can engage with.

In this sense, the initiative is data-led at its core, using the exhibition as the medium to communicate the evidence we have gathered in an interesting format.