Bengaluru's tanker market
The informal tanker market is what households substitute when BWSSB's 48% non-revenue-water gap meets their tap. Longitudinal data from OpenCity's apartment-level surveys (2015, 2019, 2024) plus the 2025 follow-up tells the story of how the price, frequency, and BWSSB-dependency of tanker use has shifted through pre-crisis, crisis, and post-Stage-V recovery years.
How to read these numbers
The OpenCity surveys are voluntary apartment-association responses, not a random population sample - the 2024 numbers in particular skew toward apartments that experienced supply stress (which is why the "BWSSB supply got worse" rate reaches 90%). What they capture cleanly is price evolution across the three survey years, which moves in step with the Cauvery delivery + groundwater + weather variables documented in the engineering literature.
Tanker rates here are the informal market - private tanker operators charging apartment associations directly. BWSSB's official Kaveriwheels app rates (₹700 / 5kL via the tanker tariff) are typically lower but driver-assigned often fails (~19,000 downloads in a 14 million city, 2.8/5 rating). What households actually pay sits between these two prices.
The Bengaluru home dashboard documents the structural supply chain the tanker market plugs the gap in: BWSSB's 1310 MLD Cauvery WTP capacity, 48% NRW, and the 2049 demand-deficit projection that explains why tankers are a long-term structural feature, not a crisis-year anomaly.