Cleaning up others' act

From a prominent boating site to a dumping yard, it took just three years for the Nallagandla lake near Serilingampally to transform dramatically. And after repeated attempts at requesting the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) employees to fix the lake failed, fed up residents of nearby localities took it upon themselves to clean the lake.

“We had a drive last month and cleared four trucks of garbage in just one day,” says Balasubramaniam, a resident of the locality. Since then, the team has been constantly organising awareness camps and plays to inform people about the lake’s condition.

Sugata Nandi, an entrepreneur and RTI activist, was the first to take up the imitative three years ago. At first, he wrote to local bodies including GHMC and Hyderabad Municipal Development Association (HMDA), but to no avail.

“Then, I decided to file an RTI. I was so frustrated that I was not even sure if a lake was supposed to be there,” he says. He received prompt replies to the initial few RTI applications, including one stating that the GHMC had allocated '2.28 lakh to revive the lake. “That was six months ago,” he says.

Since then there hasn’t been any reply to the subsequent RTIs filed by him.
It was during that time that a chance meeting with a group of Art of Living (AOL) volunteers helped. Sudha, a homemaker and a volunteer of AOL, says, “We were planning to revive a lake when we came across Sugata’s website and we decided to clean it.”

It was then that the lake cleaning movement gained momentum. Combining forces, over 50 volunteers including those from within the locality and AOL, began cleaning the lake. “We are taking leaves from our day jobs to clean the lake while those whose job it is aren’t bothered to do anything about it,” informs Balasubramaniam.

Their future plans, apart from continuing their cleaning drives, include redirecting rainwater and sewage treated water (STW) from the neighbouring townships into the lake in order to improve the aquatic life.