BENGALURU: For over a month now, Members of the Puttenahalli Neighbourhood Lake Improvement Trust (PNLIT) have been forced to watch helplessly as the lake they maintain in J P Nagar 7th Phase, has sewage flowing into it.
Spread over 13 acres and 25 guntas, this water body which is often referred to as one of the few ‘saved lakes’ of Bengaluru, but is now under threat if corrective action is not taken immediately.
According to the Trust, an underground drain, which carries sewage from Puttenahalli to Arakere Layout, has been diverted on June 3 by a section of locals.
Usha Rajagopalan, a trustee of PNLIT, the first group in the City to be entrusted the responsibility of taking care of a lake, charged that residents of Nataraja Layout, with over 1,500 houses, were fed up with underground drain water constantly spilling onto the road from the overflowing manholes and decided to direct it into the lake.
“Since then, raw sewage has been gushing into the wetland of the lake daily. While there were 28 resident birds, we can see only five of them now,” she told The New Sunday Express.
The Trust sends water samples from the lake every month for testing to keep a regular tab on water quality. The latest sample has established that the lake has become polluted. The dissolved oxygen level in January this year in the wetland stood at 4.7 mg/litre and in June it has dipped to 1.7 mg/litre, the results reveal.
The only long-term solution for it is widening the underground pipeline so that sewage does not get blocked frequently as is the norm now.
However, a slum nearby housing 115 hutments positioned above the pipeline has to be vacated to carry out this work and they refuse to leave the place despite a high court order on March 7 giving them 12 weeks.
The Trust has now approached the Principal Secretary (Revenue), who directed the members to the Karnataka Slum Development Board and the Commissioner directed them to the Karnataka Tank Conservation and Development Authority.
The members were asked to meet the Deputy Secretary at Vikasa Soudha, who said he would write to the Revenue Department to remove the encroachers from the lake bund.
“The wheel has turned a full circle! If the sewage inflow is not stopped immediately, Puttenahalli Lake may soon become one more lake in Bengaluru killed as much by government apathy as by the pollutants,” Rajagopalan warned.
L Nandakumar, one of the residents of the Nataraja Layout, said that it was not a decision taken only by their Layout.
“Many other Layouts around are with us as so much sewage water flows onto the road daily. The stench is unbearable,” he said.