VIJAYAWADA: If you think a drive to Kolletikota would be pleasant, you’d be wrong. It used to be once. On either side of the bumpy road leading to it, there is waste land. It used to be the Kolleru lake bed once. You even come across the skeletal remains of small boats here and there, testimony to days when they used to ferry people on the lake. The water’s gone and the birds are gone. Instead, on the precarious bridge to Kolletikota, you see women carrying home cans of water from an RO plant.
At the other end of the bridge, there is an imposing temple stands as mute witness to the vanishing of a life-giving lake. Bad days began for the lake when powerful communities in the area seized adopted aquaculture as their vocation to make millions in the international shrimp markets. Though Kolleru was declared as a wildlife sanctuary spread over 308 sq km up to the plus 5 contour above mean sea level, tanks came up inside the protected area. The lake is one of the 26 notified marshlands in the world and is protected under the Ramsar Convention of 1971. India is a signatory.
Though the invading fish tanks were demolished with explosives by the Y S Rajasekhara Reddy government following a verdict of the Supreme Court, they have come up again.
Farmer leader Yerneni Nagendranath, who fought an unsuccessful battle to protect the lake in the 1980s, recalled: "At present, fish tanks inside and outside the protected are take up 2.5 lakh acres. In the past, 67 distributories used to supply water to the marshland and excess water used to flow into the sea through a river called Upputeru. Kolleru was in perfect sync with nature. With encroachments coming up, flooding has become a frequent occurrence."
There used to be plenty of water then. Now this is a region of scarcity with aqua farmers using up whatever water is available in the lake.
In addition, aquaculture farms in other parts of Krishna and West Godavari districts also use up the water that ought to flow through the distributories into Kolleru, explains Nagendranath.
And the water smells of pesticide and fish feed, stinking to the sky. This apart, industrial effluents are let into the lake, mostly from Eluru. Says environmental activist T Patanjali Sastry: "Kolleru has dried up because its water is being used up for aquaculture. The fish tanks are brimming with water but the lake bed looks like a desert."
He says aquaculture is destroying the lake. "Just a few weeks ago, I came to know that supporters of a legislator were laying a road in a protected area to facilitate movement of vehicles. If there’s anyone violating the rules, it is our MPs and MLAs!" he says ruefully.
Sastry recalls wistfully how pure the water used to be in the 1960s and 70s. Pepole used to drink water from the lake.
Divisional forest officer N Nageswarar Rao says that if this summer the lake is looking as though it is dried up, it is because of poor inflows. Usually water flows into the lake from June to December and there are low inflows in the months thereafter and none in the summer. This year the lake turned dry in January. "We have managed to conserve some water bodies in the Atapaka bird sanctuary. This summer has been unusually hot, reducing the water flow to almost zero," he says.