Invest in Your Lakes
Want to know more about how you can get involved with lake conservation in Bengaluru? Here are some organisations doing amazing work.
Anu Sridharan and Shashank Palur
The state of Bengaluru’s lakes is well documented — some are polluted, many are drying up or being built over. Paradoxically, the city is also home to some of the most engaged citizen communities. They are ‘watchdogs’ for the city’s lakes — coordinating between agencies and often leading rejuvenation efforts, fostering awareness on lakes, and helping innovate new solutions.
Read | CSEI Insights on Bengaluru’s Lakes
These are groups who have, for long, imbibed and acted upon the theme of this year’s Earth Day — ‘Invest in Our Planet’. If you would like to get involved but don’t know where to start, we can help.
ATREE has been working in the area of lake restoration for the past decade in Bengaluru. When CSEI was launched and incubated at ATREE in 2019, we continued to work in this space. As an ecosystem builder, CSEI focuses on bringing key stakeholders together to create partnerships that align on vision. Together, these partners surface gaps, identify complex problems, build paper prototypes and co-create science-backed solutions. Showcasing the incredible work of our partners and helping them leverage our networks to build partnerships is a large part of what we do as a backbone organisation.
We wanted to use Earth Day as an opportunity to highlight the citizen-led organisations working to protect and rejuvenate Bengaluru’s water bodies.
Mira: Lakes as learning spaces
But first, a little more context about our previous work with lakes and how we have engaged with lake groups. We started our journey focused on installing IoT sensors and giving citizens data to enable citizen science. But we eventually realised that lakes needed to be converted into learning spaces. People need different types of information and data to be able to act locally.
To that end, we were involved with a project called Mira, an initiative to create common digital resources and tools to help citizens learn simple, science-based ways to nurture Bengaluru’s lakes. CSEI, ATREE, Biome and Friends of Lakes joined hands to create the Mira community, with funding from Akamai and Oracle. The Bangalore Citizen’s Lakes Dashboard, previously accessible only through the browser, is now available as the smartphone app, Mira: Your Urban Nature Guide.
Neighbourhood lake groups
We found that citizens are usually organised around either formal or informal ‘neighbourhood lake groups’ (read more about them here). They can be even more effective through greater engagement, more inclusivity and improved monitoring and learning.
Here is the contact database we co-created with our partners that details the names of the citizen groups, the contact person as well as their phone numbers. If you are interested in either funding these lake-specific initiatives or volunteering, please get in touch with these individuals directly.
Here are a few of the organisations that we have personally worked with and have been doing some amazing work:
- Mahadevpura Parisara Samrakshane Mattu Abhivrudhi Samiti (MAPSAS): They are a citizen-led ecologically-oriented lake group, who oversee the maintenance of four lakes in south-east Bengaluru — Kaikondrahalli, Kasavanahalli, Sowl Kere and Lower Ambalipura lakes.
- Friends of Lakes: This informal group guides local citizens through the entire process of forming and registering their lake groups. They also work with different research organisations and institutes to create awareness about lakes and prevent lake encroachment and pollution.
- Biome Trust: This non profit focuses on citizen engagement in lakes and helps lake groups make more informed decisions. They also create educational and awareness material on better water management in cities which can be found here.
- Jala Poshan: This lake group has been taking care of Jakkur lake in north Bengaluru for more than 10 years now. Group members regularly interact with all the stakeholders around the lake. A great example of their work is how they organised the cleaning up of excess hyacinth growth in Jakkur lake through a crowdfunded project.
- Jalmitra: They look after the day-to-day maintenance of the Rachenahalli lake in north Bengaluru. What started out as a small volunteer-led group succeeded in transforming the lake into a model urban space or ‘living lab’ where students, researchers and other groups can convene and learn about the local ecosystem.
- Puttenahalli Neighbourhood Lake Improvement Trust (PNLIT): They are the current caretakers of the Puttenahalli lake in JP Nagar, south Bengaluru. They have worked extensively with government bodies to create an ecological diverse lake through nature-based interventions.
We were able to take our work with lake conservation groups a step further through the crowdmapping project we spearheaded. Government bodies responsible for the maintenance of lakes lack up-to-date records. This has tangible impacts on the ground as poor planning and enforcement bulldozes what’s left of the city’s water bodies. The key to protecting existing lakes is first documenting them, and then ensuring that this data remains openly accessible to the public. Which is why with the help of citizen volunteers, CSEI collated lake data from different sources to identify 1,350 lakes in Bengaluru.
We wrote about this in an article published by IndiaSpend: Crowdmapping Bengaluru’s Vanishing Lakes
Reducing wastewater inflow
Our work is informed by another key learning — that sewage inflow was one of the biggest problems plaguing lake conservation in Bengaluru. One way we believe this can be solved is by turning wastewater into a commodity. Creating a market for treated wastewater will stem the flow of untreated sewage into Bengaluru’s lakes; our Cities and Towns Initiative is studying ways to ensure higher rates of reuse of treated wastewater in the domestic context, i.e. apartment complexes.
Since very little of this water ends up getting reused, we are working with stakeholders including state agencies, residents welfare associations, STP operators and builders to explore how wastewater can be used for greening, construction and other purposes instead of winding up in our lakes and deteriorating them.
Apart from volunteering with lake groups, getting involved with our Grey to Green campaign is another way you can drive sustainable solutions. We are collaborating with Karnataka Pollution Control Board (KSPCB) to pilot the use of excess treated wastewater from apartments for the greening of the public parks and gardens in the Yelahanka zone. If you live in an apartment with its own sewage treatment plant in Bengaluru, contact us or join our mailing list. You can help us scale the Yelahanka pilot to other parts of the city.
Read | Research Brief: Wastewater Treatment and Reuse in Bengaluru
If your apartment has an STP, reach out to us: csei.collab@atree.org.
Read more about Bengaluru’s lakes and the way forward in the Insight Articles we have published.
Edited by Kaavya Kumar
