To do away with the Eichhornia weeds menace from the iconic Ambazari Lake, the Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC) is taking help of an ‘Aquatic Weed Harvester’, which was previously utilised by Gujarat Government and Delhi Government for cleaning the Sabarmati River Front and Yamuna river respectively. Cleantec Infra’s ‘Aquatic Weed Harvester’ is designed to remove floating trash, aquatic weeds, debris, plastic waste, and other surface pollutants from rivers and other water bodies. This machine is manufactured locally under ‘Make In India’ and its storage capacity is in the range of 3-30 cubic meters.

 

This machine is able to collect floating trash like bottles, plastic, weeds, religious waste, etc. The gates on either side of collection head guide the material towards the conveyor and then, these gates hydraulically close to trap the waste. The floating trash is transferred from collection to storage conveyor and thereafter, to unloading conveyor at a disposal point. NMC was previously using CSIR-NEERI manufactured ‘Jal Dost’, which is now docked at bank of the lake and hardly in use for cleaning of the lake. According to a senior officer from Solid Waste Management Department, “The ‘Jal Dost’ is capable of lifting only one ton of weeds at a time from the lake, but it requires manpower to remove weeds from its conveyer belt. It also has some other limitations, which are hampering the daily work of weed removal.” To speed up the work of removing weeds from the water body before the start of monsoon, NMC is taking the help of ‘Aquatic Weed Harvester’ for the last one month.

 

“We hired this machine for two months, which doubled the speed of weed removal work. It is capable of removing more weeds as compared to ‘Jal Dost’ and for this machine, we are paying Rs 30 lakh for two months for its use,” Dr Shweta Banerjee, Superintending Engineer, Environment Department, NMC told ‘The Hitavada’. Despite all these efforts by the civic body, the flooding of the weeds continues and the lake requires proper weed management as a long-term solution.