Naik Talao - Where they buried a lake ‘Official’ invasion !

The Green Death: Naik Talao which is one of the oldest lakes in city has lost its identity along with its water due to invasion of Eichhornia weeds and rampant human encroachment. There is no water left in the lake and the place looks like a green grave-yard of environment.

By Team Hitavada :

“Lakes are the city’s pulse; their waters are the mirror that reflects the soul of urban life”, says an anonymous quote -- aptly depicting the relationship of lakes with a city -- ideally ! In Nagpur, the people and their administration and the power-pyramid appear to work hard in exactly the opposite direction -- systematically killing lakes, suspectedly with a sly purpose of creating ground for real estate exploitation in future. There can be no better example of this ugly urban invasion of lakes than the Naik Talao in East Nagpur.

Even a passer-by can get a flush of anger if he/she pauses for a while and understands how the city has conspired to kill the lake, bury it under uncontrolled wild weed, cover it up with double-wall fencing on all sides to hide the plunder from public eye, dump garbage between the two walls, block all inlets of water into the lake (which we may call catchment streams) ... ! Everything is terrible. Everything is sinister. Everything is evil in every which the way. For all practical purposes, therefore, the Naik Talao is almost moribund. However, manage to go past the two-walled fencing to take a look at what is officially a lake, and you will be staring at a huge green ground covered with thick growth of Eichhornia weed (which the city administration is just incapable of removing). Stare harder and you will see four or five poodles of muddy-green water that are passed as “LAKE”. For your information, each of these poodles may not admeasure more than a couple of hundred square feet at the most.

That is Naik Talao !
That is Naik Talao, the victim of (un)official 
homicide !
Why should the second answer be called 
‘difficult’?

Because, that means we have to blame ourselves -- the people of Nagpur. For, habitually, we are conspiring to finish off water-body after water-body -- shamelessly, brazenly, enthusiastically ! -- and Naik Talao is a classic example of all these qualities we the Nagpurians have acquired over time. Accost Dr. Shweta Banerjee, Superintending Engineer of the NMC in charge of Environment Department, and she would come out with a candid statement that removing Eichhornia weed and silt from the Naik Talao is the biggest challenge. True, Dr. Shweta Banerjee is a serious-minded official with much verve.

Yet, in the case of Naik Talao, the NMC has not been able to do much as regards the twin challenge of silt and wild weed -- for the past 5-6 years since 2019 when the lake rejuvenation programme was first announced. One of the difficulties in this project is understood to be non-allocation of funds in the first place. Against that background, possibly, the CSIR-NEERI might have felt helpless. Some NGOs are said to have offered help in weed-removal, but their efforts (whatever those might have been) do not seem to have cut much ice. This is the overall story of Naik Talao -- full of apathy, full of negligence, full of popular disinterest, and full of the characteristic attributes of the Nagpur city where people’s commitment to environment is only for political tall talk and drawing room conversation over coffee chilled with ice-cream.

Naik Talao - Where they buried a lake ‘Official’ invasion ! - III