This man is tackling the water crisis in Tamil Nadu, one lake at a time
Saravanan Thiyagarajan founded Wake Our Lakes in 2017 in a bid to rejuvenate water bodies in his village in Tamil Nadu.
Several districts in Tamil Nadu are witnessing acute water shortage. Delayed rains, along with borewells and lakes running dry, its capital Chennai is facing a drought-like condition.
However, this isn’t limited to Chennai alone. The situation has been dire for the past few years in Tamil Nadu’s rural areas as well.
After witnessing a similar situation in his village in Kolli Hills, Tamil Nadu, 36-year-old Saravanan Thiyagarajan decided to take up matter into his hands to conserve water. In 2017, he founded ‘Wake Our Lake’ to rejuvenate lakes. It provide guidelines to conserve water bodies, revive lakes and the vegetation surrounding it. One can also find an entire flowchart on its website giving us guidelines about rejuvenating a lake.
Saravanan Thiyagarajan (Image: Edex Live)
Through this, Saravanan aims to encourage people to work towards water conservation in their areas. For instance, in the rural district of Theni in Tamil Nadu, Saravanan is trying to reuse the drainage water to water the plants.
Speaking to Edex Live on the initiative, he said,
“Drainage water is being filtered in a natural way for these purposes. We are also restoring forests, reviving lakes around rural Tamil Nadu, and volunteering at a few places in Bengaluru.”
A software professional working in Bengaluru, Saravanan makes time to visit his village over the weekends.
His first lake revival project, called the Thendral Lake Project in Narasiman Kadu village, Tamil Nadu, was started in 2017.
The lake was in an alarming state of water depletion, and a survey showed that a borewell, which was 800-1,000-foot deep, and had completely dried up. This also affected the vegetation, and the crops were slowly dying due to lack of water.
Villagers pooled in for the construction of a pond (Image: The Logical Indian)
To revive the lake, Saravanan, along with his team of volunteers, started creating an inlet channel. He told The Logical Indian,
“We manually started digging a one-kilometre long canal from the adjacent hills to the lake. The farmers were doubtful, and only 10 or 20 of them offered their support. When it rained, the lake was filled overnight. The farmers could not believe their eyes.”
Later, the organisation took up another project, and this time it was the Panjapatti lake, which had dried up due to the overabundance of aquatic weed. This had degraded the growth of nearby vegetation. According to Saravanan, his efforts to encourage the villagers failed, and the organisation deployed a special crawler machine to uproot and convert the weeds into reusable biomass.
After taking up many such initiatives, Saravanan is now hoping to see individuals take an active role in saving the existing water bodies and natural resources. He has also collaborated with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) to plant seed balls in barren lands to increase the green cover around his village in Tamil Nadu.
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