The Kenikarai lake in Tamil Nadu’s Ramanathapuram district has been dry for 15 years. But now, villagers are celebrating. The lake is going to be filled up again.
In March, villagers in Ramanathapuram district showed up at the Siva temple dressed up in traditional silk sarees and veshtis, and Nadaswaram music blared from the speakers at the inauguration ceremony of the project that people never thought was even possible.
But 35-year-old engineer Nimal Raghavan who returned from Dubai five years ago has made it his mission to rejuvenate Tamil Nadu’s lakes. It’s almost like a page from Shah Rukh Khan starrer Swades.
“[The] Kenikarai lake is dry, the region has saltwater intrusion. Once the restoration is done in the next two years, the entire problem here will be solved,” he said confidently. And he should know. He has a track record of having rejuvenated 142 lakes across India, he said.
Raghavan also wants to raise a forest by creating artificial landfills around the restored lakes. The dug-out mud is used to make thick boundaries for the lake, creating an artificial lake island.
“We plant several natural species of plants. This will attract many bees, birds, etc and will create a forest system,” Raghavan said. Additionally, the sowed plants bear fibrous roots that would act as a rainwater harvesting system.
Bringing ‘amrutham’ back
The Kenikarai lake, which is spread across eight acres, had been a part of the villagers’ life for several generations.
Four neighbouring villages too were once dependent on this lake for their livelihood, But things changed when the lake dried up. “The inlet and outlet connection has not been maintained here,” said Raghavan.
In its glory days, water from the lake once tasted like amrutham (elixir). But today, not only is the lake dry, but the salinity levels in the water table below are rising.
Clutching a small white bottle filled with water from her borewell, 57-year-old T Saira Banu came for the inauguration. She wanted officials to taste the water that she gets at home.
“Taste it,” she said, asking them to test the hardness and salinity of the water. “We have been living with this kind of water for several years now.”
Sixty-year-old B Sasikala, who moved from Madurai to Kenikarai after marriage, reminisces the good old days when residents in the area would gather at the banks of the lake and there was no shortage of clean water.
“Now we have to wait for tanker lorries to bring water every alternate day and pay Rs 15 per pot,” said Sasikala. “A large chunk of our monthly income is spent on water.”
Meanwhile, in an olive green shirt and white veshti, Raghavan was busy ensuring the preparations for the inauguration ceremony were in place. His excavator, which was presented to him by the NGO Nanban Foundation, was placed in the middle of the Kenikarai lake. A red carpet was rolled out from the stage to the excavator. Residents, assembled near the restoration site and exchanging smiles, looked curiously at Raghavan.
Cynics harboured doubts, optimists were excited and hopeful, and everyone had questions. How long will the process be? Once water starts coming in, when will they have to clean the lake again? Will they stop getting saltwater and be able to taste amrutham again?
The Kenikarai lake restoration project, which is estimated to cost around Rs 12 to 15 lakh, is mostly crowdfunded. This project is 145th on Raghavan’s list (two other projects are underway currently) and the lake was expected to be restored by the second week of April this year. But progress on the project has been slow, as Raghavan and his team have still not got the required funds. They have now raised a campaign on crowdfunding website Milaap to reach out to people.
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The lake restoration quest
Raghavan returned from Dubai in 2018 to his village Nadiyam in Tamil Nadu’s Thanjavur district to build his dream home — a three-storey building. But Gaja Cyclone, which hit Tamil Nadu on 16 November that year, not only wreaked havoc in the delta regions of the state, but also changed the young engineer’s life.
“After three months of relief work, I realised that the biggest problem here was water shortage,” said Raghavan. Restoring lakes was a sustainable answer, and he plunged into it, with the help of NGOs like the Nanban Foundation and crowdfunding.
“In most places, 90 per cent of the lakes are either encroached or ill-maintained. This needs to change,” he added. The people in the region are made aware of the good practices to ensure the restored lake is not polluted and is protected. The artificial landfills also ensure the forest cycle continues.
Restoring lakes will also be a solution to saltwater intrusion in places like Kenikarai.
His first project, the 565-acre Periyakulam (Big Lake), was in his hometown. The project cost approximately Rs 27 lakh and was accomplished by a team of like-minded individuals who received crowdfunding and other means of support from the villagers.
Old photos of the region show a completely empty, barren land. Today, the area is full of water; pond herons fly around. More importantly, the lake is capable of irrigating more than 6,000 acres of land in the region. The groundwater level too is rising.
“From 300-400 feet [earlier], the groundwater is at 60 feet [now],” added Ragahavan.
Raghavan has also restored a lake in Uttar Pradesh’s Pragyaraj for the Indian Army.
Other lake rejuvenation projects are currently underway in Kishtwar in Jammu and Kashmir, Badli and Luhari in Haryana, and Narsipatnam in Visakhapatnam.
While some of these projects are set up through certain companies’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) programmes, others have been started at the behest of local residents or collectors of different districts.
The next one will be in Kenya, where has been invited by the Green Africa Foundation. Raghavan will work there for 10 days a month over the next few months. “We will be restoring as many lakes as possible in Africa from Kenya to Somalia,” he added in an Instagram post.
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The restoration process
The last lake that Raghavan restored at Kollukkadu in the Thanjavur district is just 500 metres from the Bay of Bengal. Spreading across just 3 acres, the lake shows a massive transition from how it was earlier.
The Kollukkadu village sarpanch’s husband, 52-year-old Samiappan, had been on the ground working with Raghavan’s team to restore the lake.
“We are farmers, and this is a seashore area. Lately, there was some saltwater intrusion here, and to stop that, we started the lake restoration process,” he said.
Lake restoration mainly involves “desilting, making boundaries, and connecting the inlet and outlet,” with a clear understanding of the topography and the size of the lake, explains Raghavan.
“Water is god, and the moment it seeps into the restored lake, you only feel like bowing and showering flowers into it,” Raghavan said. But this journey has come with its share of challenges, he added. People always cast doubts on the intention, think there is some foreign funding involved, and even question the “political motive”.
The financial factor has been a challenge as well. Hiring excavators accounted for three-fourths of the expenses. And while he was initially met with suspicion, he also garnered goodwill with each lake he revived. By the time he was on his sixtieth project, a private company, Milky Mist provided him with excavators.
It gave Raghavan a much-needed boost.
“Four lakes can be restored with one hired excavator’s price,” he said.
Today, he runs his own NGO, MEGA Foundation, headquartered in Thanjavur. Raghavan set it up in 2021, and the NGO works toward restoring waterbodies, motivated by larger sustainability goals. He is also associated with ExNoRa International, BiotaSoil Foundation, Oor Koodi Oorani Kaappom, and Nam Thamirabarani.
While announcing the state budget in March this year, finance minister Palanivel Thiaga Rajan allocated Rs 258 crore to the Tamil Nadu Irrigated Agriculture Modernisation Project for the repair, renovation, and restoration of 309 tanks. In the rural development scheme, the minister set aside Rs 800 crore for the renovation of 10,000 water bodies, consisting of minor irrigation tanks, ponds, and ooranies.
Across India, several states including Tamil Nadu are fighting depleting groundwater levels and rising salinity at the local level. According to 2019 reports, in a study conducted by Central Ground Water Board (CGWB), the groundwater level in India declined by 61 per cent between 2007 and 2017. It’s what happened at Kenikarai.
“The groundwater is not usable now, and secondly, the restored lake will help the people in the region during summertime,” said Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) MLA Katharbatcha Muthuramalingam, who inaugurated the Kenikarai project. He further assured local residents that all lakes in the Ramanathapuram constituency will be restored in the next few years.
Raghavan may have started his journey alone, but over the years there has been a perception shift, especially among those who see a lake reborn. They have come to respect water bodies. And Raghavan doesn’t intend to stop reviving lakes. He will keep at it till there isn’t a single waterbody in India left to heal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)