Prasad Nagar Lake Revival - Week 04

We're into the fourth week of Prasad Nagar lake revival. Today, we started with creating awareness about various issues of the lake and how those can be tackled. Great thing is that a lot of locals understand these issues and have come together to help revive the park and the lake.

They themselves talked about the importance of protecting the park as they realise how everyone gets benefited from the park and that it is everyone's duty to give back to the park. While they talked about it, a lot more locals gathered to listen.

Soon after this, a team of locals put on gloves and started cleaning the periphery of the lake of all kinds of plastics, glass bottles and religious offerings. Another team of volunteers started cleaning the park area collecting plastics and food left by people near trees in different bags.

The main highlight of today was the restoration of an old peepal tree. Everyday people, in the name of misplaced faith, put eatables such as atta (wheat flour) around the tree because of which a lot of ants and rats come there. A lot of rat holes could be seen there exposing the roots of the great tree. This makes roots of these trees week and more susceptible to fall during storms.

So the volunteers and the locals started putting soil and dry leaves on the exposed roots to cover it. Soon enough a whole army of local kids joined in to help with cleaning and putting leaves and soil around the tree.

They were so full of energy and they even planted a few saplings in the park. At last, we gave water to the newly planted saplings as well as the newly restored peepal tree. Soon enough a lot of rats started coming out of it and moved elsewhere.

We concluded by putting the garbage in a nearby 'dhalao'. During the entire activity, one of our volunteers was segregating the waste. All food items were given off in a cow shelter, plastic and glass bottles, as well as the kind of plastics that could be given for recycling,  were put in a separate bag. This bag was given to a waste collector who sells it to kabadiwalas, and the rest was dumped in a nearby 'dhalao'.