“My childhood was surrounded with a few people and a lot of nature. I grew up in a lush environment in a suburban area of South west Chennai. My house was located in between a lake and a pond. We moved to Chennai because of my dad’s job. When we moved, there were hardly any houses around. During monsoons, when the lakes would fill up, the water would run through my streets and to the ponds.
As a child, I drank water straight from the roads. That was how clean the water used to be. I was surrounded with abundance of fresh air, clean water and also a lot of snakes, frogs and crabs. I had a greater understanding of the ecosystem at large. Not in terms of scientific knowledge, but the fact that they all exist and we live with them. Then the urban dream caught on, where things started to change. I was in fourth grade when something didn’t feel right. When I was sitting by the pond after school, I saw a truck come by and dump the construction debris in it. I then complained to anyone who would listen about what I had seen. Some were sympathetic, but one of my friends thought that I should do something rather than just complain. That’s when I spoke to a bunch of my classmates and all of us got down into the pond and started cleaning it. Adults joined us too! We didn’t plan on making it a community activity but eventually it resulted in being a community celebration. Cricket was the core crux. A bunch of us would play cricket close to the pond and the cricket match for that day was to be preceded by a pond cleanup. And the gentlemen who used to own a store close by asked us to divide ourselves into teams. He promised us a wafer chocobar for it!
He said the team that does well, would get chocobars. We wanted that chocobar and we worked hard to earn it. We were able to remove close to 30 big sack loads of trash. This experience and my ambition to improve the environment around me only intensified as I got older. When I was in college, Google came to our campus and did multiple rounds of interviews and tests. Fortunately, despite being a science student, I got through. I moved to Hyderabad for my job and the Google experience is what actually opened up my entrepreneurial ambitions. I would work for them and save money which I would then spend on my projects which were my environmental efforts. I took my salary and invested it in my Organization called Environmentalist Foundation of India ( EFI ) in 2007. That was the true beginning of my journey.
Our primary focus is to clean water bodies across India. The first lake we ever cleaned as a group was the Gurunadam Cheruvu in Miyapur in Hyderabad. Then we had our major breakthrough with the Kapra Lake where a lot of community residents came forward, volunteered and gave us the confidence that this is possible. We still haven’t been able to restore the Kapra lake completely, because we haven’t gotten the permissions. The resident groups there are active and have been doing some large amount of work. We also took on the Gangaram cheruvu and are volunteering in several lakes across Hyderabad over the years.
A few years later, I quit my job to focus on Environmental work. We did a complete restoration of the Gachibowli pond but beyond that it’s only outside of Telangana that we have been able to restore water bodies. This includes Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Kerala and Karnataka where till date we have restored nearly 108 water bodies. By restored, I mean we revived these water bodies by increasing their storage capacity, cleaning the garbage, deepening them, regulating the inlet and outlet canals and creating habitats for several life forms. We have been able to engage roughly around 60,000 to 80,000 volunteers every year in either a beach clean up, river clean up, pond clean-up, plantation, wall paintings and several other efforts.
Our efforts should have direct results towards planet protection. You and I have to become water literate. We have to know where our water is coming from and what kind of water we are sending out of our homes. The more chemicals we add, the greater the pressure is on the civic administration to treat that sewage and in most places our sewage doesn’t get treated. It just flows into our rivers, lakes and ponds. These are the things we need to think about.
Being a part of EFI, I had several opportunities to meet amazing people, especially students who are passionate about conservation. Everybody wants to do something for nature but they don’t know where to start and how to go about it. That’s where EFI aims to be the platform through which we all can come together and volunteer for India and the environment. My dream is to revive 15 lakes in Hyderabad. The day that happens, my journey will be complete.
Climate change is a reality. From the Uttarakhand floods to Chennai floods or the massive heat waves that we have been witnessing in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and a few other states. It’s not that we didn’t have these before but the intensity and frequency with which it’s happening now is concerning. All of us have to unite for the common goal of restoring our natural resources; that’s the real climate action!”
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