BBMP (Lakes) – Usha Rajagopalan "Lakeika"

End of the year greetings

We wish you all a wonderful holiday season and a great new year. We wish ourselves the same too! For, truth be told, 2023 was a period of endless challenges for us at PNLIT. Puttenahalli Puttakere sailed through the year but we had to fight hard to protect it, help it thrive. Officers changed and weContinue reading “End of the year greetings”

PNLIT – Caretakers of Puttenahalli Lake for 13 years

Today, 11th June, we complete 13 years of nurturing Puttenahalli Lake in south Bengaluru. Our team was registered as Puttenahalli Neighbourhood Lake Improvement Trust (PNLIT) on this day in 2010 with Prasanna Vynatheya, Arathi Manay, OP Ramaswamy and me as founder trustees. Prasanna stepped down. Other residents, Nupur Jain, Sangeetha Agrawal, Divya Shetty and Nandhini Sriraaman joined the Trust. Our Vision was to: Encourage localContinue reading “PNLIT – Caretakers of Puttenahalli Lake for 13 years”

Stung By a Woman

7 March 2013. We were at the last leg of an ambitious project, diverting surface runoff from the Brigade Millennium Avenue nearby into the lake. It was a calculated risk BBMP was taking at our behest. Everything depended on the force of the water entering the trench because the road sloped sharply away to theContinue reading “Stung By a Woman”

Death of a Great Cormorant

Several people in our locality are as deeply attached to our Puttenahalli Puttakere as we trustees are. One of them is S K Srinivas, our inhouse water expert, bird watcher, and photographer. In his recent blog post, a heartbreaking, angry, helpless narrative, he has written about the agonizing death of a Great cormorant at the lake yesterday. Continue reading “Death of a Great Cormorant”

That First Monsoon

While rejuvenating our Puttenahalli lake in 2010, BBMP had provided five inlets for rainwater to enter and one waste weir for the excess to flow out. Of the five inlets, one was at the entrance, another further down, roughly midway to where the white silk cotton tree now towers over the walking track like aContinue reading “That First Monsoon”

A Narrow Escape for our Precious Lake

The vigilance of our gardeners is to be applauded. On 3rd Aug, at around 5.30 p.m., they telephoned to say that “black oil” was entering the lake. We replied that it may be from the two-wheeler mechanic shop across the road and asked them to get it stopped. We were wrong. Our gardeners followed theContinue reading “A Narrow Escape for our Precious Lake”