Picture a fifty-acre lake right behind your house. Now picture still having to buy water in cans to drink, cook and bathe, because the lake outside your window is too choked with sewage and garbage to give you a single drop.
That was daily life in Chitlapakkam, a residential neighbourhood near Chennai, for years. Today, the same lake recharges the groundwater beneath the town, and residents walk laps around it every evening instead of queuing for water tankers. Getting from one reality to the other took seven years, a volunteer group called Chitlapakkam Rising, and a stubborn refusal to let a “dying lake” stay that way.
A water crisis with a lake next door
The crisis wasn’t abstract for long. By 2016, borewells across Chitlapakkam had started running dry, and the ones that hadn’t were pulling up water that looked closer to sludge.
“There wasn’t even a drop of water in our homes. Some people even noticed contaminated black water in their borewell.
Despite several protests, there was no action by the government. I had to pay for water, with a lake right in my backyard,” recalls Dayanand Krishnan, a civil engineer who would go on to advise Chitlapakkam Rising.
The lake itself, believed to be around a hundred years old, told the story of that neglect. One side had become a dumping ground; the other was choked with water hyacinth. Locals had stopped calling it by its real name and started calling it Saakadai Eri instead — the Sewage Lake.
Years of civic action led to one bigger fight
Chitlapakkam wasn’t starting from scratch. Its citizens’ welfare associations date back to the late 1980s, and had already proven they could win fights that mattered, once forming a human chain to stop a state housing board from building over parts of the lake.
More than 2,000 residents came together to clean Chitlapakkam Lake in 2019. Photograph: (AI-Generated collage)
But it took the devastating Chennai floods of December 2015, and the grim realisation that a neglected lake had made the flooding worse, to turn decades of civic muscle into a single, focused campaign. In 2017, the tactics were still patient ones: postcards, petitions, street plays, songs, anything that might make the government look up.
Two years of that got them almost nowhere.
2,000 people, one lake, and a turning point
So in 2019, residents stopped waiting for permission and picked up gloves themselves.
“The lake was inaccessible due to years of neglect. Despite years of efforts in the form of postcards, petitions, protests, candlelight vigils, the government didn’t pay heed. That’s when we planned the mass cleaning drive,” says Sunil Jayaram, one of the founding members of Chitlapakkam Rising.
On 2 June 2019, over 2,000 people showed up. Not for one weekend, but for several, under the banner #SavingChitlapakkamLake, until word spread far enough on social media that the state could no longer look away. The following year, the then Chief Minister visited in person and sanctioned ₹25 crore in the assembly for the lake’s restoration.
Chitlapakkam Rising’s seven-year campaign transformed a polluted waterbody into a community space.
“Social activism runs in the DNA of the people of Chitlapakkam,” says L Sundararaman, president of the Chitlapakkam Muthulakshmi Nagar Welfare Association, who has watched the neighbourhood fight for this lake since he moved here in 1987.
The 4D plan that revived the lake
Money alone doesn’t fix a hundred-year-old lake. Restoring it scientifically needed a method, and Chitlapakkam Rising had one ready: a four-step process the team calls the 4D model.
First, sluice gates were built at every inlet, deflecting incoming sewage to a treatment plant instead of the lake. Next, the sewage water already trapped inside for years was drained out through a sluice outlet, leaving the lake bed dry.
The contaminated soil was then desilted entirely, before the lake was deepened by 2.5 metres, based on soil studies, to hold more rainwater and keep the neighbourhood from flooding again.
The restored lake now features walking paths, greenery, an open-air gym and spaces for recreation.
Step by step, a sewage-choked waterbody became a functioning lake again, not just a cleaner-looking one.
From ‘sewage lake’ to evening walks
Restoring the water was never really the finish line. What Chitlapakkam wanted was its water security back, and a neighbourhood worth living in.
So residents were asked, through a Facebook poll, what they wanted built around the revived lake. Today, the answer stands there in full: a walking path, an open-air gym, an amphitheatre, a basketball court, stretches of greenery, all wrapped around water that once forced people to buy their own supply. Mornings and evenings now find the same lakeside crowded with walkers, children, and senior citizens, not garbage.
Since October 2023, Chitlapakkam Rising has started conducting lake walk tours for residents of other localities hoping to pull off the same transformation where they live.
What began as a fight to save a dying lake became a community-led movement for water security and better public spaces.
A fifty-acre lake sitting dead behind your house is easy to walk past every single day. It took seven years, but the people of Chitlapakkam never did.
About the campaign
This story is part of The Better India’s #CivicSenseHeroes, a year-long nationwide campaign celebrating citizens who take responsibility for the places and communities we all share. From cleaner streets and safer roads to restored lakes and public spaces, we’re looking for everyday Indians turning civic sense into action. Know someone doing work like this? Nominate your Civic Sense Hero here.
