Our Journey
Our journey before Vrikshamitra
The decision to form Vrikshamitra was primarily due to our experiences as lone warriors prior to that.
The battle to save the lakes of Anekal started with Hennagara Lake in March 2018. Vacant land beside the lake was being used by adjoining apartment complexes to dump their residential garbage. This was being done by well-educated people, working in top multi-national companies most of whom had spent a lot of time in Europe or the US. Ironically, substantial premiums had been paid by the owners for apartments that had a clear view of the lake.
This was not right, and one of our members, Tushar Chandra decided it had to be stopped if the lake were to not turn into another Bellandur Lake. Questioning the residents welfare association of the apartments responsible, about what they were doing returned a “We give our garbage to someone that is licensed by the government, what he does with it is not our concern.” The person disposing the garbage was a local goon, with plenty of money and political support, and absolutely no qualms in misusing it.
Later during the year, when Tushar saw the same person dumping waste from the sewage treatment plant of the apartments directly into the lake he could not stop himself and went to speak directly with the goon. This led to him getting beaten up by the goon, within the apartment complex, in front of over a dozen other residents. Not one of them cared enough to step in and support him. Tushar was told that going to the police wouldn’t help and the best thing for him to do was look the other way.
In 2019, Tushar moved to his new house in Celebrity Lakeview Layout, beside Hennagara Lake. Things seemed quite for a while but this was just the silence before the storm.
In Jan 2020, the goon emboldened by the fact that there was no one to question him, decided he had to do something bigger. He took a contract to dispose of construction waste. Hundreds of trucks of waste concrete were picked up and brought to be dumped in Hennagara lake.
This was the lake being encroached into right in front of Tushar and in spite of what had happened earlier, he could not keep silent.
He approached the Jigani police station. What was being done by the goon was a crime that required an FIR to be filed but all the police did was register a complaint. The dumping continued.
Appeals for help from bureaucrats, politicians, and other NGOs did not help. All may have been lost if it weren’t for Ms. Keya Acharya, President of the Environmental Journalists Forum in India. An email to her, describing the problem got a response, and she connected Tushar to Ms. Bosky Khanna from the New Indian Express and Ms. Ankita Sengupta from thelede.in. The journalists realised the seriousness of what was happening beside Hennagara Lake and covered it in their reports. The importance of the media in these issues was displayed by the fact that the goon stopped dumping just a day after the stories were published.
He then got in touch with Dr. Yellappa Reddy, a well known IFS officer now retired, who was presiding over an open court and described the situation here. He immediately ordered the Jigani police to file an FIR against the goon and he was ordered to clear up all that was dumped immediately.
To prevent the vacant land from being reused for similar purposes, a high density Miyawaki forest was planted here with the help of SayTrees. This fight of ours was a partial success as shown in the photographs below.
