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.

View this post on InstagramA post shared by The Better India (@thebetterindia)

A post shared by The Better India (@thebetterindia)

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........

© The Better India