What may have been a casual vacation to Kashmir with his wife to celebrate their first wedding anniversary in 2013 turned into a vision for Maninder Singh.

Surrounded by the majestic mountains of Kashmir, Dal Lake is one of India’s most iconic and picturesque destinations. Its serene waters, dotted with shikaras (boats) and framed by willow trees, attract countless visitors each year.

However, beneath its tranquil surface, the lake faces a persistent environmental crisis: the overgrowth of lake weeds. For decades, this issue has affected the lake’s natural beauty, with no effective solution in sight.

During this trip, Maninder (41) first encountered the lake weeds — a sight that deeply disturbed him. “When I first saw the weeds near Dal Lake, I wondered, where do these go once they pile up. The lake’s beauty was being marred by this seemingly useless material.”

Born and raised in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, Maninder’s journey as a social entrepreneur took an unconventional turn from the very beginning. While pursuing his law degree at ILS Law College in Pune, he was on the lookout for opportunities to utilise his time better. In 2009, he decided to launch his own IT-based education company.

Though he started small, his business quickly gained traction, becoming profitable within three and a half years. He reinvested the profits to achieve financial stability and moved to Delhi because he wanted to focus on ventures aimed at creating a lasting societal impact.

During his travels abroad in 2012, he encountered criticism of India’s sanitation issues. While many admired the country’s rich culture and history, hygiene was a recurring concern.

From law school to social impact

Determined to make a change, Maninder set out to create a social enterprise. He narrowed his focus to three critical problems: cleanliness, soil depletion, and unemployment. But it was his trip to Dal Lake in 2013 that inspired his most impactful idea.

“These aquatic plants had accumulated near Dal Lake over the years, creating an unsightly mess and posing a threat to the local ecosystem,” he tells The Better India. Previous efforts by the government and various organisations had failed to find an effective solution.

“I brought some lake weed back to Delhi and tested it in labs, including PFT Gurugram, Shree Ram Testing Laboratory in Ghaziabad, and two labs in Sweden. I discovered that the weeds were rich in carbohydrates and could be used to create organic manure,” he explains.

This insight led Maninder to establish ‘CEF Group (CleanEffentech)’ in 2016, a company dedicated to addressing environmental degradation, soil erosion, and waste management.

The breakthrough came in 2017, when CEF Group was empanelled with the National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India (NAFED) as a technical and financial partner in a project to set up waste processing plants across the country.

By 2018, Maninder proposed his solution to the Jammu and Kashmir government,........

© The Better India