The Water and Power Consultancy Services limited (WAPCOS), a mini Ratna Company of the Government of India, has prepared a draft plan for rejuvenation and sustainable conservation plan of holy Bindusagar lake and its five periphery tanks.
It presented its concept before stakeholders at a meeting with the BMC officials and also organised a meet on the banks of the historic water body.
Among others, Mayor Ananta Narayan Jena, MP Prasanna Kumar Patsani, local councillors of the surrounding areas and representatives of the priests and servitors from various temples and residents of the Old Town area attended.
The experts engaged by the Central organisation raised their concern over carefree disposal of religious offerings like human hair, Rspuja’ items like flowers and garlands and also people using soaps to take bath in the holy waters. They requested the stakeholders to create awareness programmes rigorously so that communities residing nearby would be thinking twice before throwing anything in future inside the waters of Bindusagar.
While the expert body on water management took up Bindusagar as the central source for the revival of a water ecosystem, the five water bodies, it picked for the project, include Devipadahara, Kotitirtha, Godipokhari, Ganga Jamuna and Godavari Kund.
In a nutshell, the project is based on the observations on the ecological and heritage perspective of Bindusagar and the nearby water bodies and how, communities, as major stakeholders would play a pro-active role in the conservation project in order to have a pure, deep and healthy water body so that all the annual religious functions of lord lingaraj would be organised with much fanfare and followings.
During the presentation of the draft plan, the WAPCOS experts pointed at issues like lack of sewerage network, storm water network and how due to shrinking marshy land around the historic water body and the natural drainage channel getting polluted with house-hold waste water disposal.
The WAPCOS team has carried out various surveys i.e. topographic, bathymetric, aquatic, terrestrial and sedimentation/soil quality surveys to know the details of the six important water bodies.
The WAPCOS proposal has enlisted several measures like dewatering of the holy lake of 27 hectares, removal of the sedimentation layers from the tank bed, fresh water inflow from the nearby Daya river to Bindusagar and also other water bodies, in need of water flow and introduction of some select fish varieties, which would be able to eat out the overgrowing aquatic weeds.
To facilitate religious offerings, the draft has proposed separate tanks.