Friday, June 11, 2021

PNLIT turns 11 today

On this day in 2010, we registered Puttenahalli Neighbourhood Lake Improvement Trust with Arathi Manay, Prasanna Vynatheya, O. P. Ramaswamy, from Brigade Millennium, and myself from South City as founder trustees. Prasanna stepped down in July 2014. Nupur Jain from Brigade Millennium, Sangita Agrawal from South City, Divya Shetty from Brigade Palmsprings and Nandhini Sriraaman from Adarsh Rhythm are currently on the board of trustees. Our team is small and we rely heavily on our gardeners Jayanna, Ramu, Srinivasa and Soma.

 

We are grateful for the assistance we receive from Mrs. Vijayalakshmi Kutty who's managing our newsletter so well, and Sapana Rawat our events coordinator who's waiting for the all clear signal to resume events at the lake premises. S.K. Srinivas, Madhurima Das, and Vishnupriya Hathwar, are our in-house birders/photographers, Geetha Srikrishnan, photographer, Raghavendra Shanbhag, our turn to person, Dr. K.G. Rangaraju, our hydraulic consultant, A.K. Venkat, who provides technical help with our newsletter, ornithologist Dr. S. Subramanya, and Capt. S. Prabhala, Bangalore Environment Trust. For want of space, we are unable to give the names of many more experts that we rely upon. Special mention must be made of former Chief Engineer, BBMP (Lakes), Mr. B. V. Satish, for making us official custodians of a lake, the first such in Bengaluru and to Mr. L. Ramesh Jelly from Puttenahalli ward. 

 

We wouldn't have made any headway with nurturing Puttenahalli Puttakere without our government partners, primarily BBMP, BWSSB, and KSPCB among others. Individual donors, largely from our neighbourhood, continue to be our primary source of income to meet recurring expenses. We executed projects with CSR funds from companies such as VMWare, Axis Bank, Deloitte Shared Services India LLP, Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions Private Limited, Duleep Matthai Nature Conservation Trust, Misys Financial Software. The most recent grant was from Wipro Foundation to create a Replicable Floating Bio-filtration system in our wetland. We are excited about starting work as soon as BBMP repairs and modifies the existing wetland.  The media has covered our endeavour extensively from the early days to now. Our heartfelt thanks to all. 



What is a lake without water? The transformation of the lake became complete when we began filling it with excess treated water from South City apartment complex. Together with Earthwatch India, we held a number of programmes to spread environment awareness among several corporate employees and residents. Through advocate Sindhu Vasudev, we hope to protect the lake from encroachments.

 

Eleven years of nurturing the lake together. We at PNLIT have more goals, more dreams and need your support to realize them. Together we can reach greater heights. 

 

Usha Rajagopalan

Chairperson, PNLIT

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