Love and Let Live: Saving Puttenahalli Lake

Growing up in Bangalore city in the '90s, two popular phrases about the city - ‘The garden city’ and ‘The city of a thousand lakes’ — were popular. Some 30 years later, the dominant narrative is the city's rapid economic growth into a global IT powerhouse and its many consequences — urbanisation of vast tracts of land, traffic that makes you question your will to live, and unprecedented environmental degradation. “The garden city” is now mostly concrete and tar. “The land of a thousand lakes” is now famous for lakes that go up in flames, spew foam, or carry a strong stench of sewage. While Bellandur Lake captures a lot of attention for catching fire, most lakes in and around the city are pumped full of effluents and in equally bad shape. Through the decades of gradual destruction of our natural environmental that I have witnessed in the city, I am admittedly guilty of doing little more than complaining about how "this is not the Bangalore I grew up in". Fortunately, Bangalore is also home to several environmental activist groups that have come together to protect their neighbourhoods and their city. One such group is the Puttenahalli Neighbourhood Lake Improvement Trust (PNLIT). Through a decade of tireless work, the team has revived the lake in their JP Nagar neighbourhood into an oasis of clean water surrounded by lush vegetation. It has become a space that gives life to birds, spiders, insects, and passionate debates about where one can find the best masala dosa in south Bangalore. Puttenahalli Lake lets me time travel to a Bangalore that otherwise exists only as a memory.

As you enter the path that leads around the lake, the red bottlebrush tree comes alive with bees buzzing and looking for nectar. The shrubs along the path begin to shimmer with the fluttering of damselfly wings. The pixie-like aerial predators search the vegetation for small insects and spiders. In a poetic moment that illustrated the interconnectedness of the web of life, I watched a damselfly catch and eat a spider before ending up on the web of a signature orb-weaver spider. Further along the path, a jumping spider (Brettus cingulatus) attempted a bold attack on a small web-building spider. Away from all the predatory action, a cranefly rested delicately on the leaves of a small plant while a wasp busily searched the rest of the plant for its next meal. The plants along the path also provide refuge for a wide diversity of caterpillars and construction material for weaver ant nests. Hardly ten metres into my walk around the lake I’d seen enough action for an entire natural history documentary.

Among the many environmentally motivated interventions at the lake, the PNLIT team has introduced small floating islands and perches for the lake's resident birds like the little grebe. We watched as a family grebes scanned through the vegetation. The adult would free-dive and return with a small fish for the younger grebes to feed on. Coots would sometimes compete with the grebes for the use of these vegetative fishing commons. Elsewhere on one of the floating islands was a bird with the focus of someone trying to thread a needle and the stillness of a statue — a purple heron stood patiently waiting to catch fish. The perches were popular among birds that employed more active fishing techniques. We watched a white-throated kingfisher use a low-lying perch (less than two feet from the surface of the water) as a vantage point to spot its next meal before diving. The perches also hosted cormorants and Brahminy kites looking to sunbathe after a morning of fishing at the lake.

The lush green vegetation that lined the shores of the lake was dotted with the spectacular colours of the purple swamphen. These birds fed and walked effortlessly along the marshy shores of the lake. A few swamphens also seemed to wonder what all the fuss was about perches was about. They climbed onto the perch, inspected it briefly and came straight back down to the shore. The shoreside vegetation also provided a safe space for migratory coots to build their nests. While scanning the shoreline for more life, we saw damselfly and dragonfly exuviae on some of the perches - more reminders of the amazing life processes that take place at the lake. As we neared the end of our walk, we heard the call of a lapwing and watched a painted stork engulf the sky with its humongous wings.

It was hard to process the idea that I was experiencing all this in the middle of a busy residential neighbourhood in Bangalore city. Puttenahalli Lake in JP Nagar is an inspiring story of a neighbourhood community coming together to preserve nature in a city where most (like me) are losing hope.