Housing societies, telecom tower, parking lot: The story of Ahmedabad's ‘vanished' lakes

Indian Express

5 hours ago

What is common between a group of residential societies in Ghatlodia, a telecom tower in Vejalpur, and a dumpsite in the East Zone? Going by an internal report of the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC), all of these structures and sites stand on what were once lakes in the city.
And that's not all. According to the report, the city has as many as 37 'vanished' lakes.
A recent anti-encroachment drive in Ahmedabad's Chandola Lake area, preceded by an exercise to weed out alleged illegal Bangladeshis in the aftermath of the Pahalgam terror attack, saw a total of 12,500 residential, commercial and religious structures reduced to rubble, and four lakh square metres of land cleared.
While the authorities stated that all these structures were illegal, and Municipal Commissioner Banchhanidhi Pani defended the demolitions, calling the water bodies 'sacrosanct', questions are being raised about the status of other lakes, including those which have made way for even government buildings.
Take the case of an unnamed lake in Thaltej. According to the AMC progress report on the status of lakes, not only does this site house a residential society, it also serves as a base for a water distribution centre of the civic body.
In Jodhpur area, a temple stands on the site of an unnamed talavadi (smaller lake/pond) while the erstwhile Kasai Lake in Sarkhej has a mosque and a few residential encroachments. Also in Sarkhej, religious and commercial encroachments can be seen where Malkani Lake once existed, according to the report.
While Nikol Lake in the East zone has turned into a dumpsite, Kanetri lake in the same area has reportedly been subsumed by residential and commercial encroachments.
The report also mentions several such disappeared lakes that have now been hidden by construction on all sides, leaving no space for a road, whenever it is built, to access them. An example is Gam Talav Kharabo, a listed water body located in Ghatlodia of the North-west Zone. During a visit by The Indian Express, multiple residential societies were found at the site. An entry into what was likely the centre of the lake leads to a cow shed complete with a cattle trough. A puddle caused by unseasonal rain was the only sign of water in the area.
Brahmani Talavadi, which used to be located on Corporate Road in Makarba, has also completely vanished. In its place stands an entire gated society containing type E and type D government quarters built by the revenue department. AMC and Collectorate officials, both, declined to comment on these cases.
A water body marked as Vejalpur lake does not even have the sloped identifiers required on the banks. It is simply a rectangular plot of land with two-third portion housing an unofficial parking space by local residents, a dumpsite for construction debris, and a feeding zone for pigeons. The remaining portion is a walled-off area containing an office and a telecom tower bearing the marking of public sector company BSNL.
The fact that these buildings have encroached on plots of land that were lakes was confirmed by coordinates mentioned in the report accessed by The Indian Express.
A unique case is that of the Vatva area, which has a site called Bibi Lake. Local residents who stay on its banks say the water body fills up during monsoon. Construction debris could be seen strewn across more than two thirds of the lake. During its visit, The Indian Express could see some water in a section of the lake. 'The lake fills up to the brim during monsoons as the water from the road drains into it,' said a boy who was heading to a tuition class, taking the dried-up lake bed as a shortcut. During summers, though, the lake is little more than a patch of marsh, made all the more dangerous by piles of brickwork, ceramics and wooden furniture piled onto it. On the side that is still dry, a makeshift cricket pitch could be seen.
When asked about the encroachments, an AMC official said, 'In places where buildings have come up, we are taking a call on a case-by-case basis after sending proposals to the state government. This is a policy matter.'
Congress Councillor Shehzad Khan Pathan, who had raised the matter during a board meeting in May, told The Indian Express: 'Wherever there is jhuppad patti (kutcha houses), these people (AMC) cite the Supreme Court order that encroachment cannot be done on a water body. But when the government itself does encroachment on lakes, why does nobody remember the order? They should also face the same action that the poor people did. The government cannot carry out encroachment and then run bulldozers only on poor people.'
The Leader of Opposition in the AMC further said, 'On Saijpur Lake, there are 40 commercial establishments whose impact fee applications are pending. In another place, there appears to be a metro project construction on a lake.'
Impact fee is the amount charged for regularising illegal constructions in Gujarat.
Amul Bhatt, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA of Maninagar and former Standing Committee Chairman of the AMC, said, 'I have raised the issue of encroachments on lakes several times in the past one year. Lakes must be kept as water reservoirs and there should be no construction on them, including government buildings.'
Most lakes in Ahmedabad city were, until recently, under the purview of the Revenue Department of Gujarat through the Ahmedabad Collectorate. On the AMC's initiative, many lakes were transferred to the civic body. However, the transfer of ownership of several lakes, including Chandola Lake, is pending, confirmed two senior officials of the urban housing and urban development department.
Explaining the handover process, BR Sagar, the Resident Additional Collector (RAC) of Ahmedabad district, said, 'When the Collectorate gets a request from the municipal corporation for transfer of a plot identified as a lake, we seek permission from the revenue department. Required orders are passed and the ownership is transferred to the city.'
On the conflict between the two government bodies regarding encroachments on lakes, a revenue department official said, 'While the revenue department asked the Collectorate to hand over the lakes to the AMC in their current state, the latter asked the Collectorate to first clear all the encroachments on the lakes and then transfer them. Recently, a solution was reached where the bodies decided to work together to clear the encroachments as they did on Chandola Lake.'
Officials said encroachments on other lakes will also be removed with similar 'cooperation'.
The second question was that of the area of land on which the lakes are situated. 'Till the time the Collectorate had ownership of the lakes, there was no question of surveying and assessing the size of the land. However, during the time of transfer of ownership, it became necessary to measure the plots with lakes in them. This process is underway in several lakes that are to be handed over to the AMC, which is why the transfers are still pending,' said an official in the know of the process.
Dr Jayanti Ravi, the Additional Chief Secretary (ACS) of the Revenue Department, said that the state of the lakes in Ahmedabad had been brought to her notice by local politicians, and a meeting between the Collectorate and Commissionerate had led to the handing over of several lakes to the city while others were still pending due to the amount of paperwork involved in the process.
But mostly, evidence of historic lakes or talavadis being on certain plots of land, whether dried out, encroached or having completely vanished, come from the 7/12 (saat-baara) — a revenue department document denoting ownerships and other critical information on status of a plot of land.
A revenue department official said, 'It will be mentioned in the 7/12 document that there is a lake on a specific plot of land. Now, if the lake is not in existence at the moment, the irrigation department can be asked to check if the plot is a water reservoir. Officials of the revenue department can then take a call on whether to remove the lake status from that particular plot of land or not. 'Though Chandola Lake doesn't have water all year round, it fills up during monsoon. Hence, it is a water reservoir and thus must remain one,' said an official.
The AMC had sought the transfer of 142 lakes from the Revenue Department, said RAC Sagar. 'While 27 lakes have been handed over, plots of 82 of them are being measured and will be transferred after this process. AMC's request for 33 lakes is still under due consideration.'
Besides turning larger water bodies into lakefronts on the lines of Vastrapur and Kankaria in Ahmedabad, there has been a push to use the 'blue cover' in the city to mitigate floods and direct the rain water to recharge them. This is expected to also counter the Urban Heat Island (UHI) Effect – a phenomenon when certain pockets within a city experience higher heat load than surrounding or neighbouring areas on the same day.
For this, the AMC has been working on the lake-interlinking project that uses hydrology, land gradient and gravity to interconnect clusters of lakes in the same area to accommodate stormwater as well as reservoirs that can be filled using Sewage Treatment Plants (STPs).
Currently, there are seven sets of lakes that are already interlinked or where work in this direction is underway.
Mirant Parikh, the Deputy Municipal Commissioner (DyMC) for Water and Drainage Projects at the AMC, said, 'We are planning interlinking in groups of lakes located next to each other. So, what happens is that water will go into the lakes through STPs but if one lake gets full, water can flow into other lakes.'
Parikh said that in the other lakes, pre-monsoon work was underway to ensure that they accommodate more water. 'In small lakes, we will implement cost-effective development models and make catch pits to divert rain water into them so that the flooding issue is resolved during monsoon. We will also increase their water carrying capacity by deepening them – a process that is underway,' Parikh added.
With the handover of Chandola Lake to the AMC imminent, the planning to turn it into a 'city attraction' is already underway.
The first plan, said officials, is to finish clearing all the debris. Until a few weeks ago, the area was home to thousands of people, some of whom claimed they had been staying there for generations. As a result, so much is the volume of remnants of their homes that AMC has invited anyone seeking to salvage scrap, wood or other material to freely do so in the hope that it will reduce the burden for the civic body.
At the same time, work is on to deepen the lake bed as well as construct a boundary wall with a platform and fencing through which visitors could view the lake.
Now the question: Where will the water come from?
Officials said there are three viable ways to bring water to Chandola. One is from the Kharicut canal, the other is from an STP in Bapunagar. The third is a proposal to construct a new STP on the banks of Chandola.
But a major shift that the lake premises will likely go through entails changing the geography of the area. Chandola Lake premises is made up of three water bodies — the greater Chandola and two smaller (Nana) lakes to its north and north east — all separated by a land barrier. This land barrier is where major parts of the encroachments had come up over the last three or four decades. Deputy Municipal Commissioner Riddhesh Raval told The Indian Express that the land barrier will be removed to unify all the three lakes to turn the entire four lakh square metres into a single water body.
This, said Raval, is important because the water inlets from the STP near the Malek Saban Lake in Bapunagar and the water line connecting Kharicut canal are linked to one of the smaller Chandola lakes. If the barrier is not demolished, the water won't reach the greater lake, thus defeating the purpose of the project.