From Northern India comes the story of an entrepreneur’s efforts to clean up a historically-beautiful lakefront by turning an infestation of weeds into rich natural fertilizer.
Being something along the lines of the Lake Como of India, Dal Lake in the nation’s northerly city of Srinagar is surrounded by palaces, temples, fog-cloaked forested hills, and is iconic in the country for its houseboat culture.
Yet for all its natural and historic beauty, Dal Lake was sick—sick with lake weeds.
“These aquatic plants had accumulated near Dal Lake over the years, creating an unsightly mess and posing a threat to the local ecosystem,” Maninder Singh tells The Better India.
Singh is the founder of Clean ‘Effen’ Tech (CET), a local-government partner company that harvests thousands of tons of those lake weeds every year, dries and enriches them, then grinds them into fertilizer to sell to local farmers.
Maninder was first inspired to find a solution for clearing the lake weed when visiting Indian-administered Kashmir for his first wedding anniversary. Having already launched an IT startup in his native Uttar Pradesh, Singh would eventually change his focus to creating a social enterprise to tackle the challenges of our age.
The sight of the lake weed marring Dal Lake’s beauty immediately came into his head, and he began an 8-year process to construct a value chain that would see the lake, the local ecology, the global ecology, the local economy, and his own economy, all flourish together.
“Our project is designed to process up to 70,000 [metric] tonnes of lake weed each year, which yields between 20,000 to 22,000 tonnes of organic manure. This large-scale effort is expected to lead to an annual reduction of around 50,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions,” Singh tells The Better India.
“We have made an impact by enriching over 4,400 acres of land, improving soil health, and supporting sustainable agriculture practices.”
Local workers harvest the lake weed using large machines and transport it to CET’s production plant. There the lake water is drained and treated for heavy metals and other pollutants before it’s released.
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The lake weed is dried, shredded, enriched, and pulverized before being sold for 25% less than chemical fertilizers imported from other states like UP and Haryana, saving more emissions from transportation.
Local farmers have benefited from the cost savings and from the lack of soil amending. Harvests are up, as are soil nutrient concentrations. Also in an economic sense, the local tourism industry will no doubt benefit from the 14,800 metric tons of lake weed pulled in by Singh’s partners last year, not least because during the hotter summer months the mounds of weeds decay and putrefy the air.
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Looking to the future, Singh aims to replicate this success in other Indian lakes—starting in the states of Odisha and Rajasthan. Anywhere there’s a beautiful fresh water body overrun with aquatic plants, Singh hopes to see some Clean ‘Effen’ Tech brought in to clean it the eff up.
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