Residents of Bengaluru were in for a shock on Friday after they found tens of thousands of dead snails shored up around Kudlu Dodda Kere swimming lake in the city.
One of many such lakes, the 40-acre big Kudlu Dodda Kere is managed by an NGO called 'United Way Bengaluru' since 2017 and is located near Parappana Agrahara Central Prison. The death of the snails en masse is being blamed on the excessive inflow of sewage from the jail that has allegedly been entering the lake, causing a shortage of oxygen and thus forcing the fish to literally gasp to death underwater.
As per a report in the Times of India, local residents who frequent the area for morning walks etc claim that sewage is the main culprit behind the mass snail deaths. A sewage pipe from the lake is reportedly connected to the lake and has been causing pollution in the water body, which consists of a lake bund, and a walking track surrounded by trees and benches.
While fish have previously turned up dead in the lake before, this type of mass snail death is unusual and caused by excessive raw and untreated sewage being dumped into the lake.
This is not the first time that the sewage flow of the Parappana Agrahara Central Prison has made it to the headlines. In 2017, when the BS Yediyurappa government started to crack down on industries for restricting their effluent flow into local water bodies and lakes, The Economic Times reported that nearly all the sewage from the prison - home to 5,000 odd inmates and staff - was flowing into the local 16-acre Parappana Agrahara lake. This lake is linked to a series of lakes such as Kudlu Dodda Kere.
The Karnataka State Pollution Control Board (KSPCB) has reportedly sent three notices to the Public Works Department as well as prison authorities to divert the sewage flow by constructing a sewage treatment plant. The last was sent in 2018. All three notices have so far been ignored. The prison currently has just one septic tank for all its waste production.
Management and conservation of water bodies is an often neglected aspect of public works and a huge cause for concern, not just for environmentalists but also animal welfare activists.
Dumping untreated sewage into water bodies and not taking proper measures to maintain them causes excessive sewage pollution and algal blooms in water bodies, causing eutrophication which prevents sunlight from entering the bottom of the body and reach marine flora and fauna.