Cleansing Cubbon Park ponds

The Lotus Pond and Karagada Kunte at Cubbon Park is all set to get rid of its stink in the coming days.  The city’s lung space seem to be catching up with new methodologies to improve the park, attracting more visitors to it.

More than two hundred litres of ‘Effective Microbes Solution’ will be poured over a period of one year on dosage basis, into the above water bodies to keep it clean and free from any bad odour.

Department of Horticulture, in association with Green Farm Innovators, have launched a project here on Monday where the water bodies in the park will be restored with microbial treatment.

Explaining how the microbes function in cleaning up the lakes, Kiran P Kulkarni, representative of Green Farm Innovators said, “The effective microbes solution is an organic and eco-friendly solution. The solution will be a brew of yeast, lactobacilli and photosynthetic bacteria. The bacteria in the solution will eat up the black sludge over the wall of the lake, apart from waste, rotten matter, mosquito larvae and other unwanted things in the water bodies, making if free from any dead matter and deodorising it over a period of time.”

He further said that this technology was widely used in China, Myanmar and Egypt among others.

When asked about the cost of the effective microbes solution, Kulkarni said, “One litre of solution costs around `50, which is affordable. About ten litres of the solution will easily clean up one lakh litres of water.”

While the Lotus Pond which caters to the gardening of Bal Bhavan will be poured with about 120 litres of mircrobes solution, Karagada Kunte will get 80 litres of it. This will ensure that over a period of time, the colour of the water will become transparent.

Sharing his future endeavours, Kulkarni said that he was planning to rope-in concerned individuals and NGOs who can fund to keep the various water bodies clean and odourless.

Dr M Jagadish, Deputy Director, Department of Horticulture was not available for comments.