Clean-up and restoration drives take off in Coonoor and Udhagamandalam

Two clean-up and restoration drives along the main water courses flowing through Udhagamandalam and Coonoor towns were inaugurated with the involvement of non-governmental organisations and the local municipalities on Saturday.

In Udhagamandalam, the Make Ooty Beautiful (MOB) project began to clean a small portion of the Kodappamund Channel at Charring Cross between the farmers’ market and Gallery One Two, between Coonoor Road and Kotagiri Road. “We also plan on creating some systems to keep this portion of the channel clean thereafter,” said Shobana Chandrashekar of the MOB Project.

Ms. Chandrashekar said that invasive weeds along the banks of the channel were cleared.

The next phase of the restoration will include planting of a small “green bridge” where aquatic flora will be planted to absorb toxins in the water and murals will be painted on both sides of the channel.

“This will be followed by the installation of a mesh to allow the flow of water, and stop solid debris, which can be cleared at periodic intervals. We also hope to have a chain link mesh to prevent the dumping of garbage from the bridge into the channel,” said a press statement.

In Coonoor, the Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited, Clean Coonoor and the Coonoor Municipality organised a four-day clean-up of the Coonoor River.

The effort will also concentrate on bank strengthening, planting of native wetland vegetation and establishing a meandering flow, said Clean Coonoor in a statement to The Hindu.

Present at the start of the event were Vishnu Vardhan Reddy, Senior Regional Manager-Coimbatore Retail Regional Office, HPCL; Deepak Pericharla, Senior Sales Manager, HPCL; Eswara Iyer, Sales Officer, HPCL, and officials from the Coonoor Municipality.

Native wetland fauna, that will serve the purpose of strengthening the river banks and also aid in water purification have been donated for the effort by Upstream Ecology, a non-governmental environmental organisation working on restoring native ecology.

Published - September 29, 2024 06:36 pm IST