Earth movers have started moving at the Singanallur Tank for the last few days to remove water hyacinth to ready the water body for boating.
Soon, the Coimbatore Corporation will send workers to clean and refurbish the boat house.
The move follows the visit of Mayor P. Rajkumar, Commissioner S. Ganesh and Deputy Commissioner P. Gandhimathi to the place recently.
Mr. Rajkumar said that he had instructed officials to first remove water hyacinth. In the next few days, the weed would be removed.
And thereafter, the refurbishment process would begin. Once the work would be completed, the place would have parking facility, cafeteria, children’s play area and other necessary amenities for safe boating.
Sources said that the civic body would remove the weed on at least 35 of the 288-acre tank. The current cleaning effort comes nearly eight years after the civic body made a similar effort with help from Siruthuli. It had spend close to Rs. 5 lakh, but the effect was nullified within a few months as water hyacinth re-occupied the cleaned area, thanks to inflow of sewage into the water body.
East Zone chairman K.R. Jayaram said that the renovation would bring to end the 10-plus years of the boat house being in disuse.
Former East Zone chairman S.M. Samy said that no amount of water hyacinth cleaning would help because the water in the tank would continue to be sewage.
The Corporation would first have to concentrate on stopping the flow of sewage into the tank and that could happen only when it completed the underground drainage project.
Unless that was done, people would not be able to go boating also because they would be swarmed by mosquitoes. The civic body must also look into the worthiness of the boats as they were purchased many years ago. For, safety was of utmost importance, he added.
As for the cleaning up of other water bodies under its control, the Coimbatore Corporation has planned to take them up one by one with funds from the Centre.
The civic body had written to the Centre for Rs. 55 crore to clean the Big Tank under the National Lake Conservation Programme.
As for other tanks, it had sent a proposal under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission.
