The civic body has started restoration of the Bindu Sagar at Old Town, thanks to the Bhubaneswar Art Trail 2018 and the Men’s Hockey World Cup — two events for which officials are pulling out all stops to showcase the city at its best.
The Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation has started de-weeding of the Bindu Sagar to give it a better look before the visitors arrive during the art trail as well as the grand sports event between November 18 and December 18. International, national and local artists are going to showcase their works during the art-heritage-culture interface.
To execute the job, the civic body’s engineering section has taken up the cleaning of the historic pond, which is built around 8th century and is spread over an area of about 21.9 acres. The pond is 450 metres long and 320 metres wide with average depth between 2.5 metres in the summer to 4.5 metres during rains.
Executive engineer (division II) Asim Mishra said the de-weeding had started from Thursday morning and would continue for a fortnight. “Once the pond bed is cleaned completely, regular cleaning of the growing weeds will be carried out by agencies concerned till the end of the hockey world cup,” said Mishra.
He said that about 50 workers would be engaged on every day basis with adequate boats to clean the weeds from the pond. Later, the cleaned weeds would be lifted by tractors to dumping sites. The civic body would invest around Rs 6 lakh for cleaning the pond.
The private agency also lifts the ritual offerings thrown into the pond during Mahalaya or the miniature boats sail ritual during Kartik Purnima. “We have asked the agency to keep the surrounding clean on priority,” said city health officer Ramachandra Rout.
It is not the first time that the civic body made any such effort to clean this pond. In the past seven years, the authorities have spend more than Rs 27 crore in restoration of the pond. In a recent addition to it, the tourism department has accorded Rs 7 crore more for the pond, which is being utilised now, sources said.
According to a study conducted by a mini ratna company under the ministry of water resources, Bindu Sagar had a nice composition of vegetation around itself and there are 33 species of trees, 10 types of shrubs, 37 herbs, 12 grasses, three climbers and four sedges (grass seen in wetlands) most of which are lost now.
