come weekend and bengalurubased bank employee ashwin kumar sets off to coimbatore and once he reaches the city he meets fellow volunteers of kovai kulangal paathukaapu amaippu who have been actively working toward reviving and restoring lakes in the city the volunteers of this group have been cleaning different lakes in coimbatore every sunday for the last two years and they recently completed 100 weeks of lake cleaning and conservation only after working in the lakes did i realize the extent of damage we have caused the environment even a simple act of ours like throwing away a tea cup has been polluting the environment i have been coming here every week from bengaluru to take part in the conservation work we are like a family if i dont come for even a week i feel like i miss everyone seconding him is abdul akbar who has been part of the drive for 50 weeks god has blessed us with nature and its our duty to protect it i have been part of lake cleaning drives at muthannankulam and vellalore lake and every week has been a learning experience for methe brain behind the massive drive is manikandan r whos mission to give lakes in the city a new lease of life we started cleaning lakes with the help of the government soon we decided to start doing this work on our own we shared the information on social media and we got 50 volunteers for our very first drive in perur periyakulam 12022017 we even brought our own jcb by the next weekend word had spread and we got around 400 volunteers we cleaned 300 acres of the lake in a month since we were getting huge support we decided to continue the process we then cleaned selvachinthamani and vellalore lake kuniamuthur vellallore canal kuniamuthur check dam and a 400yearold well in sundakkamuthur we not only cleared the plastic but also invasive species like seema karuvelam prosopis juliflora we wanted to clean the source of water first before the lakes we focused on places where we could gather the support of public when quizzed if the plastic ban by the government of tamil nadu has helped them in any way and pat comes the reply people still use plastic dont they now with the elections coming up their use is not monitored as well plastic is choking our water bodies people throw plastic into water as if its their birthright we would have painstakingly cleaned a lake on sunday but the very next day people would come here have a drink and throw bottles and plastic in coimbatore there is no place to dump construction debris and septic tank discharges these are let into the water bodies which makes our job tougher if you look at perur lake the dump yard is right next to the lake this can easily get into the lake we noticed that the garbage that we cleaned at perur were thrown into other