Current Affairs Angle: Lakes in the News

Exam current-affairs sections repeatedly draw on a small recurring set of lake-related environmental stories — worth knowing as short, self-contained narratives rather than isolated facts.

Dal Lake's shrinkage and restoration. Dal Lake's open-water area has been repeatedly documented as shrinking over recent decades — commonly cited estimates suggest it has lost a substantial share of its historical extent (figures vary by source and survey year, so treat any specific percentage as approximate) — driven by unauthorised construction and encroachment along its shores, untreated sewage and nutrient inflow triggering weed and algal overgrowth, and silt accumulation from the surrounding catchment. The Jammu & Kashmir government's Dal Lake Conservation and Management Project, running for over two decades with funding from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) among others, has focused on de-weeding, dredging, sewage treatment infrastructure, and relocating houseboat and shoreline populations — with mixed and still-incomplete results, making Dal Lake a recurring example in questions about the difficulty of urban wetland restoration specifically (as distinct from Chilika's more clearly successful restoration, below).

Chilika's mouth-opening restoration project. As covered above, the September 2000 artificial-mouth intervention at Satapada is the standard "successful lagoon restoration" case study, credited with restoring tidal flushing, reviving fish yields, and getting Chilika removed from Ramsar's Montreux Record in 2002 — routinely paired against Dal Lake's more troubled, still-ongoing restoration as a "compare and contrast" exam angle.

Loktak's phumdi management. As covered above, the interaction between the Ithai Barrage (which altered natural water-level fluctuation after its 1980s construction) and unchecked phumdi growth remains an active management challenge, periodically prompting phumdi-clearance drives that have drawn criticism from fishing communities whose homes sit on the same floating mats being cleared — a genuine and still-unresolved policy tension between ecological restoration and livelihood displacement, useful as an example in questions about conservation-versus-community-rights tradeoffs.

Memory hook: "Dal struggles, Chilika succeeded, Loktak is still fighting itself." Three Indian lake restoration stories, three different outcomes, easy to keep straight.

Practice Recall: Before reading on, name the one Indian lake restoration project in this book most commonly cited as a clear success story, and the one most commonly cited as still troubled/incomplete.

Answer: Chilika's mouth-opening project (success); Dal Lake's ongoing conservation project (still troubled).

One more recurring current-affairs angle: encroachment enforcement. Beyond Dal, Chilika, and Loktak, Kolleru Lake in Andhra Pradesh is a fourth commonly cited restoration story, distinguished from the other three by its specific cause and remedy: rather than sewage, weed growth, or floating-mat mismanagement, Kolleru's crisis was driven by illegal aquaculture — fish and prawn farms built directly on notified lake-bed land under encroachment permits that were later challenged in court. A 2006 Andhra Pradesh government demolition drive removed a large number of these unauthorised structures under directions linked to the Wildlife Protection Act (since Kolleru was also notified a wildlife sanctuary), making it a useful example in questions about the legal tools available to reclaim an encroached wetland — distinct from Dal Lake's slower, negotiation-and-relocation-based approach to a broadly similar underlying problem.

Memory hook: "Kolleru's prawn ponds got bulldozed by court order — a fourth restoration story, and the one driven by encroachment law rather than engineering or community negotiation."

A governance framework worth knowing by name: the National Plan for Conservation of Aquatic Ecosystems (NPCA). India's central lake- and wetland-conservation funding mechanism was originally split into two separate schemes — the National Lake Conservation Plan (NLCP), launched in 2001 to fund pollution abatement, catchment-area treatment, and biodiversity conservation at individual named lakes, and the National Wetlands Conservation Programme (NWCP), covering wetlands more broadly. In 2013, the government merged both schemes into the single unified NPCA, administered by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, which now funds conservation activities at both lakes and wetlands under one umbrella — a useful scheme-name fact to have ready whenever a question asks which central programme funds a named lake's restoration, since Dal Lake's, Chilika's, and several other lakes' conservation work covered in this section has drawn on this funding line at various points. A second useful body to know: the Wetlands (Conservation and Management) Rules, most recently notified in 2017 (replacing 2010 rules), which set out the regulatory framework — including State Wetlands Authorities — under which Ramsar and other notified wetlands are meant to be protected from encroachment, reclamation, and pollution, a regulatory backbone worth citing alongside any specific lake's Ramsar status.

Memory hook: "NLCP + NWCP, merged in 2013, became NPCA — one scheme, lakes and wetlands both." India's central lake-and-wetland funding history in one line.

Bengaluru's lake crisis is a further urban case study worth adding alongside Dal Lake's, precisely because it illustrates the same underlying problem — untreated sewage and encroachment — playing out in a fast-growing metropolitan setting rather than a Himalayan tourist town. Bengaluru once had several hundred interconnected lakes (locally called keres), originally built over centuries as a chain of irrigation tanks harvesting monsoon runoff across the city's rolling terrain, but rapid, poorly regulated urbanisation from the 1980s onward has both destroyed a large share of them outright (built over for real estate) and severely polluted many of those that remain, as untreated sewage and industrial effluent flow directly into lakes never designed to handle urban-scale waste loads. Bellandur Lake, the city's largest, has become the standard national symbol of this crisis: repeatedly documented catching fire (the froth and scum on its surface, laden with flammable industrial chemicals and detergents, has ignited on multiple occasions) and famously overflowing with toxic white foam onto adjoining roads during heavy rain — images that have circulated nationally and internationally as shorthand for urban lake mismanagement. Ulsoor Lake, an older, smaller Bengaluru lake nearer the city centre, faces similar though less extreme pollution pressures and is more actively targeted for restoration given its central, more visible location. This urban-lake crisis is now a standard current-affairs example distinct from — but thematically related to — Dal Lake's troubled restoration, and the two are frequently paired in "urban lake degradation" essay-type questions.

Memory hook: "Bellandur catches fire and foams over; Ulsoor's smaller and more central, and is Bengaluru's flagship restoration target." Bengaluru's lake crisis, a second urban degradation story alongside Dal Lake's.

Practice Recall: Before reading on, name India's unified lake-and-wetland conservation scheme and the year it was formed by merging two earlier programmes, and name Bengaluru's most notorious pollution-crisis lake.

Answer: The National Plan for Conservation of Aquatic Ecosystems (NPCA), formed in 2013 by merging the NLCP and NWCP; Bellandur Lake.

A further recent Ramsar-linked recognition worth knowing: the "Wetland City Accreditation." In 2022, three Indian cities — Udaipur (Rajasthan), Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh), and Indore (Madhya Pradesh) — were among the first Indian cities awarded the Ramsar Convention's international "Wetland City Accreditation," a recognition given to urban centres that have taken demonstrable steps to protect the wetlands within or near their boundaries; Udaipur's accreditation ties directly back to its lake cluster (Pichola, Fateh Sagar, and others) covered earlier in this book, and Bhopal's ties to its Upper and Lower Lakes (the Bhoj Wetland), giving both cities a second, more recent layer of international recognition beyond their lakes' individual Ramsar status. This accreditation is worth knowing as distinct from ordinary Ramsar site designation: it recognises a city's wetland-stewardship record rather than designating a specific wetland itself, and is a comparatively new (2022) addition to the Ramsar framework's toolkit — a genuinely current, easily-tested fact given how recent it is.

A second live infrastructure story worth a brief mention: the Ken-Betwa river-linking project, India's first major river-interlinking project to move to implementation, will create a new large reservoir (the Daudhan Dam, on the Ken river in Madhya Pradesh) as part of transferring surplus Ken river water to the water-stressed Betwa basin in Uttar Pradesh — a project that, once complete, will add a significant new artificial lake to this book's reservoir landscape and is worth watching for updates, since river-linking as a broader national water-policy theme (the National River Linking Project) frequently surfaces in current-affairs coverage independent of any specific lake or reservoir.

Memory hook: "Udaipur, Bhopal, Indore — India's first Wetland City Accreditations, 2022. Ken-Betwa's Daudhan Dam is the newest reservoir-in-the-making, from India's first working river-link project." Two more current, easily-dated facts.

Practice Recall: Before reading on, name the three Indian cities awarded Ramsar's "Wetland City Accreditation" in 2022, and the new dam/reservoir being built under the Ken-Betwa river-linking project.

Answer: Udaipur, Bhopal, and Indore; the Daudhan Dam.

A fifth current-affairs angle worth knowing: Pangong Tso and border tension. Pangong Tso's cross-border position (roughly a third in India, the remainder in Chinese-administered territory) has made it a recurring flashpoint in India–China border tensions along the Line of Actual Control, most notably during the 2020 Galwan-era standoff, when troop positioning and infrastructure along the lake's northern and southern banks ("Finger" points, in the military terminology used for the ridgelines along its north shore) featured prominently in disengagement talks between the two countries — a useful current-affairs cross-reference to keep in mind whenever a question links this book's physical-geography material on Pangong Tso to broader India–China border coverage, since the lake's fame in current-affairs contexts often has little to do with its physical statistics and everything to do with its strategic location.

A sixth angle: hydropower and dam-safety debate in the Himalayan lake belt. Beyond Loktak's Ithai Barrage tension, several Himalayan hydropower projects sited near glacial lakes or on rivers fed by them (across Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Sikkim) have drawn sustained environmental and safety scrutiny, especially after the October 2023 South Lhonak Lake glacial lake outburst flood in Sikkim (detailed in the next section) severely damaged the Teesta-III hydropower dam downstream — an event now frequently cited in policy discussions about whether hydropower projects in the Himalayas adequately account for glacial-lake-related flood risk in their design and siting.

Memory hook: "Pangong's current-affairs fame is strategic, not statistical; Himalayan hydropower's current-affairs fame increasingly turns on glacial-lake flood risk, after Sikkim's 2023 disaster." Two more current-affairs threads, layered onto the four restoration stories above.

Practice Recall: Before reading on, name the Ladakh lake that recurs in India–China border current-affairs coverage for reasons unrelated to its physical superlatives, and the 2023 disaster that damaged a major Sikkim hydropower dam.

Answer: Pangong Tso; the October 2023 South Lhonak Lake glacial lake outburst flood, which damaged the Teesta-III dam.