Gurgaon man fought to save dying pond for 3 years, NGT steps in

When real estate businessman Virendra Tyagi moved to Gurgaon’s Sector 47 in 2009, he was delighted to find a pond barely 200 metres away from his home in Block B. The nearly three-acre water body in Fatehpur Jharsa village, however, was in bad shape: construction debris had piled up, cattle grazed on the site, and encroachments spread.

Tyagi, who is the Residents’ Welfare Association (RWA) president of Sector 47, decided to approach the authorities. On April 17, 2023, the 52-year-old wrote to the Deputy Commissioner and the Chief Minister, seeking action.

When those representations yielded no response, he took the matter to the National Green Tribunal (NGT), sending an email letter petition on May 16, 2023. He sought demarcation, fencing, contour mapping and ecological revival of the pond to recharge groundwater.

On August 24 this year, the Tribunal directed authorities to remove the encroachments and restore the pond. Speaking with The Indian Express, Tyagi recalled how he built his case before the Tribunal. “… I sent whatever material and responses I had in my email to the NGT.

They then called and said the petition is fine, but I needed to attach proof of the land ownership. So I went to the patwari, which said it was Haryana Shehri Vikas Pradhikaran (HSVP) land that is now the civic corporation’s.” The district administration then carried out a survey, said Tyagi.

By November 2023, he said the lake became quite beautiful. “Fourteen-foot pits were dug and all the dumped construction waste was removed. The area became well lit, barricaded, and had an open gym and other facilities,” he said.

The transformation, however, didn’t last long. “Residents of the nearby JJ colony broke the gates, and it became a spot for cattle grazing… it went back to ruin,” Tyagi alleged. “Two or three times, the district administration tried to remove encroachments, but couldn't fully,” he claimed.

During the hearings, authorities cited an ongoing dispute in the Punjab and Haryana High Court, where an interim status quo order had been passed on May 25, 2015, over land acquisition in the area. In its order, the NGT principal bench comprising Judicial Member Justice Arun Kumar Tyagi and Expert Member Dr A Senthil Vel rejected the notion that the encroachments enjoyed legal immunity.

The order noted that site inspections, Differential Global Positioning System (DGPS) mapping, and drone surveys ordered by the Tribunal confirmed the extent of the degradation on the 19-kanal site, recorded as ‘Johad’ (pond) measuring 2.12 acres in revenue records.

A demarcation report revealed that HSVP itself had built a road and footpath over 1,077 square yards of the pond area, it said. The NGT order also noted that the survey documented seven jhuggis occupying 275 square yards across a government water-retention bund, a 39-square-yard temple built by the Gram Samaj, and a five-square-yard masonry platform.