In the first, at Keezhakattalai people have come together to resist a sewage pumping station’s location that might jeopardize their beloved lake. Spread over 80 acres, this lake’s rain water storage remains plenty and sweet.

The other, the Ninnakarai lake at Maraimalai Nagar is being revived by a coalition of citizens, civic authorities and politicians. Covering 125 acres, the lake is now being excavated, the removed soil piled on the periphery to form a 20’ wide bund with a road on it, to be planted later extensively with trees.

There’s a third lake at Pammal closer to the city [not covered in the above story], where too citizens are fierce guardians of the asset.

The Deccan Chronicle today reports that in village Lakhanpal in Jalandhar district of Punjab, there are 1,400 little girls for every 1,000 boys. The State’s average is 776 per 1000, the worst for India. The Panchayats Federation of Punjab recently held a meeting to facilitate Lakhanpal’s villagers, to which representatives from 42 villages were invited. The village is now to be rewarded with a brand new water supply scheme, quite apart from a substantial cash award. But then Lakhanpal achieved its humane success long before these rewards were on offer.

The experiment is 3 years old and ADG Abhyanand takes time off from policing to teach physics. In the first year, 18 of the boys got into IITs; in the second year the score went up to 22 and last year it was 26.

Maybe there’s a need for coaching classes on the Super-30 model all over India. That would be true affirmative action by private citizens.