The Big Lake, which has shrunk into a small lake - this would be the ideal title for this article.
Yes, the lake is known as "Periya Eri", which means "the big lake". It was a bigger lake once. It is said that the lake occupied around 150 acres once. Thanks to encroachments and other related issues, it is hardly 70 acres now. The Big Lake lost almost 50%, and it has already become a small lake.
The lake is supposed to seamlessly flow into the Adyar river, which is not the case now. It is one of the sad stories of water bodies of South Chennai, the region full of lakes and ponds.
One can get an excellent aerial view of the lake from Tiruneermalai hill. Periya Eri is also known as Tiruneermalai Lake.
Happy travelling.
Note: As per a report, there were about 650+ waterbodies in Chennai region till 1980s. Today, only a fraction of them exist. And, most of those surviving waterbodies hardly have water and even some of them that have water had been shrunk badly. In Chennai, there are tank roads without tanks nearby and lake view roads without any lake in the vicinity. There is a high possibility that even the few water bodies that we have today might vanish in the near future. I thought of visiting the currently surviving waterbodies of Chennai and its suburbs and write about them in my blog as a series.
