Chandigarh, April 22 -- The Punjab government has started an ambitious project to clean around 15,000 village ponds in the state, Rural Development and Panchayats Minister Tarunpreet Singh Sond said on Monday. For the first time in the state, the government has launched a mass-scale ponds rejuvenation exercise, he said.
Around 1,100 village ponds have already been dewatered and nearly 400 village ponds desilted, he said. "Depending on the requirement, both desilting and re-silting operations are being carried out."Many of these ponds had not been cleaned for decades, leading to overflow, foul odours and mosquito breeding in villages, the minister said.
Now, with this initiative, the Punjab government is actively working to reverse these c...