Mermaid Pond on the YWCA campus being restored

The 1.5-acre Mermaid Pond on the YWCA campus on EVR Periyar Salai in Egmore is having a revamp. A project by YWCA and Rotary Club of Madras, it is being implemented by Environmentalist Foundation of India (EFI)

Leafing through on old, well-thumbed copy of an old book, More Grasps To Reach (1992) by Gladys Ambat, one realises a pond has been the centrepiece of the YWCA campus, though tucked away and hidden from the public glare. Essentially a look back in time that takes in the history of the organisation since its inception in 1892, Ambat’s book reserved an entire chapter for the Mermaid Pond (as it is called), thereby underlining its significance to the campus and those associated with it.

Ambat writes: “Old Annual Reports mention boat rides in the Pond during Carnival time, and the fun young people had, going out in a flat-bottomed boat.”

One can justifiably hold on to the assumption that “the back-then” mentioned in the old annual records pertain to a time when the pond was deeper and had greater storage capacity.

At present, efforts are under way to take the pond to “the back-then”, not defined by boat rides but a larger storage capacity.

At present, around the pond sit cakes of dark earth, as if a humongous water-titan had emerged from a deep slumber dredging up all the silt while making its thudding way out of the pond.

In truth, machinery have been hard at work since March 11, 2024 carrying out a dredging and de-silting exercise in the pond.

Recently, when The Hindu Downtown caught up with Valsa Benjamin Cherian, convenor of YWCA’s pond restoration committee, by the side of the pond, she disclosed that effort to have the pond restored actually began exactly a year earlier on March 11, 2023, when the pond restoration committee was constituted.