I travel past Ulsoor Lake every morning.

On the surface, it looks like it should. Relatively clean, big and glossy. The walking path around it is shut off, but the footpath is still there.

In 2016, fish began floating to the surface. Dead and asphyxiated. Untreated sewage had been entering the lake’s body for several years, depleting oxygen levels until the water itself turned hostile to the creatures living in it. The situation could not have been worse over there.

It has been over ten years since. Sewage inflows have reportedly reduced. The communities around the lake seem healthier.Things look better than 2016 but that is a low bar. Since then, since then significant funding has come in: 15th Finance Commission grants, Brand Bengaluru Foundation, Rs 4 crore from the National Disaster Mitigation Fund, and BBMP’s Rs 80–95 crore master plan. All of this has been pointing towards one intervention, de-silting the lake.

De-silting means removing accumulated sediment from the lake bed. To do that properly, you need to drain the water first.

So they drained it.

The Bengaluru Meenu Utpanna Mattu Maratagara Sangha — the fishing association with a lease on the lake — was asked to rescue the remaining fish before operations began. According to reports, they halted work on January 31, 2026, and successfully relocated adult fish. No mass die-offs of fingerlings were confirmed after the drainage.

But something had already gone wrong before any of this.

A quote from The New Indian Express, February 17, 2026:

“He added that after partial cleaning in 2020, the contract was also renewed. The association paid Rs 50,000 for the lease period and released fishlings worth lakhs, but within a few days, the fishlings and small fish died. The treatment was done, and the issue was addressed. ‘Now once the desilting is completed, which may take three months to four months, and water is filled again, the fishing will be taken up,’ he said.”

Read that again.

Fishlings worth lakhs were released into the lake and then were found dead.

The explanation given is that treatment was done and the issue was addressed. But the sequence of events is difficult to accept without scrutiny. If the water quality was bad enough to kill newly released fingerlings, why were they released into it in the first place?

That is a lot of fish.

The de-silting project, once complete, promises a cleaner, deeper, restored Ulsoor Lake. That outcome may be worth pursuing. But the history here — of funding cycles, renewed contracts and dead fingerlings— suggests that the lake’s recovery has been managed more as a project than as an ecosystem.