Nagdaha Lake, a small body of water in the Kathmandu Valley in the Lalitpur district, was once used by the locals for daily tasks, irrigation, and washing. Like many urban lakes in South Asia, it has been absorbing runoff from the nearby settlements for the past few decades, absorbing household waste, agricultural fertiliser, and seepage from grazing land until nutrient levels reached a point where the lake was choked with algae and deprived of oxygen. Over the years, local advocacy groups attempted several cleanup initiatives, but because the underlying nutrient load in the water was never truly eliminated, eutrophication kept coming back.
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