Engineer turns ‘terror of Bengal’ water hyacinth Into fusion sarees
Jamshedpur: Water hyacinth chokes water bodies. The fast-growing freshwater weed blocks sunlight, drops dissolved oxygen from 5 mg per litre to 1 mg per litre, and threatens aquatic life and water quality. Known as the “terror of Bengal”, it grows in still pond water found in almost every backyard across the state.
Gaurav Anand saw the problem firsthand during river cleaning drives with TATA Steel. The 46-year-old environmental engineer found the weed in almost all rivers except fast-flowing ones like the Ganga, Godavari and Krishna. A month-long Namami Gange mission in 2018 covering 1,500 km of the Ganga changed his focus. After that, he dedicated every Sunday to cleaning rivers.
In 2022 he quit a 16-year corporate career and founded Swacchata Pukare Foundation to work full-time on the issue. While making lampshades, paper, notebooks and mats from hyacinth, he found the plant pulp contains cellulose that can be spun into yarn, similar to jute.
With weavers, he fused that yarn with cotton. The result: fusion sarees made from a weed most people treat as waste.“We utilise 25 kg of water hyacinth to make one fusion saree,” Gaurav says. “I wanted to come up with a sustainable solution so that people do not see it as a nuisance but as a resource.”
Since February 2022, when he made the first saree, he has produced 50 fusion sarees. He aims to make 1,000 more by the end of this year.
Water hyacinth is already used in India for mats, paper and handicrafts. Gaurav’s move adds fashion to the list, turning a global ecological problem into wearable fabric.
