He called himself “tabahi” [devastation] on Instagram. Yet when Surendra Singh Chaudhary sneaked out of his home every day at 6 am, lying to his family that he was going to college, it wasn’t to skip class with friends – instead, the 21-year-old spent that time cleaning a local pond near his home.“I used to see how dirty the pond was. It was near a local temple, and the people stopped attending because of how filthy it was. There was something in me that could not stand that, and one day I just began cleaning the pond,” Chaudhary told The Indian Express.In January, that obsession to rid water bodies of plastic bottles, polythene bags, clothes and other discarded waste led him to undertake a bigger project — cleaning up Madhya Pradesh’s Ajnar River. The project took him nine months, countless hours and immense effort, sometimes by a group but mostly solitary.This week, that drive gained him national attention – it led prominent people such as industrialist Anand Mahindra, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Mohan Yadav and Union Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia to praise his work, and prompted the local municipality to provide machinery for the clean-up. It also led to what began as a 21-year-old’s solitary effort to clean a pond near his home to grow into an obsession to revive polluted water bodies across states.Chaudhary says he began cleaning the polluted Ajnar River on January 26, 2026 – Republic Day. What initially involved a few friends soon largely became a one-man effort: he entered the polluted river, pulling out plastic, weeds, sludge and other waste with basic equipment.He spent around Rs 30,000 of his own money on the effort and continued despite having no formal backing. By the time a before-and-after video of the cleanup began circulating, his parents still thought their son was simply a B.Sc. student who kept unusual hours. His Instagram account now has 1.9 million followers.Asking him why he has the name tabahi gets a cheeky response: “I’m glad I have this name for myself. Whatever I am doing is tabahi only in a sense”.Story continues below this adThe local pond was the first of several. Surendra has since gone on to restore small ponds in Rajasthan and Bengaluru as well as elsewhere in Madhya Pradesh, moving state to state, working the same way each time: alone, unpaid at the start, before anyone had reason to notice.Also Read | ‘Not about taking credit’: Bittu Tabahi rejects Dhruv Rathee’s PR accusationAttention did eventually arrive. Scindia praised his work, and there was some engagement from within the state government afterwards, though what exactly was discussed or promised is not clear.He initially faced criticism from people who questioned whether the exercise was being done for publicity, but the continuing documentation of the physical transformation gradually changed the response. His persistence also attracted the attention of the Biaora municipal authorities, who eventually deployed JCB and Poclain machines to assist with removing accumulated waste.“Now everyone is claiming that they were always behind my work and want to steal my credit,” he said. “I worked alone when no one was paying attention. The local municipal authorities are annoyed at my work, and in future if they keep discouraging me then I will have to quit.”Story continues below this adThe work itself has a physical cost that he mentions almost in passing. “Right now, I have a bad skin infection,” he said. “It’s always dangerous to enter polluted ponds. But that is a small price I have to pay.”