Bdbusinessdaily.com – India’s rivers carry a staggering pollution burden. Decades of untreated industrial discharge, open defecation, agricultural runoff, and casual littering have turned waterways across the country into open sewages. Government clean-up programmes, when they exist at all, tend to arrive late, under-resourced, and politically conditional. Into that gap of institutional inaction stepped a young man with no budget, no training, and no guarantee of survival beyond the next few weeks of immersion in toxic water.

Surendra Singh Chaudhary, a 20-year-old BSc student enrolled at a college in Biaora, Rajgarh district, Madhya Pradesh, spent more than two months wading through a heavily polluted stretch of the Ajnar River, pulling out waste by hand. He went online under the handle “Bittu Tabahi,” and his story exploded across Indian social media in early 2025 after a single tweet from industrialist Anand Mahindra put the cleanup in front of millions of viewers.…