The 3km promenade around Sukhna Lake is where Chandigarh takes its pulse every morning
Winter brings migratory birds from Siberia; the cormorants arrive before the fog lifts
Built in 1958 by Le Corbusier’s team, this reservoir has outlasted every trend the city has tried
By the time most of Chandigarh is thinking about breakfast, Sukhna Lake has already seen its best hour.
It is 5:45 in the morning and the promenade is moving. Retired colonels in tracksuits. Young women in groups of three, voices low, the conversation comfortable and unhurried. A man doing surya namaskar on the grass beside the path, eyes shut, the Shivalik hills in the background doing what they always do: stand there and look permanent.
Sukhna Lake does not need to announce itself. It has been the city’s morning room for nearly seven decades, and it knows its job.
The lake was completed in 1958, part of the original Chandigarh master plan under Le Corbusier’s team. It sits at the base of the Shivalik foothills, a 3-kilometre-long reservoir that was created by damming the Sukhna Choe seasonal stream. What was designed as a flood-control feature became the city’s heart.
The Morning Shift
There are walkers who have been coming here since the 1970s. Families where the grandfather walked this path, then the father, and now the son. The promenade, paved and well-maintained, loops around the lake and gives you three kilometres of flat walking with a view that changes every season.
In November, the migratory birds arrive. Cormorants, pochards, bar-headed geese. The birdwatching community shows up with binoculars and telephoto lenses, standing at the bund in the early morning light, speaking in whispers so as not to disturb the guests. By January the lake surface is sometimes covered in birds. Old-timers say the count has been declining over the years, which concerns everyone who knows what that means.
In summer the lake shimmers in the heat and the paddle boats do their slow circles in the afternoon. Families queue for the boating club on weekends. Children who have never paddled before try to go straight and mostly do not manage it. The chai stall near the main entrance does steady business from sunrise to late evening. The samosas are reliable. The view from the plastic chairs is, by any measure, unreasonable.
What Thirty Years Shows You
Sam Sharma has been walking this promenade since 1994. What has changed? The crowds, certainly. The weekends are much more crowded now, especially since Mohali and Panchkula grew. The no-plastic rules, introduced over the years, have helped. The lake looks cleaner than it did in the late 1990s when awareness was still catching up.
What has not changed: the quality of the morning. The way the mist sits on the water in winter. The sound of the geese. The feeling that the city, for all its growth and noise, still knows to come here and be quiet for an hour.
Main aur meri wife, hum dono 1987 se aa rahe hain. Jab tak paon chalte hain, yahaan aate rahenge. (My wife and I have been coming since 1987. As long as our legs work, we will keep coming here.)Harpreet Singh, 71, retired bank manager
The Boating Club and Beyond
The Chandigarh Boating Club operates from the lake’s edge. Rowing is taken seriously here. The club has produced national-level athletes over the years and the early morning water is often dotted with competitive rowers, their oars dipping in rhythm while the walkers on the promenade watch from above.
The Rock Garden is visible from the bund, just a short walk away. Many visitors combine both in a single morning. There is also a small rose garden near the entrance, and a deer park adjacent to the lake area that draws families with children on weekends.
The lake also hosts an annual marathon that draws participants from across the Tricity. Thousands of runners descend on the promenade at dawn, and for a few hours the usual mix of walkers and yoga enthusiasts gives way to something louder and more competitive. Then the race ends and the lake quietly goes back to what it does best.
The Debates That Never End
Sukhna Lake is not without its controversies. Construction in the catchment area has been a long-running concern, with courts and activists both raising alarms about siltation over the decades. The Punjab and Haryana High Court has intervened on multiple occasions to protect the lake’s catchment zone.
The authorities have periodically attempted desilting. Whether it is enough, and whether the political will to protect the catchment properly exists, is a conversation that Chandigarh has been having since at least the 1990s.
The Sukhna Wildlife Sanctuary, notified in 1988, covers the catchment area and provides at least some formal protection to the hills behind the lake. But enforcement has always been patchy, and the pressure from real estate development in the surrounding areas does not ease. Every few years a new controversy erupts, a court order is issued, and the debate continues.
What the lake asks of the city is simple: keep the hills behind it clean, keep the stream that feeds it unobstructed, and keep the construction away. What it offers in return is not a small thing: a morning that begins in stillness, with birds overhead and fog on the water, in a city that keeps getting noisier everywhere else.
That is not a bad deal. Chandigarh has always known it. It keeps showing up, every morning, before the day begins.
Sukhna Lake | Symbolic picture | Photo: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA) | For representation