Creator · Biaora, Madhya Pradesh
Surendra Singh Choudhry posts under a handle that means devastation, and has spent every month since Republic Day pulling a river back out of the garbage by hand
Surendra Singh Choudhry
Posts as destruction, spends his days repairing
The Ajnar runs through Biaora, a town in Rajgarh district in Madhya Pradesh, and for years the honest description of it was not a river. Plastic sheeting, bottles, bags, household waste, banked up in the water and across the ghats until families stopped going down there at all. Everybody could see it. Everybody had opinions about whose job it was.
On 26 January 2026, which is Republic Day, a twenty-year-old college student went down with gloves and started lifting it out. His name is Surendra Singh Choudhry. Online he goes by Bittu Tabahi, which is worth sitting with for a second, because tabahi means devastation. He picked a handle that means wreckage and then spent nine months undoing some.
Three months a ghat
The number that should stop you is not the follower count. It is three months. That is roughly what a single ghat took him, working it over and over, and there is more than one ghat. This is not a weekend of good intentions with a photographer present. It is the least glamorous labour available, repeated across most of a year, in water that gave him infections for his trouble.
He paid for it himself. Around thirty thousand rupees on gloves and tools and whatever else the work needed, out of a college student's pocket, with nobody reimbursing him. There was no NGO behind this, no municipal contract, no brand. The commonest reaction in his comments is people asking why a twenty-year-old had to be the one, which is a fair question aimed in the right direction, and it is not really his problem to answer. He just went.
The reels are not the shortcut, they are the point
The line that keeps getting repeated under his posts is sirf videos nahi banaye, kaam bhi kiya. He did not only make videos, he did the work too. It arrives as a defence, as though filming were something he had to be forgiven for, and the truth is better than that. The filming is the second half of the job.
A hundred people have quietly cleaned a stretch of river and nobody heard. What he built is the before-and-after as a format: the same frame, the same kid, the same green gloves, one shot with the bank buried and one with a river in it. It is impossible to argue with and impossible to scroll past. That is why one of them has 4.9 million views, why Anand Mahindra was posting about him by March, and why 614,000 people now follow a Rajgarh college student around a riverbank.
Turning municipal neglect into something the whole country looks at is its own skill, and he taught it to himself alongside the shovel work.
What it actually changed
The best measurement here is not a metric at all. Families avoided those ghats. Now children play on them. A river that everybody had written off as a dump is water again in the stretches he has finished, and the people who live nearby got it back.
He is twenty. He has done this for most of a year, on his own money, while enrolled in college, and the proof is a place you could walk to. If you only put one person on a list of people worth watching this year, it is difficult to make the case for anybody else.
Sirf videos nahi banaye, kaam bhi kiya.
The comment under his post that stuck. He did not just make videos, he did the work.
The Rundown
The things Surendra has actually shipped.
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The Ajnar cleanup
Nine months, three-plus months per ghat, by hand. A river in Biaora that families had given up on and now use again.
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The before-and-afters
Same frame, same gloves, buried bank then open water. The most unarguable format on the Indian internet right now.
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Thirty thousand rupees
His own money, on gloves and tools, as a college student. Nobody sent him and nobody paid him.
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614,000 followers
Built from a riverbank in Rajgarh district, with reels past 4.9 million views and Anand Mahindra amplifying by March.
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The handle
Bittu Tabahi. Tabahi means devastation. He has spent the year running it in reverse.
Common questions about Surendra Singh Choudhry
- Who is Surendra Singh Choudhry?
- Surendra Singh Choudhry, known online as Bittu Tabahi, is a twenty-year-old college student from Biaora in Rajgarh district, Madhya Pradesh, who has been cleaning the polluted Ajnar River by hand since 26 January 2026 and posting before-and-after videos of the work. He does it independently, funded with his own money, and has more than 614,000 followers on Instagram.
- What is the Ajnar River cleanup?
- The Ajnar River runs through Biaora in Madhya Pradesh and had become heavily choked with plastic and household waste. Since Republic Day 2026, Surendra Singh Choudhry has been removing that waste by hand, ghat by ghat, with a single ghat taking more than three months of work. Stretches families used to avoid are now used again.
- Is he part of a government or NGO programme?
- No. The cleanup is entirely his own initiative. It is not a government drive, an NGO programme or a sponsored campaign, and he has spent around thirty thousand rupees of his own money on gloves, tools and supplies.
- Why is he called Bittu Tabahi?
- Bittu Tabahi is the handle he posts under on Instagram. Tabahi means devastation in Hindi, which sits in pointed contrast to the work itself: nine months of repairing a river that had been written off.
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