The world is stressing on the need to adopt a sustainable way of life and yet the political and economic decisions are steering the society away from the coveted goal of sustainability. Take for instance wetland ecosystems – they provide us food, purify and regenerate our water supplies and store carbon, and are our best bet in many ways to adapt to climate change. We have all heard about Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – the blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future by addressing issues such as poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace, and justice. Most importantly, science says that wetlands are integral to achieving the SDGs.
The Dankuni wetland complex is one of the largest remaining contiguous wetland habitats in Bengal. Photo Credit: Dhritiman Mukherjee
And yet, ironically, wetlands happen to be the most rapidly disappearing ecosystems on the planet. We have lost 87 percent of the world’s wetlands since the 1700s and the loss is predicted to occur at a much higher rate in the developing economies due to urbanisation. The common perception is that continuous infrastructural and industrial development is needed as it benefits people, but this has been highly contested in academia as well as by social justice practitioners and recently also by conservationists.
It is in the latter category that I belong. While working on the highly threatened fishing cat in the wetlands of the Lower Gangetic Floodplains of West Bengal, I happened to also work in the Dankuni wetlands. The Dankuni wetland complex is one of the largest remaining contiguous wetland habitats in Bengal and one of the last strongholds of the fishing cat, which also happens to be the state animal of West Bengal. Since 2010, I have seen a steady reclamation of the wetlands due to industrial encroachment and the murder of a prominent wetland activist.
This made me ask who is all this development really benefitting? More specifically, how do local people perceive this rapid change? Hence, we recorded oral testimonies of local residents from which we could identify 18 ecosystem services of the wetlands which can be categorised as regulating, cultural and supporting services.
The wetlands were used for seasonal agriculture to cultivate paddy, onion, Lady’s finger, spinach, coriander, beans, cow pea, Indian pea. From among these crops, paddy was the most important source of livelihood. Apart from this, people fished in the wetlands, collected edible wild flowers, leafy vegetables, molluscs, fibre, water, mud (for building houses), bamboo, jute-stick, fuelwood and fodder for cattle. People also collect shola¸ a wetland plant that is becoming rare and is traditionally and culturally significant because the white fibre of this plant is used as decoration during Durga puja and also to embellish Bengali brides and grooms.
Photo credit: Partha Dey, The Fishing Cat Project
The regulating services included water purification and flood regulation. The cultural services included capacity to reflect and the availability of spaces for recreation. The ability of the wetlands to support fish nurseries and retain nutrients were categorised as supporting services.
Respondents perceived a steady degradation in the wetland’s quality in the last 20 years with the trend worsening rapidly in the last three to four years. We were told that factories intentionally blocked the canal that linked the wetland to the rivers. This meant that floodwaters stayed on in the wetland longer than normal. This delayed onion cultivation, which is the second most cultivated crop, because it needs saturated soil and also conducive temperature within which the cultivation must conclude. In years of excessive rainfall, the whole cycle of seasonal cultivation would be affected because waterlogging persisted beyond what was natural. Additionally, factories dumped untreated wastewater into the wetlands, making the water non-potable.
Moreover, land parcels of the local residents would be diverted without the owners’ knowledge on the one hand. On the other, their repeated requests to the panchayat to clean the riverine connections would not be heard. Some respondents feared that they would be “squashed like insects” if they protested. Some would be coerced to sell off their land to middlemen. The remaining chose to sell their lands off anyway because there was a steady decline in the functional quality of the wetland. People’s narratives of the situation had strong imprints of a deliberate attempt to degrade the wetlands to a point-of-no-return.
All this because Dankuni has still not been included in the state’s wetland inventory, a simple move which would have rendered it protection against industrial encroachment. Incidentally, an environmental litigation was filed by a Kolkata-based NGO, PUBLIC, and is now also being supported by HEAL, another NGO in Kolkata, to stop industries from usurping wetlands. The litigation has been ongoing for 12 years, which has kept the companies off, well mostly, because they do play the typical cat-and-mouse game by trying to evade surveillance and encroach upon the wetland. But technical committees with government representatives have gone to the extent of stating that it is not a wetland even though Dankuni satisfies all three criteria to qualify as a wetland – the presence of hydric or water retaining soil (as proven by scientists from Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata), hydrophytic vegetation or water loving vegetation and wetland fauna (including the fishing cat).
In our study, therefore, we have stressed on greater government accountability for wetland protection and the need to include local ecological knowledge to understand the status of wetlands, for which baseline data is non-existent. For such wetlands, implementing socio-ecological conservation frameworks for which provisions exist under the legal infrastructure should be used. One such provision remains heavily under-utilised, i.e., the provision to declare socio-ecological spaces that humans used for traditional purposes sustainably and which also provide resources to support various threatened species as Biodiversity Heritage Sites under the Indian Biological Diversity Act, 2020. Additionally, there is great promise to recognise such wetlands under Ramsar (‘wise use of wetlands’) and Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD).
WCT has supported The Fishing Cat Project and the aforementioned study titled ‘Impact of Wetland Development and Degradation on the Livelihoods of Wetland‐dependent Communities: a Case Study from the Lower Gangetic Floodplains’ led by the author.
About the author: Tiasa Adhya is the co-founder of The Fishing Cat Project, a partner to the Fishing Cat Conservation Alliance and a member of the IUCN Species Survival Commission. She is also a researcher with The University of Trans-Disciplinary Health Sciences and Technology.
Disclaimer: The author is associated with Wildlife Conservation Trust. The views and opinions expressed in the article are her own and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Wildlife Conservation Trust.
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