A Wetlands Requiem?

What emerges is the willingness to look at the wetlands as a piece of readily available real estate rather than a complex but crucial ecosystem whose ecological patterns are perfect to contribute to a city's longevity and better protect it from climate hazards, along with possibilities for profitable replication in multiple instances. If one is willing to walk the talk around innovation and pragmatism, there are creative methods of empowering the community without damaging the wetlands themselves

The year 2022 marked the completion of two decades of Ramsar recognition of the East Kolkata Wetlands. Apart from a small function on the actual day August 19), a full-scale conference was organised by civil society organisations and a state university with much fervour, titled Connecting Wetland Narratives to Action Plan: A Stakeholders’ Dialogue.

The conference discussed threadbare many of the challenges that these wetlands face sewage paucity, lack of solid waste management, data paucity and outdated databases leading to management challenges, acute shortage of finances, lack of focus on institutional coordination to ascertain tenurial issues, little emphasis on productivity enhancement, gender imbalances, lack of entrepreneurship incentives and overall, the looming threat of urbanisation that puts a question mark on the very survival of the wetlands.

The takeaway at the end of the conference was that in order to survive, the wetlands need multi-sectoral institutional planning and commensurate finances, along with a recognition of the entitlements of those engaged in a sewage-based livelihood.

Indeed, the East Kolkata Wetlands are special because they are treatment wetlands that engage in food production to comprehensively treat the city sewage that they receive before depositing it to the receiving river at the Kulti-Bidyadhari estuary. They are the city’s natural biological sewage treatment plant that have unfailingly performed by extracting the nutrients from municipal sewage and disintegrating the pathogenic bacteria that have caused so much pollution in the Ganga.

The wetland ecology links a community of people whose livelihood engagements ensure that they act as the custodians of these wetlands. Their existence is fundamental to these wetlands’ survival. This is especially relevant in light of the fact that even today, only 20 per cent of municipal sewage is treated all over the world.