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many of the challenges that these wetlands face ~ sewage paucity, lack of solid waste management, data paucity and outdated databases leading to management challenges, acute shortage of finances, lack of focus on institutional coordination to ascertain tenurial issues, little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.

The day after the conference was over, we were jolted to hear that the National Green Tribunal had imposed a penalty of Rs 3,500 crore on the government of West Bengal for failing to treat sewage and manage solid waste as it was their duty to do. Of this, Rs 3000 crore was to be used to treat sewage, while Rs 500 crore was to be spent on solid waste management.

These sums had to be utilised for the entire state. The episode brought home even more clearly the prime attention that had to be paid to sewage treatment. Though the East Kolkata Wetlands’ sewage treatment function is known and acknowledged the world over, its effectiveness in sewage treatment and potential for replicability has hardly been understood in our country despite the success of this model.

Dhrubajyoti Ghosh, the pioneering ecologist who rediscovered these wetlands and took their story to the world, replicated this model and met with a measure of success in the three places where he tried to do so. After he left his administrative duties, these successful models were neglected and left to languish.

No one ever showed any interest in examining the costeffectiveness of this form of sewage treatment and its relevance for municipalities which are cash-strapped and unable to sustain the high costs involved in running a sewage treatment plant. It will be of prime importance to re-examine the option of replicating the East Kolkata Wetlands model.

It became clear at the conference that while officialdom was doing its administrative duties, it was not used to meeting so many community stakeholders face to face. To give the officials their due, they were happy to be given an opportunity to interact and understand what the community was trying to communicate.

Herein comes an important learning ~ treatment wetlands cannot function without custodians and that facilitating their well-being is equally the duty of civil society, especially in the current urbanising environment.

The report of working group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change mentions that, by 2030, 64 per cent of Asia will have urbanised. It is an established fact that wetlands are crucial for city sustainability and to ward off climate hazards. They become irreplaceable when they also serve a sanitation and pollution control function, linking sanitation to livelihood and poverty alleviation.

As Dhrubajyoti Ghosh would say, ‘Give me poverty and sunshine, and I will give you food, sanitation and employment, free of cost’. About 130,000 people are dependent on their livelihood directly and indirectly on the East Kolkata Wetlands, by conservative estimates.

Cut to the beginning of 2023 with another stakeholders’ meeting held with much fanfare, organised by the government itself. A slew of issues came up, with abundant discussions on encroachment by outsiders while the original inhabitants are unable to accommodate their own expanding families.

Heads of rural local bodies also played to the gallery by dramatising these complaints and laying the blame squarely on the shoulders of law-and-order enforcers, whose representatives kept silent. This brought up the idea with which the government has been toying for quite some time, namely, modifying the existing provisions in the law to accommodate more housing provisions within the wetlands. One does not have to look very far to understand the windfall to be reaped by real estate.

Unsurprisingly, 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 custodians of the wetlands must be better served and promoting their welfare becomes impossible given a thrust on urbanisation and destruction of the production space.

It is just as important for civil society to remember that the wetlands provide a comparatively inexpensive food production that brings down the cost of city living. They also ensure the livelihood security of the wetland population. That is why Kolkata is an ‘ecologically subsidised city’ and cannot be allowed to squander this subsidy.

Clarity is the need of the hour. It is important that a pledge be taken for clarity of vision and honesty of purpose ‘unto ourselves’. The East Kolkata Wetlands need protection and replication, where the community can stay on as a part of this ecosystem without compromising its livelihood. That will retain the ecological character of the wetlands, cater to the dietary needs of the city population and ensure the longevity of the ecosystem. These ecological functions must be replicated or else West Bengal will be forced to spend many more thousands of crores to keep its waters clean 

(The writer is Project Fellow, Department of Civil Engineering, IIEST Shibpur )