An earlier e-mail with an attachment from an American friend popped up suddenly. His water and sewerage bill would cost him $900 a year after a discount from January 2024, up from about $676 just six months ago, a neat Rs 20,000 jump in Indian terms. He would have to pay about Rs 75,000, up from around Rs 55,000. I rubbed my eyes in disbelief.

Twenty thousand? Cut to Kolkata. An average Kolkata citizen’s tax paid for sewerage and water supply would never be anything like this; not at least in the next half a century, considering our urban body’s inability to ever imagine taxing its citizens for the municipal services they receive. What has happened is just the reverse of the normal practice in other standard cities. Here, our urban local body is perennially cash-strapped and in debt, while citizens abuse the municipal services ~ the precious water and sewerage systems ~ though never paying for them.

This brazenness has reached its absolute nadir. Education has made no difference to ordinary citizens’ civic sense and never encourages them to think that the abuse of a city’s sewer systems leads to flooding and pollution of the existing water bodies and ultimately leads to their own damage. It is a sad irony that Kolkata’s citizens speak about the environment and climate change while being complicit in damaging the city’s living heritage.

There are no prizes for guessing what one is talking about here: the citizens’ apathy towards wetlands or active connivance in its misuse, although the wetlands subsidise their existence and the city’s 10.6 million populace (residents and floating) have their sewage treated through the best and largest natural biological sewage treatment system in the world, the East Kolkata Wetlands (EKW). An ecosystem comprising a 12,500-hectare ensemble of waste stabilisation ponds, vegetables, floriculture and paddy fields, the EKW treats the city’s largely domestic sewage through an elaborate nutrient recovery process.

These wetlands have an engineering design for sewage distribution that competes with the best sewage treatment systems in the world. This year, the theme of World Wetlands Day focuses on Wetlands and Human Wellbeing. Fit this in the context of the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration (2018-2028) and already half a decade is over with no lasting institutional conservation measures in place.

Add to that the paltry understanding of wetlands in the context of Kolkata and what emerges is a massive knowledge gap. Calcutta (as Kolkata was then known), was the first city in the world to begin the celebration of Wetlands Day in 1990, seven years before the World Wetlands Day began to be celebrated. On 5 June 1990, pioneer ecologist Dhrubajyoti Ghosh was honoured with the UN Global 500 Roll of Honour for doing fundamental work in conserving the East Calcutta Wetlands.

He approached the then Chief Minister with the proposal of celebrating this honour as recognition of the state and the people of West Bengal. Ghosh asked for Wetlands Day to be celebrated at the beginning of the Bengali month of Asarh, which signified the onset of the monsoons. Thus, June 16 began to be celebrated as Wetlands Day, under the aegis of the Department of Fisheries. It was celebrated for a long time but faded over time and has been discontinued for the last two years.

The fading away does not stop here. What is also obliterated from institutional memory and adds to public ignorance is that these waste stabilisation pond (WSP) systems were handsomely replicated. Such treatment systems came to be created through engineering design in Panihati, Titagarh (panchayat area), Kona and North Bally; all within the Kolkata Metropolitan Area. All of these happened in 1995-96, after the East Calcutta Wetlands got recognition as a biological sewage treatment option under the Ganga Action Plan.

For the uninitiated, that plan was the largest river-cleaning programme launched in Asia in 1986. Ghosh who was the Executive Engineer in CMW&SA (Calcutta Metropolitan Water and Sanitation Authority) did his best to institutionalise the WSPs in the Metropolitan Area and the arrangement worked successfully. In 1997, the late Professor Duncan Mara, a UN expert and founder of the Duncan Mara School of Civil Engineering, University of Leeds, visited Kolkata.

He was preparing a design manual for Waste Stabilisation Ponds in India under a bilateral agreement programme with the UK government. He was full of praise for the favour that WSPs found in West Bengal. Regrettably, soon after, Ghosh got transferred out of CMW&SA to the Environment Department and the WSPs slowly died an unmarked death. In the urban wastewater treatment scenarios in India today, the least preference out of all technological options available is allotted for Waste Stabilisation Ponds.

Ironically, the WSPs are the least-cost sewage treatment option except for the land component. What goes relatively unnoticed is that with good engineering design, the land component can be reasonably minimised and the system made more efficient. Of course, the East Kolkata Wetlands (EKW) are alive and functioning and a testimony to what can happen when, as Ghosh pointed out, people “live creatively with nature”.

The biggest financial debt that citizens owe in unpaid municipal taxes is too huge to even imagine. The 1,30,000-strong wetland community that stays within the wetlands and conserves them is fighting a grim battle for survival. The absence of institutional support and a weak legal regime, making vacuous assumptions about compensatory wetlands that are not relevant in the EKW (as wastewater wetlands cannot be compensated), poor healthcare of the canals and fish ponds and the onslaught of climate change, testify to an unmitigated present and bleak future.

The icing on the cake is that realtors in the garb of ‘entrepreneurship’ regularly flood the State Wetland Authority (SWA) with proposals to “develop” the wetlands. On the occasion of World Wetlands Day, February 2, it is time that the citizens of Kolkata pledged to take up the cause of the unglamorous, unsung but essential task of protecting the wetland community to ensure their own survival.

(The writer is Project Fellow, Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology, Shibpur)