Urban wetlands, the lifeline of Indias cities for centuries, protected by tradition and preserved by people, are being ravaged by sheer greed and neglect
WHAT do the Consumer Action Group, Madras, the Citizens
Against Pollution, Hyderabad, the Nagarik Marich and
Mudiyali Fisherfolks Cooperative Society, Calcutta, and the
Citizens Voluntary Initiative for the City, Bangalore, have in
common? They are all struggling against the mindless destruction of the urban wetlands in their respective cities. And these
are just some examples of such struggles all over the country.
Today, it is a civil war of sorts. The country is divided into 2
distinct belligerent forces. It is the war of the wetlands.
At the heart of the war is the cultural divide over the attitude towards our natural resources. Under lingering colonial
hangover, officialdom is pursuing a shameless aping of
Western methods of what it terms 'development'. But more
and more individuals are today inclined to reach back to the
native wisdom of our ancients, who had constructed and cared
for these waterbodies religiously, culturally and socially. And
though minor battles are being won by the people here and
there, the scenario remains grim. Tradition is still fighting a
losing battle.
Cities which did not have a perennial river-source. Pod
ularly, had to have a tank in every possible catchment an
Elaborate systems evolved as new tanks were built in low
areas to catch the overflow of those above. Every drop was
cious.
Tank building was considered a noble deed by the nali
and by the rich and wealthy. The city of Hyderabad, for e"
ple, owes its many lakes to the foresight of its two sol,
dynasties, the Qutub Shahi (1564-1724 AD) and the Asaf
rulers (1724-1948 AD).
South India is particularly rich in tanks, with the CINA
Hoysalas and Vijaynagar kings paying great attention to irni
tion. While the Cholas confined themselves to a large extent
what is presently the state of Tamil Nadu, the Hoys" bL
close to 204 tanks in Karnataka during their rule between
I Ith and 14th centuries.
Writing about the tanks in Karnataka in 1986, a Brig
engineer noted that the tanks, constructed by the "rajahs
wealthy natives," were "magnificent works, on a gigan
scale .... got up regardless of expenses, as their originators h
for object the attainment of religious merit by the execution
such works, quite as much as the acquisition of grain by
profits of improved cultivation."
Little wonder then, that by 1881, the then state
Karnataka had one tank for every 15 square-infles. By theit
had become difficult to locate a suitable low-lying site to
more tanks. "Any new work ... would almost certainly be found
cut-off supply of another lower down and interfere with interests," wrote one Raj commentator. The beneficiaries
s aho paid for the maintenance of the tanks and often
wed panchayats (local governing bodies) to lay down rules
7 the use of water, and its equitable distribution.
in Karnataka, festivals were organised around tanks, during
g which farmers would desilt the tanks and
an them to maintain their original capacity.
mubekhar Reddy records that in the begin-
eg of the 19th century, 7,897,500 hectares of How
d in India was irrigated by tanks built indige- cannot
ady. "This system of water harvesting made
! vilages totally self-reliant," says K L Vyas, V401 the
aw or of the "Save the Lakes Campaign", ar4, he
ruched by Hyderabad's Society for the
pervation of Environment and Quality of Life
(SPEQL).
In the more humid regions, like Calcutta,
iands were part of the city system for long. from
we was human action behind their formation
k. though, unlike the tanks of south India, they were not
irely humanmade. The East Calcutta Wetlands were
ned gradually over 400 years, due partly to the natural
cm of siltation of the distributaries of the Ganga, and partly
ue to the growth of the city and its consequential sewage needs.
The Calcutta wetlands are in many ways unique. The main
inage fi)r the city has been the Hooghly river, a distributary
he Ganga, situated west of the city. However, the topographical incline of the city is eastwards.
The British colonisers always held the marshy lands cast of
their new township suspect. Tbese were marked off as the Salt
Lakes, as the water was permanently stagnant and salty. The
area had been partially colonised by peasants who were once
landless. Over the years, these peasants not only Icarnt to live
with this hostile environment, they even developed considerable skills in resource recovery. They learnt that
nature had its own ways of purifying waste
water, even sewage. They knew, without being
wdy able to articulate it in so many words, that the
epj*M wetlands are essentially solar reactors, where,
through a complex process of algal photosynthesis and plankton activity, fresh oxygen is released
e, Me into water, making it fit for fish cultivation and
agriculture, and help in many other ways.
Eventually, when the British fed this area
aw with sewage, and even later on, when Dhapa
became the dumping ground for the city's solid
waste, the salt-water fisheries metamorphosed
into sewage-fed ones. The fisherfolk easily
adopted themselves to the new system.
"The fisherfolk did not look upon sewage as waste, but as
a resource," says Dhrubajyoti Ghosh of the Calcutta
Metropolitan Water and Sanitation Authority. It was only
after 1980 that this system came to be studied officially by the
state government authorities, and the complete implications
of the wetlands as an ecosystem came to be realised.
The Calcutta wetlands also serve as a flood cushion for a
city which receives an annual rainfall of 1,500 mm. As and
when these are came under the assault of brutal and mindless reclamation,
starting in real earnes-t
with the development of Salt Lake
City (now Bidhan
Nagar), a satellite township,
which started coming
up in the late '60s, the
incidence of monsoon flooding in Calcutta proper started.
The problem has
been growing over the years. This
only helps emphasise the importance of urban
India's traditional
waterbodies.
Tanks, however, did not entirely
suit the British system of governance. "Their
objective was resource
extraction. As land revenue from
each village was
assured through a well developed
ryotwari and N
zamindari system, they knew that
the construction
of tanks would not enhance
revenue,. says
Somashekhar Reddy. Maintenance,
by extension,
would mean useless drainage of
the exchequer.
So, instead of the
community-managed indigenous water systems, like tanks
and wells, which deteriorated
after they stopped receiving
state patronage, the emphasis
shifted to diverting and pumping
river water through projects
like the Punjab and Deccan
Canals. And India's present obsession with dams and other
largescale water projects took
root.
Little has changed after
Independence, with minimal
funds being allotted to minor
irrigation projects in the Five
Year Plans, and modern dams being
anointed as the "temples
of modern India" by the first
Prime Minister, Pandit
Jawaharlal Nehru.
As existing systems fail to
provide the metros with suffi-cient water for their burgeoning
populations today, ambitious
projects are being drawn up to
pump water over large distances at enormous costs. "The
dependance of man, business
and industry on municipal water
is total, and no alternatives
are developed until a crisis
develops," says D K Subramanian
of the Indian Institute of
Science, Bangalore.
Over the years, the tanks and
wetlands have not only been
neglected, they have been
systematically encroached upon, or
have irreverently been made the
receptacles of city muck. Independence governments have
meticulously followed
the footsteps of their former
colonial masters and found
the urban waterbodies to be the
best places for siting
their ambitious 'developmental'
projects, especially,
town expansion projects.
The fallouts have been many: in
Madras, it has ereated a severe water crisis, and
monsoon flooding to
boot. It is ironic that a city
which enjoys the boon of
such massive rainfall has to look
up to drawing in water
from a distant river at
prohibitive costs to quench the
thirst of its denizenry. Industry,
especially the textile
sector, once saw in Indore a
blue-eyed boy, but in just
under two decades, it is flying
from there to more fluid
climes. And Bangalore and
Hyderabad are reeling under
water crisis year after year.
No wonder then that citizens
countrywide are
becoming increasingly impatient
with this development
model being pushed by the
powers-that-be. That is the
war over two visions. As
Dhrubajyoti Ghosh says, it
brings in more money to go for the
western models.
Pumped water brought from far off
places are more
"in"; maintaining old tanks and
systems of yore are not
just passC they are branded as
ridiculously hanging on
to moribund systems. But as the
instance of Delhi's
Hauz Khas shows, the developers
who speak thus, along
with the fashionable armchair
environmentalists who
overtly or covertly support the
merits of this model of
growth, are not even aware how we
are marching into a
noxious future.
The lesson is clear: it is futile
to indulge in
high-sounding, jargonised
rhetorics, unless urbanites
learn to live in harmony with
nature in their own habitat. And if environmentalism
begins and ends with
merely protecting endangered flora
and fauna, urban
lifestyle itself will become
endangered. Our cities cannot
survive on the corpses of their
wetlands.
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