Abstract
This chapter provides a historical account of the evolution of Kolkata’s sewage-fed fisheries—the East Kolkata Wetlands (EKW)—as an outcome of the internal drainage design and the Kulti Outfall Scheme implemented by the Calcutta Corporation. It complicates the wetlands story by critically interrogating the existing binaries: “state” versus EKW, “municipal” versus “local,” “urban” versus “rural,” and “managerial” versus “environmentalist.” Using ethnography (including key informant interviews with irrigation officers, corporation officials, pump operators, lock-gate operators, project in-charges of government bheris, secretaries of cooperative bheris, leaseholders and managers of private bheris, and fishers and farmers) complemented with archival research (including consultation of drainage committee reports by the Irrigation and Waterways Department, records maintained at municipal pum** stations, minutes of meetings between government departments and wetland inhabitants, and also local documents and participatory maps), it establishes that low-cost waste management and recycling practices conducted by locals (leaseholders, fishers, and farmers) in the EKW are strongly associated with the history of municipal initiatives, encouragements, and interests so as to harness the best possible solutions for parallel management of urban sewage, generation of local livelihoods, and establishment of a revenue regime. The chapter ends with three case studies of three different types of bheris—government, cooperative, and private—to demonstrate that the EKW is a complex and heterogeneous space with each bheri marked by its own specificities in terms of geographical location, administrative status, size, ownership patterns, etc. These in turn shape its specific sets of challenges and potentials that await rigorous exploration towards conscious and comprehensive planning, policy formulation, and actions.
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Notes
- 1.
I had the opportunity to work closely with Dr. Dhrubajyoti Ghosh as his research assistant between 2008 and 2009. Our exchanges and debates on the EKW continued till 2018. I have learnt the fundamental principles of functioning of the EKW from him. He was my teacher and mentor.
- 2.
“The fishermen of the wetlands are the forerunners of a contemporary worldview of waste as resource pursued by leaders and thinkers of the modern-day environment movement” (Dhrubajyoti Ghosh, quoted in Anand 2008, p. 18).
- 3.
In his 2014 book, Ghosh elaborated on the concept of “cognitive apartheid.” He argued that while the local wetland dwellers have been managing the ecosystem using their cognitive abilities and innovative instincts, mainstream science suffers from “cognitive apartheid,” i.e., “the glaring inability to respect the ‘outsiders’ (farmers, fishers, forest dwellers, for example) even to locate any benchmark of ideas in the high and mighty platforms of licensed knowledge” (Ghosh 2014, p. 25).
- 4.
I am aware that from the chapter titles “Tamed Interventions” (Chap. 3) and “Untamed Practices” (Chap. 4), it might appear that the study continues to evoke the binary or bifurcation of “tamed” and “untamed.” However, the contents of the chapters elaborate the intertwining of tamed–untamed in the course of the long history of coevolution, coproduction, and co-management of the urban environmental trajectory across complex interconnections among city, nature, and technology. The idea of “untamed practices” is used here to elaborate on the successful, low-cost waste management and recycling practices implemented and conducted by locals (leaseholders, fishers, and farmers) in the sewage-fed wetlands, practices also associated with the history of municipal initiatives and incentives to harness the best solutions for parallel management of urban sewage, generation of local livelihoods, and the establishment of a revenue regime.
- 5.
Ghat is a Bengali word which means the bank of a river, canal, or pond.
- 6.
Proceedings of National Institute of Science (1944), 10(4), 441–467.
- 7.
The history of the lease followed a sequence of events where legal cases were fought between the Corporation and the families of leaseholders. In the late 1980s, the Corporation became the exclusive title-holder of the Dhapa Square Mile Area after paying a compensation of 1,200,000 rupees to the leaseholding Sen family. For a detailed history of land lease in Dhapa, see H. Chattopadhyay (1990, Chap. 3: “The Dhapa Square Mile”).
- 8.
Water Works, Drainage, etc. Previous History and Enquiry Committee Report, etc. 628 COR. Superintendent’s Copy, Calcutta Corporation, cited in Chattopadhyay (1990).
- 9.
“Untamed practices” refers to the application of this “low-cost folk technology” by the locals. However, this conceptualization does not romanticize these practices or weave an illusory worldview surrounding them that opposes them to a statist worldview. Rather, the term addresses complex state–wetlands, municipal–local intersections in the making, unmaking, and remaking of Kolkata’s environment.
- 10.
Banerjee (2012, p. 101) ridicules the nomenclature of the wetlands: “The government’s choice of nomenclature for these wetlands—East Kolkata Wetlands—conveniently ties up with the ‘peri-urbanity’ officially ascribed to them; as if the wetlands derive their fundamental identity from being ‘peripheral’ to Kolkata!”.
- 11.
By “contemporary” I mean the present; the present not cut off from but connected to the past, carrying the legacy and residues of the past, but also prominently projecting what and how it is now.
Banerjee (2012) points out that categorizing these wetlands as Kolkata’s peri-urban fringe is loaded with the exclusionary politics of not acknowledging the vast expanse of eastern marshes and restricting them to the waste recycling region (WRR) of the Ramsar-designated EKW. Though Banerjee also argues that the connotation “peri-urban” itself is a debatable category, and “definitions of ‘peri-urban interface’ are thin and inconsistent” (2012, p. 101), yet it is a strong categorization capturing the contemporary urban sprawl in the global South (Allen 2009; Marshall et al. 2009). The bheris (and this is especially applicable to bheris and not so much to other land use patterns and practices within the EKW) underwent administrative (jurisdictional) transformation from being governed by the panchayat (i.e., the lowest village unit of administration) to the municipal corporation (specifically the Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation [BMC]) during recent times.
- 12.
With the partition of India in 1947, the distribution of districts and states followed the principle of a contiguous Hindu majority for India and Muslim majority for Pakistan; districts within the eastern part of Bengal became part of the newly formed country of Pakistan. The eastern districts of Bengal constituted Bangladesh when Bangladesh was formed out of Pakistan in 1971, the (Bengali) language (and not religion) being the determining variable.
- 13.
In 1803, urban drainage was directed to the Hooghly River. But it was a decisional misfire on the part of the colonial masters as the natural elevation of Kolkata is 26 m (approx.) to the east and only 6–7 m to the west, i.e., along the levee of the Hooghly. Thus, right at the initial stage, the scheme was annulled and replaced by a viable drainage scheme that followed the natural slope of the land towards the south-east through the Bidyadhari and the Matla Rivers (Chap. 3).
- 14.
Though Sewell pointed out the overall dwindling of salinity following the decay of the Bidyadhari, it is to be noted that he also specified that the highest salinity occurred during April and May before the onset of monsoons and the lowest salinity occurred during the monsoons or at the end of monsoons when the rains diluted the water. Table 4.1 captures these details.
- 15.
Summary of the Report of Dr S.L. Hora, DoF, GoWB on Fishery Development-cum-Mosquito Control Scheme for the Reclamation of the Salt Lakes, Calcutta, Appendix VII (I&WD 1947).
- 16.
The city has no sewage treatment plants within municipal boundaries. There are three small plants located outside the municipal limits at Bangur, Garden Reach, and Bagha Jatin and these too have very little capacity: 45 million liters per day (MLD), 48 MLD, and 2 MLD, respectively.
- 17.
There is difference of opinion regarding this figure, which varies between 600 and 810 MLD, as reflected in scientific literature on the EKW.
- 18.
The Ramsar Convention is an intergovernmental treaty that provides the framework for national action and international cooperation for the conservation and wise use of wetlands and their resources.
- 19.
This epithet for the wetlands was given by Ashok Mitra, a Marxist economist who was the finance minister of West Bengal between 1977 and 1987. This came up in an exchange with Asish Ghosh, former director of the Zoological Survey of India, who was deeply involved in environmental activism to save the wetlands against conversions. Furedy and Ghosh (1984) and Furedy (1985) have cited the article published by Mitra (1984) in the Statesman, where he used the term “Calcutta’s backyard” while discussing “health and wealth from garbage.”.
- 20.
In the study conducted by Ghosh and Das Gupta (2015), it has been estimated that only 200 bheris exist today.
- 21.
Mouza refers to administrative units, corresponding to a specific land area within which there may be one or more village settlements.
This land use has encountered significant changes during the post-Ramsar period with areas within the Ramsar-declared protected site facing rampant conversion (see Chap. 6). Though the DoF, West Bengal, and PAN Network have recently prepared the present land use map by applying GIS techniques, their accuracies are yet to be verified across technical and cartographic ethnography parameters; these are not yet available for public dissemination.
- 22.
Key informant interviews were conducted with private bheri owners, project in-charges of government bheris, cooperative members, and fishers in two sets between July and August 2016 and September and April 2019.
- 23.
It should be noted here that in the late 1960s, there was a large-scale conversion of sewage-fed fisheries when about 2500 ha (approx.) were drained and converted into paddy lands, “essentially as a consequence of the unsettled land questions and the anarchy of holding pattern in this region” (Premtosh Ghosh, unpublished records, 1987, cited in Ghosh and Sen 1987, p. 223). This was followed by the land reforms movement in the 1970s and the subsequent cooperativization of bheris and acquisition of bheris by the state in the 1990s.
- 24.
In Ghosh and Sen (1987, p. 4), Ghosh drew attention to the fact that “disposal of solid waste has also resulted in the reclamation of wetlands. Unlike urban conversion, however, wetlands that have lost to garbage fill are not always of a permanent nature, this landfill having produced an economically viable natural biological system to recycle waste which is inseparably linked with the water-bodies of the area.”
- 25.
Interviews conducted between July and September 2016.
- 26.
For a detailed list of bheris based on ownership types, please refer to Ghosh and Das Gupta (2015).
- 27.
Though technically and ideally only the DWF channel is expected to receive wastewater, yet wastewater is also pumped to the SWF, creating tensions between the municipal agencies and fishers.
- 28.
The issue of subinfeudation and its impact on fish production came out in an interview conducted in December 2018 with the leaseholder of Munshir Bheri located in the Dhapa Manpur mouza. The interviewee emphasized the increasing costs of production or capital investment with parcelization of bheris, making the fish production business more competitive and less profitable for bheris that are small in size and located in remote areas, away from the main canal.
- 29.
SFDC website, http://wbsfdc.com/fishery-projects/ (accessed March 26, 2019).
- 30.
The mouzas in the “high” group experience all three types of changes and those in the “low” group experience change on only one count. The “moderate” group lies in between. The changes are mostly concentrated in the western and the south-western parts that share a common border with the city of Kolkata.
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Mukherjee, J. (2020). Untamed Practices. In: Blue Infrastructures. Exploring Urban Change in South Asia. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3951-0_4
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