Why Communities Are Key To Saving UP’s Wetlands

Mishra, a block coordinator with Trust Community Livelihoods (TCL)--a non-profit based in Bahraich and Shrawasti--has been observing wetland encroachment and had worked with these communities for two years. He explained that it is the community that first notices disappearance of wetlands, and hence can call out encroachments.

Wetlands occur wherever water meets land. These could be mangroves, peatlands, marshes, rivers and lakes, deltas, floodplains and flooded forests, rice-fields, and even coral reefs. The 2011 National Wetland Atlas documented over 757,000 wetlands across India covering an area of 15.2 million hectares. Some of these, considered of international importance as designated under the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, are recognised as Ramsar sites--currently, 91 such sites have been identified, covering 1.5 million hectares.

Ramsar Convention calls wetlands indispensable for the ecosystem services they provide--from freshwater supply, food and building materials, and biodiversity, to flood control, groundwater recharge, and climate change mitigation. Yet studies show that wetland area and quality continue to decline in most regions of the world, including in India.

Talab Baghel, as IndiaSpend reported in the first of this three-part series, is the largest inland natural lake in Bahriach, Uttar Pradesh with an area of 1,383 hectares, according to the Wetlands of India Portal, with 567 hectares recorded as Category 6(1) in Bhulekh, the state’s land portal. The category signifies non-agricultural land covered with water. Yet much of this has been encroached upon for agricultural use.

“Only if the community is strengthened can they challenge this,” Mishra said. Otherwise, “revenue records will say one thing, and what exists on the ground will be something else entirely”.

But Heeralal (60), who owns a small patch of land in the vicinity of the wetland, is apprehensive. “We can’t put our life on the line for a complaint,” he said, indicating the power dynamics in the village.

Uttar Pradesh has 86 wetland mitras--“motivated volunteers from diverse stakeholder groups working together to protect wetlands, and actively engage in conservation initiatives to manage these natural resources”. In 2018, these volunteers were identified around Ramsar sites and protected areas like bird sanctuaries, but wetlands like Talab Baghel had no mitras in place.

Neeraj Kumar, secretary of the State Wetland Authority (SWA), confirms: “This list has been neither updated nor recorded ever since”, making community engagement in wetland protection invisible.

Sanjaya Singh, former principal chief conservator of forest and chief wildlife warden in Uttar Pradesh, cautions, “It (the number of mitras) is a meagre number for a state like Uttar Pradesh and must be intensified.” The approach, he feels, should be to build on what was already done, engage communities, and push for cross-district and cross-state learning.

Ritesh Kumar, director of Wetlands International, a non-profit working on conservation and restoration of wetlands, thinks it is a good beginning. Where it goes from here, he believes, will depend on how the government programmes it. “In the case of the Ganga, it worked well because the Ganga Praharis were given a defined role. Their capacity was developed, they received identity and respect.”

Another example of the role of communities is the turtle conservation project launched in 2012 by WWF-India in Uttar Pradesh in collaboration with the state’s forest department. It was the riparian communities who became the caretakers of turtle nests found in their fields and river banks, actively participating in nest identification, protection and biological monitoring.

Whose pond is it anyway?

In Gonda’s Parvati Arga Bird Sanctuary, 75 km from Talab Baghel, Amrish has been a wetland mitra since 2021, involved in protecting the eggs of migratory birds from dogs and cattle.

His motivation is the “livelihood generated from the daily wage work he gets from the sanctuary, including clearing of water hyacinth”. He hopes that this will translate into a monthly wage job of Rs 2,500. “The authorities are telling us that when the next budget comes, we might become permanent,” he told IndiaSpend.

Another volunteer, Jagdamba Yadav (33), was listed as a mitra two years back but he began a dedicated vigil only after February this year, when the Chief Minister visited the region on World Wetlands Day (February 2), and Yadav heard the discussions around “upcoming roads and lights in the area if the wetland is well taken care of”.

“And how long can one do this caretaking for free? If there was a proper salary, one will be motivated to do the job more diligently,” he said.

The linkage of wetland to livelihoods plays well in onboarding wetland mitras. Shiraz A. Wajih from the Gorakhpur Environmental Action Group, who has been involved in training mitras from some districts in Uttar Pradesh, observed that “once the people understand the ecology of the wetland and the ecosystem services, its linkage to their livelihood, they become interested”. He met mitras living in villages adjoining the Parvati Arga wetland who knew the ecology well because they live there. They were the ones who had its historical and cultural context.

The last training Amrish attended as a wetland mitra was two years ago, in which he learned that the birds visiting the Arga wetland need to be saved from harm. Wajih feels that while these mitras know the ecosystem well, training still needs to be strengthened for them to have a clear idea of their role and actionable points.

Kumar from SWA was clear about the single most important thing that needed to be done for wetland conservation. “More community involvement,” he said firmly. But despite the decentralisation of responsibility, the support gap exists, as pointed out by Wajih.

Ashish Tiwari, principal chief conservator of forests, Uttar Pradesh, pointed out that community involvement is possible only if “we establish a need-basis connection” with the wetlands. For Uttar Pradesh, he said this was water security.

“If you go to Western UP, you will see communities asking for a johad [pond], because the groundwater has become scarce and they understand that ponds can solve this problem,” Tiwari told IndiaSpend.

He shared an example from Banda, where 300-400 farmers from Badhokhar Khurd gram panchayat have diversified their income by dividing a five-acre land into 1.5-acre pond, 1.5-acre orchard and 2 acres for agriculture. “The people have built the circular economy where they practise fisheries in the pond, use the water for irrigation in lean periods and practise backyard poultry farming with the hen beat used as fish feed,” he said.

Western Uttar Pradesh is amongst the most depleted aquifer systems of the state where extensive, indiscriminate exploitation is widespread. The region is also home to a majority of over-exploited blocks.

Satellite imagery shows this gram panchayat as a prominent green patch around the dull browns in the water-parched Bundelkhand region, “..but in places where groundwater is still available and taps are running, this connection is missing and nothing can happen till the community takes charge,” Tiwari said.

Range officer Vivek Singh of the Nawabganj Bird Sanctuary felt the role of communities becomes even more crucial for wetlands that fall under the revenue department, as monitoring is limited. In Nawabganj of UP’s Unnao, wetland mitras work alongside the forest department to keep a vigil. “They understand that more birds means more tourists and hence more livelihood,” he said.

A catch with identifying encroachment at a hyperlocal level is that “only if the community complains, the encroachment will come to light,” Kumar from SWA pointed out. Building on Tiwari’s observation from Western UP, he told IndiaSpend that “most complaints regarding wetlands encroachment come from Western Uttar Pradesh”. The complaint flows from the community to the District Wetland Authority and further to the State Wetland Authority.

Ranjit Singh (56), a cattle herder, spoke of how as a child he used to jump on the Taal Baghel soil in the lean period pre monsoon. “It felt like the land had water beneath and it shook like a sponge. We used to jump on it for hours,” he reminisced. Presently, it is a place for his cattle to graze, drink water and bathe. “There are times when it’s completely dry, then we fill some area using a pumping motor for the cattle to use,” he said.

But in case the pond was completely converted into agriculture parcels in future, or the beautification project restricts his access, he “will reduce the number of buffaloes and buy fodder,” he said. He guessed that the pond probably belongs to the government, and it is them who can decide what they want to do with it.

“Saving community rights to traditional uses of wetlands is crucial because humans also play a role in this ecosystem,” said Kumar from Wetlands International. He explained how we went through a generation which destroyed wetlands when they wanted to shift the entire water supply to groundwater.

“Now we are at the cusp. We have seen a boom in groundwater. Now that boom is going bust because of low replenishment rate, and perhaps this dialogue after 10 years would look very different,” he said. Wetlands being such a large asset, he said, they can’t be protected without community involvement.

Siyaram Jaiswal, sarpanch of Manakpur village, Gonda is looking forward to developing the Kasbakhas wetland in his village. His motivating factor is job generation for locals when tourists visit this 37-hectare wetland.

Women play a vital role

When Shail Mishra from TCL reached out to communities in the villages in Payagpur tehsil in Bahraich for village mapping, it was the men who came forward to talk. But more often than not, it never went beyond talking.

One day, when a male member of the house was sharing details of landholdings, 19-year-old Pooja, was heard correcting him. “She just took off from there and mapped every land, every road, every pond in the village,” Neetu Tripathi, field coordinator with TCL, recalled. “Women connect with these ecosystems more culturally, emotionally, and hence they always come through with focused work,” Mishra said.

Field coordinator Neetu Tripathi explains the hand drawn map of Mohanpur Mafi village. The exercise was conducted by local women, led by Phuleshwari Devi.

In villages around Nawabganj Bird Sanctuary in Unnao, range officer Singh has observed that more women are interested in attending the training sessions on protecting migratory birds and their habitat, as compared to men.

“When women come, they bring their children along, starting the conversation of conservation at the childhood itself,” he told IndiaSpend. Singh has never seen kids tagging along with men for these sessions.

Sanjaya Singh too recognised that involvement of women will increase the continuity and sustainability of wetland protection. Geeta Devi, Beena Devi and Phuleshwari Devi, all living in the neighbourhood in Mohanpur Mafi village, agree. “We can tell who is encroaching what, but whom should we tell,” they asked.

Jaiswal calls the women in his village tez-tarrar--bold and assertive. He recalled that it is the women who have come to him with the suggestion to focus on a fodder patch for the goats they rear. Securing their interests will motivate them to participate in conservation, he felt.

This is the second of a three-part series. You can read the first part here. The third part focuses on the counter-productive wetland conservation mechanisms in practice which lack scientific backing.

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