Why Wetlands Need Dry Days

“These birds feed on the fishlings and thus maintaining water becomes crucial,” range officer Vivek Singh explained. “If we don’t maintain the water, these birds will find a different habitat to nest and won’t come back the next year, if they prefer the new site.”

If the birds decide to move on, Singh’s efforts of maintaining the wetland will be questioned, and its status could change to “unpreserved”. The burden to not let go of the Ramsar site status is real, as criterion 6 to identify a wetland of international importance says it should regularly support 20,000 or more waterbirds. “The wetlands which don’t have this pressure to be the bird habitat can let the ecosystems be,” Singh said. “They face heatstrokes and it actually helps them in nutrient building, time to time.”

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.

Uttar Pradesh is dotted with diverse wetlands ranging from the wet grasslands of the Terai, the riverine wetlands of the Gangetic plains and the ponds and tanks of the Vindhyan hills and plateau. As per the National Wetlands Atlas, the state has 1.24 million ha of natural and human-made wetlands, with high biodiversity values including the state bird Sarus Crane. Nawabganj Bird Sanctuary is one of 10 Ramsar sites in the state.

“Wetlands have a natural cycle of wet and dry which indicates its health. But its name is misunderstood and they are treated as something that needs to remain wet always,” Ritesh Kumar, director of Wetlands International, a non-profit working on conservation and restoration of wetlands, told IndiaSpend.

This translates to changing the innate nature of a wetland, since groundwater has a different mineral composition than rainwater and thereby the species composition. Wetlands are supposed to be water sources and not water storage units. Kumar pointed out that “if treated as water-requiring ecosystems, it will be problematic”.

The birds are linked to attracting tourists during the summer holidays, which coincide with the lean period of these ecosystems. Hence, the water filling activity.

Pointing to the decline in the number of birds in Nawabganj, Kumar made the case that just filling water doesn’t make it a wetland. It goes further into understanding the birds: what kind they are, what kind of habitat they need, what their preferences are. “The natural hydrology of the landscape has changed entirely, and the wetland has transformed from a natural one to a regulated one,” he lamented.

Birds nesting in the Nawabganj Bird Sanctuary in Uttar Pradesh.

Ashish Tiwari, principal chief conservator of forests, Uttar Pradesh, sighed at the patched water puddles he recalled from Talab Baghel. On his tablet, he opened the digital map of the wetland, zoomed it to follow through a narrow channel joining it. He stopped once he figured out the broken link. “The only way to bring back water is to rejuvenate this channel,” he clarified. But the how remains unanswered.

Kumar is concerned about the lack of appreciation for the dry beauty of wetlands, which serve as habitats for snakes, scorpions and chameleons.

“We make a big deal of the wet phase, but forget the dry. They are pulsing systems. They will appear like huge football grounds in lean periods; that doesn’t mean they are not functioning,” Kumar said.

Gatekeeping wetlands

In Gonda’s Parvati Arga Bird Sanctuary, 75 km from Talab Baghel, Jagdamba Yadav (33) was listed as a Wetland mitra two years back, but he started dedicated vigil only after February this year. He owns a generational piece of land that overlooks the pond, and Yadav couldn’t recall a time when he didn’t enjoy the cool evening breeze near the pond.

Yadav owns 10 cows and buffaloes and “depends on this pond for the cattle's water and fodder needs” and he recognises that if it wasn’t for this pond, he would have grave problems. Sometimes when an ‘afsar’ [official] scolds him for grazing his cattle near the wetland, he gets the feeling that it’s not his pond afterall.

Kumar calls such wetlands as “humanised landscapes”, which recognises that these dynamic systems function only because humans also play a role in it.

The restrictions of sanctuaries or protected areas, he said, are apt for areas with heavy land-grabbing pressure and for habitats of endemic species. “...but where human needs are involved, and the law does not accept that, the burden of conservation falls on the poorest or most marginalised people,” he explained.

Yadav is bearing that burden. At present there is no boundary, but even then he and his fellow farmers “aren’t allowed to utilise the pond water for irrigation”. He spends money on a diesel pump to extract groundwater in order to irrigate his land adjacent to the pond.

The problem persists for recognised Ramsar sites too. In a workshop held by CMS Vatavaran in Lucknow last year, Nivedita Mani, a researcher with the Gorakhpur Environmental Action Group, highlighted the Communication, Education, Participation and Awareness (CEPA) strategies they developed for wetlands in Uttar Pradesh. She shared that during their field work she witnessed the disconnect of the community with Ramsar sites. “They are not allowed to do any activity. It is demarcated and fenced, disallowing fishing or any other activities,” she told IndiaSpend. “When the community is disconnected, why will they take ownership?”

Her observations aligned with what Yadav was feeling. “Hum kya jane talab kiska hai [How would I know whose it is]?” Since he was a child, this was a bird sanctuary and he thought it was probably theirs. By theirs, he means the officials who change every few years. “Two years back, one ‘sir’ was very strict and didn’t even let us take our cattle grazing near the pond, let alone taking water,” he recalled. That year, Yadav’s buffaloes adjusted by grazing on a small patch of his agricultural land.

“It is crucial for the community to take ownership,” Mani emphasised. She explained that wetlands are a life system and not a water patch. “..it will never sustain if its catchment doesn’t. The catchment is the nalas and rivulets, which are being cut off.”

The problem, she said, is not limited to villages but urban spaces too. “In Gorakhpur, while 108 water bodies thrived some 35 years back, we are left with only 18 today,” she said.

Mani shared one successful example of rejuvenation of a large abandoned land in Gautambuddha Nagar, “but the sensitisation of people was lacking”. She recalled getting a call from a senior government official, who she did not name, who informed her that the water of the pond had reduced, and asked her to extract groundwater to refill it.

“I was shocked--this is against the whole principle of conservation, because we are doing this for ground water recharge and he is saying we have to extract groundwater to fill the pond,” she recalled. “...because when ponds are labalab bhara hua [filled till the rim], they look beautiful.” It took some work on Mani’s part to make the official understand that extracting groundwater to fill wetlands was not a good idea.

Amrish, another wetland mitra from Parvati Arga in Gonda, has to keep an eye on anyone “trying to fish” in the pond. In most cases, all he gets is abandoned boats because people flee fearing the legal consequences. They don’t come back for the boat either.

Kumar from Wetlands International found it absurd that the people who have been always associated with these wetlands, from which they harvest kamal gatta, makhana, namak, singhada [lotus stem, fox nut, salt, water chestnut] get excluded in the name of conservation. “Places where the locals don’t consider these ecosystems as assets is when the law needs to step in,” he said. “Otherwise, it should be left with the people,” he added.

Siyaram Jaiswal, sarpanch of Manakpur village, is planning to develop the pond in his village based on what he saw in the Parvati Arga wetland, which he visited before preparing a plan for his pond rejuvenation. He wants the people to benefit. He imagines that with this, people will have ample water for irrigation, grazing ground for the cattle, grow muskmelon and watermelon, and catch fish on their boats. He hadn’t met Yadav, though.

Series concluded. You can read the first part here and the second part here.

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