Abstract:

I intend to place this issue of limiting an urban boundary wide open in the context of wetlands on the edge of the conventional city. Putting it more simply – is the wetland situated at the edge of the city within the city limits or will the city boundary have to be extended to include the wetland? My intention here is not to make a definite statement. I would on the other hand describe a wetland on the edge of the city, how it is connected with the city life and leave open the answer to the audience.

Description of East Kolkata Wetlands is now widely available. But, what if we do not have the wetlands to the East Kolkata? We shall then lose the largest and most efficient natural biological treatment plant for wastewater which traps carbon instead of generating any, and runs entirely on solar energy. The loss therefore has a global consequence, in addition
to the fact that we shall lose our free-of-cost wastewater treatment plant for the city, availability of 10,000 tonnes of fish annually and more than 100 tonnes of vegetable daily. These ecological services, in turn make the metropolitan city the cheapest in India. This is why the city is termed an ‘ecologically subsidised city’.

This particular talk will be useful for scholars  working on ecology and environmental issues, urban studies , urban policy, issues on sustainability and traditional ecological knowledge practices.



About the Speaker:

Dr Dhrubajyoti Ghosh is a Civil Engineer  who obtained a doctoral degree in the field of ecology from the University of Calcutta. He has been one of the earliest to become an Ashoka fellow as a social entrepreneur. He has  established the local ecological knowledge of the community in treating the city wastewater and did away with the expenditure for setting up a conventional sewage treatment plant for Kolkata. He discovered the outstanding community knowledge of the local people who grew fish, vegetables and paddy. As one of the earliest engineers to have done doctoral research in Ecology in the seventies, he used his subjective tool to re-understand and spread awareness about an unknown wetland ecosystem remarkable for its diverse ecosystem services. He became a UN Global 500 Laureate for this work in 1990, and recently received the Luc Hoffman award for his conservation work in the East Kolkata Wetlands.

Besides many journal publications and monographs, Dr Ghosh has written three books: (i)Ecology and Traditional Wetland Practice : 2005, Worldview Publisher: Kolkata (In this book, he has described the traditional ecological knowledge of the East Kolkata Wetlands); (ii) Ecosystem Management: Towards Merging  Theory and Practice : 2014. Nimby Books. New Delhi and (iii) His forthcoming book is on the community of waste recyclers in Kolkata, to be published by the Oxford University Press.

He has recently been honoured as Taiwan’s wetland conservation advisor by the Government of Taiwan.