Heart of Conservation PodcastEp#31 Show Notes (Edited)
Introduction:
Hi, I am Lalitha Krishnan and you’re listening to Ep# 31 of Heart of Conservation. I bring you stories from the wild that keep us all connected to our natural world. You can listen to Heart of Conservation on several platforms and also read the transcript right here on my blog Earthy Matters.
Today’s episode is about the Sundarbans. I recently made a trip there and I have to tell I am so spell bound by the immensity and biodiversity of the world’s largest delta which we share with Bangladesh. To be honest, I didn’t know about these 2 facts earlier. Almost everything I saw was unique somehow, something I had never seen before. I knew I had to find an expert to learn more about the Sundarbans ecosystem. As luck would have it, I came across a social media account @onesundarban which belongs to Dr Radhika Bhargava, my guest here on episode # 31.
In her own words, Dr Radhika wears multiple hats as a coastal geographer, geospatial analyst, and a National Geographic Explorer. She is a Research Fellow at the NUS Centre for Nature-based Climate Solutions working with wetland conservation in Asia. She recently completed her PhD at the National University of Singapore. We will discuss her research some more but for now, Radhika, welcome and congratulations on your PhD. I feel so privileged to have you share your knowledge and experiences with us.
Radhika Bhargava: Hi Lalitha, thank you so much for having me on your podcast. I am so excited and I am so happy that you recently visited the Sundarbans. I am really looking forward to your questions and interacting with you on Sundarbans.
Lalitha Krishnan: Lovely. So, let us start. Radhika, what made you, first, focus on the mangroves for your research and why must we be watching the mangroves to check on the health of our planet?
Radhika Bhargava: I started working on mangroves during my Masters actually. I was part of a project where they were looking for someone to do coding or use coding /computer languages to identify mangroves of South East Asia. So, you use satellite images and you have to interpret where the mangroves are. There were many other forest classes that I was interested in studying but somebody had taken up those classes or somebody had taken up those forest areas to study using satellite imagery. They were only left with mangroves and then, I joined the lab. Nobody was willing to take up this project because there was a lot of computer coding required. And, coming from ecology, biology or management backgrounds, we were not trained in it. I saw this gap and evenI didn’t know any computer programming at that time. But then, looking at this desperate need that nobody is doing, I said, “Sure, why not? I will give it a try.” I started learning coding from scratch and then my focus was mangroves. So, that is how I learnt a lot about mangroves. I became so curious that through the two years of my Masters which was at University of San Francisco, the focus was Environmental Management. I ended up with all my class projects or side projects related to mangroves. That’s how I came across the Sundarbans.
3:56
You asked me, “why must we be watching the mangroves to check on the health of our planet?” There are many reasons. Especially that mangroves are coastal protectors. They protect the sea from storms and cyclones. Their roots help in purifying water but specially they store or remove carbon dioxide which causes global warming. They store it within themselves and keep it there for millions and millions of years. They have such characteristics that can tell about the health of the planet and actually help in improving the health.
4:30
Lalitha Krishnan: That’s quite amazing. I love the part about you learning coding from scratch. Look where it has taken you. Radhika, I’m curious about your social media handle. Why its called ‘One Sundarban? There must be something to it. There must be a good reason why you have called it so?
4:56
Radhika Bhargava: So glad you asked me this question because initially, people thought that maybe I did not get the handle “Sundarbans’ and that it why I went with ‘One Sundarbans’. Also, I think, I have had that account for maybe two years. I only joined social media because I felt the urge to share about the Sundarbans. When I realised that a storm can come, a cyclone can come in that area and nobody would even know that somethings happening… So, I felt that I am at a place that I can share so I should take that initiative. So, I only joined social media to share about Sundarbans.
And why ‘One Sundarban’?
Sundarbans is across India and Bangladesh. It is one ecosystem. As a researcher, it really annoyed me initially when I would come across studies or management plans or government records that focused on just one side-either India or Bangladesh. So, for me, ‘One Sundarban’ is one ecosystem so hence ‘One Sundarban’ but after I pondered about it a bit more, about the terminology, I realised that “sundar” is in Hindi, In Bangla and in many local Indian languages, “sundar” is beautiful and “ban” or “van” is forest. So, it is just one beautiful forest. If I branch out of onesundarban, this name still holds.
-Radhika Bhargava
6:37
Lalitha Krishnan: Right. That is a beautiful thought and it makes so much sense because you cannot save it in part. It is half the story then. Radhika, how much ground did you cover during your research and what techniques did you employ to cover this vast area?
6:59
Radhika Bhargava: Right. So, I worked across India and Bangladesh. So, Sundarbans, for those who are not familiar, is 10,000 sq. kilometres of just mangrove forests. It is made up of many small islands-I do not even know the exact count-but, adding both India and Bangladesh, it is going to be more than 200 islands. My initial idea was to capture the ecosystem. Since I use geo-spatial analysis, which means using satellite maps and satellite data to understand what is happening on the ground, I was able to understand that from one aspect, right? Since satellite images can help you cover that vast area but when I went into the field, I still intended to go from the easternmost to the westernmost and northernmost to the southernmost island. For that, I first recorded shorelines from on top of a boat. I installed a Go Pro camera on a boat and then we would go parallel across shorelines and then I would be doing a commentary on those videos. Later on, I converted those videos into multiple images, and so from the observations in those images and my commentary, I collected some data.
8:25
So, we covered around 240 kilometres just of observation. The travelling kilometres were much more. And then, I went to around 16 villages to conduct interviews with the communities to understand their part of the story of the work I was doing.
8:53
Lalitha Krishnan: That is very extensive. You must have learnt a lot. That is quite amazing Radhika.
9:01
Radhika Bhargava: Thank you so much. If not for COVID, I had another few methods I wanted to try out too which would have made me go into the forest to collect some forest bio-physical measurements within the forests but because of COVID, I had a shorter amount of time and PhD scholarship and all restricted me. So, there was still more that I wanted to do.
9:24
Lalitha Krishnan: But you must have amassed quite a lot of information.
9:29
Radhika Bhargava: It took a long time to process it. I think I would still go back to that data set although I have written my thesis on it, there is still so much more to get from it. I hope I get a chance to do that in the future.
9:41
Lalitha Krishnan: I am sure (you will). These things never go to waste – what you’ve observed, what you’ve learnt and what you have surveyed. You know, even though I have lived by the sea, I never bothered to familiarize myself with mangroves. It was in the Sundarbans, that too on a boat that I witnessed up close, the diversity of mangroves species. They are quite different from each other apart from the fact that they seem to be thriving in this cocktail of river and sea. Could you talk about some of these mangroves species and how unique they are? The snake roots, breathing roots for e.g. or the way some species propagate themselves with seed balls that float till they find a suitable location? It is all so fascinating.
10: 34
Radhika Bhargava: In just a few lines you actually explained how one comes across and becomes fixated with mangroves. Initially you lived by the sea, I come from a land-locked place. So, I had not even heard the word ‘mangroves’. So even today when I tell people I am doing research on mangroves, they assume I am researching mangoes. The word is so unfamiliar.
Lalitha Krishnan: There’s somebody worse than me that means.
11:13
Radhika Bhargava: I was worse than you. Despite visiting coastal areas with my parents, I never processed why there are trees on the beach or why there are trees on the water. Especially in Bombay. Goa, Gujarat side of India. So, I also learnt about it through books and through reading research papers until I went to the Caribbeans to do some project on coral reefs. So, we had a small project where we were snorkelling and looking at fish nurseries around mangrove roots. So, I thought that was cool. But I did not realise that there’s this amazing ecosystem like Sundarbans or Bhitarkanika in Odisha, where in sediment-rich mangroves you can’t even see what’s happening under water. So, I also came to mangroves in a similar way; I said “what are these crazy roots?” A lot of people whom I have talked to say mangroves for them are like some sci-fi movie, when they come to the Sundarbans.
12:14
It is mainly because of the roots like you said. Mangroves have this crazy kind of roots, especially to adapt to the extreme environment they grow in. By extreme environment, I mean they grow at the interface of land and water. So, they are often flooded with salt water although they receive some fresh water from rivers as well. They get flooded twice a day during high tide. They are exposed to extreme waves. When I am explaining this, I like people to imagine that these mangroves are humans. Or to become mangroves themselves. So, if you’re standing at such a place or if you are to stay there for so long, you would develop some kind of adaptation that would help you first, stand there steadily. That the hold of the roots… the snake roots or the prop roots as it is called. that helps them stay aground. There are four to five kinds of mangroves roots. Basically, the first role they play is help them stay in that silty, flooded land. The second thing specially in the Sundarbans or Bhitarkanika, where there is a lot of sediment that these mangroves are standing on, the second thing they need to do is to be able to breathe. But the soil and the water mix are so poor in oxygen content that they have to grow their roots up or their roots have to come from their branches and then go into the ground, unlike other plants which grow roots hidden in the ground. So the roots that are propping up from the ground-there’s a type of root called pencil roots- which look like if you’ve stuck pencils in the soil, they look like that. Or buttress roots… All of these roots apart from giving them stability, they also help them get oxygen from the air. So, many plants get oxygen from the atmosphere directly and through their leaves and through their stems but mangrove roots also get oxygen content from the air to support breathing for the plants. So, these are some adaptations that mangroves must bring in to stand tall in that extreme environment.
Source: Nature Picture Library
You also asked about propogation of species. How mangroves grow mangrove babies, right? So, if you are a mangrove and you’ve figured out how you are going to stand and how to breathe in this fragile, dynamic ecosystem then the next thing is to figure out how are we going to reproduce? Unlike many trees which produce seeds–those seeds get propagated by wind or by animals or by water–some of the mangrove trees do produce fruits. And then within these fruits, there are seeds which finally find a ground and grow. But, it’s also common in certain kinds of mangrove species to not produce seeds but produce a mangrove propagule. That propagule is just a mangrove baby that’s growing on top of its mom. You might have come across these green sticks hanging from the tree, they are mangrove propagules. They hang from the tree and until they are ready to go- the weather conditions, the time of year, the tidal conditions etc are good-the mom drops them in the water. Now they are floating in the water but these are not seeds ready to be germinated. These are germinated plants which function like any other plant and it keeps floating until it finds the right elevation, the right tidal conditions, the right slope, and the right area to settle in. So, that stick or propagule has that much sense to find the right place for its survival. It floats horizontally. Once it finds the right place, it becomes vertical, the centre of mass changes and it automatically goes into the soil. Which is just mind-blowing for me. In a way, they are like mammals. In mammals…humans, babies grown within the mum until they are ready to come out. I find equal similarities.
17:19
Lalitha Krishnan: It sounds like they have an intelligence of their own. There is so much we do not know.
17: 25
Radhika Bhargava: There are things people who study these processes are still finding out. Things we know have been published but there is so much more, so much unknown when it comes to mangroves.
17:41
Lalitha Krishnan: Thank you so much for explaining that. Talking of species, the animals that exist in the Sundarbans also seem to have adapted to this unique environment. We saw the rare Mangrove pitta, the Fishing cat we didn’t see but I know it’s there and the swimming Bengal tiger, which is the only tiger that lives in a mangrove system. How cool is that? What makes them so different or what can you tell us about them?
18:19
Radhika Bhargava: If we are talking about Sundarbans, how can not (talk) about the tiger? The Royal Bengal tiger is found in many places in India or in the South Asian subcontinent. However, the subspecies of the Royal Bengal tiger—I’m not sure if sub-species is the correct word—but the evolution of the Royal Bengal tiger that found in the Sundarbans is quite different from the other Royal Bengal tigers that are found, in say, Central India, where I come from.
18:59
The main difference in their adaptation to living in the Sundarban Delta. In those mangroves, in that flooded ecosystem. Just like I was explaining earlier how mangroves adapted to this soil, sediment, flooding conditions, the tigers of the Sundarbans also have to.
19:22
If you are a tiger, you would need sweet water or fresh water, as they say, to survive. But the tigers of the Sundarbans are living in a delta filled with salt water. Their houses or their land or their habitat, gets flooded twice a day which tigers of Central India do not experience.
They go to a fresh water pond within their forest to get water but then they can go back to their caves to chill. But there are no such structures that are dry all year around for the tigers of the Sundarbans. And if they want to go from one place to another, there are huge rivers and streams in between which they have to traverse. So, tigers and other kinds of cats can swim naturally but the tigers of the Sundarbans use swimming as their means of transportation. When their islands get completely flooded because of high tide they climb on to a tree and stay on the tree twice a day during high tide conditions. Hunting also, for for these animals is very different. Now you don’t have a grassland to run and catch deer but you have to very strategically traverse the silty, quick-sand type or quick-mud type of terrain where you cannot run a lot because of the roots–that I just explained about earlier—would stop you from running far distances.
21;10
So, it so amazing how the Royal Bengal tigers of the Sundarbans have adapted to live in these conditions. However, these extreme conditions- lack of habitat these days, lack of availability of sweet-water ponds and extreme environmental and anthropogenic pressures are affecting these tigers in a way that now, they are more exposed to the local villages. A lot of human and tiger negative interactions have started to take place. There are a lot of theories of why some of these tigers are also maneaters. These theories that make sense to me are related to the extreme environment and increasing environmental and anthropogenic pressures that are making them encounter humans in a negative aspect.
22:19
Lalitha Krishnan: Right. I imagine tigers or for that matter any other animal there having to climb a tree twice a day to escape drowning if they cannot swim. I never would have even thought that far. Thank you for explaining that. It is quite a hard life even for a tiger. I was thinking of the deer…
22:40
Radhika Bhargava: Did you see any tiger?
22:41
Lalitha Krishnan: No, we did not see any tiger and we did not expect toeither. They told us not to expect to see a tiger. But we did see paw prints. What is fascinating is that—I have seen scratch marks of tigers on trees but here, we actually saw scratch marks on the mud. We had such an excellent forest guide. Mud looks like mud; it was all wet but he manged to point that out to us. It was quite distinct. That was fascinating.
23:14
Coming back to the Sundarbans and the ravages of nature, Cyclone Bulbul in 2019, Cyclone Amphan in 2020, Cyclone Yaas and Jawad in 2021 have all struck and affected these low-lying islands. What makes them so defenceless? What were the losses incurred with every cyclone-hit?
23:50
Radhika Bhargava: The “defenceless” word here is something I should talk about. It’s Yes and No. Mangroves are known to protect inland areas from the impacts of storms and cyclones. So, in a way they are not defenceless. They have those defences. And, even the all the cyclones that you named just now; Kolkata was the least impacted if we are speaking from India’s perspective or Khulna or Dacca if we are speaking from Bangladesh’s perspective. They were impacted but the impact was so small compared to what it could have been if the Sundarbans was not there. So, Sundarbans is still holding ground, defending inland areas.
However, because of ongoing anthropogenic pressures; to name a few: the shipping channel that has been formed within the Sundarbans which is a protected area. It should not be converted into a water highway.
Or a coal plant coming into Sundarbans or other aspects, the extreme erosion of land; the loss of land which was the focus of my research, causing mangroves to degrade and get lost is causing them to reduce the amount of defence they could have provided.
25:28
When you are talking of defence I would also talk about the people. The people of the Sundarbans, I feel are resilient especially in terms of how they manage when these reoccurring cyclones, with the frequency of three to four times a year, impact them. However, with reduced options of livelihood, with reduced preparedness because they are managing a lot of land, and cyclones, lack of livelihoods, lack of protection altogether, their resiliency is also getting reduced.
So, although the people are not defenceless to start with, the conditions are making them such. So, if you hear, I just made a parallel between the resiliency of the mangroves and the resiliency of the people; yet both their resiliencies are getting reduced or impacted. Which on a side note is the conclusion of PhD thesis.
26:38
Lalitha Krishnan: Good. So, during my visit to the Sundarbans, I noticed that the embankment to my resort was half washed away. I was told it was the cyclone which is a recurring factor there. Is there more to it?
26:51
Radhika Bhargava: Great observation Lalitha. I am so glad that you didn’t buy into just the story that a cyclone comes and destroys the structure. So, to give a bit more context to our audience, the soil in the Sundarbans , the sub-sediment in the Sundarbans is silty; it’s clayish. So, if you want to understand this, clay that a potter uses to mold clay into, it is that kind of clay, on which if you put a step, just as a 55kg human, the soil is going to get compressed and you’re going to slip away.
Imagine putting concrete slab on this silty and soft soil? It’s like creating a hard line in a very dynamic system. That concrete is going to eventually collapse. I’ll explain very quickly how. So, there’s a concrete slab but underneath, is a soft silty soil. And underneath, there are waves that are coming in and out throughout the day, So the waves are going to take some of that soil with them. Or that soil which may be a bit harder during low tide is going to get mixed with water and become soft. So, the concrete slab on top is eventually and slowly and slowly going to collapse. And, then, it’s going to be like the embankment that you saw during your visit.
So, when a cyclone comes, all of this just gets exaggerated. But these processes are happening on a daily basis, causing these embankments to fall and collapse. Yet, when these embankments fall, another embankment of such poor design is built maybe 200 mts. away from the current shoreline. This keeps on repeating to the point where the place you stayed, you saw the 5th embankment collapse in the past 40 years or so. This is something I also worked on during my PhD to understand why this poorly designed embankments are still around and how are they impacting the local people. So, what I explained earlier about the reduced preparedness or resiliency of the people, that lack of preparedness, that lack of having other options make them rely on these quick yet poor solutions. So, the demand also increases for these. One thing collapses, yet the second time, they want the same thing to be built so that they can get some short-term benefits of prevention of flood or some people start living in tents- who have also lost houses because of all of this, start living around the embankment. So, it becomes like a vicious cycle of land loss, poorly designed embankments come in, poorly designed embankments cause more land loss yet more of these embankments come in and the cycle continues.
30:00
Lalitha Krishnan: Again, I never thought of it. I am learning so much from you Radhika. Finally, my last question for you. Could you share a word that was perhaps part of your research or significant to you in some way? Something new for all of us.
30:16
Radhika Bhargava: So, the word I want to use, building off of what I just explained about embankments, is a word called ‘maladaptation’. It is very relevant because in the last IPCC report, it was used to highlight a pressing issue in our fight against climate change. I will explain it in pieces. Adaptation means any form of project, idea or implementation that comes in to reduce impact or anything. But in climate change context, climate change adaptation is an adaptation such as building a sea wall, or other things that help you reduce the impact of climate change. So one impact could be flooding, sea-levels rising and so on. Maladaptation to climate change means when that adaptation which is built to reduce the impact of climate change fails but not only does it fail but it causes other negative impacts to the local community or the global community.
31:31
So, when an adaptation fails and causes more negative impact it turns into a maladaptation. This is a word that I realise through the work I have done in the Sundarbans, or through my research in the Sundarbans, and I am hoping that I can contribute more to the growing literature of maladaptation.
31:56
Lalitha Krishnan: You have increased our vocabulary. Thank you so much Radhika, we have covered a lot and learnt a lot from you. It’s been a real pleasure talking to you.
Radhika Bhargava: Thank you so much Lalitha. I love talking about the Sundarbans and sharing about it from a place where I did not know and then I had the privilege to go and learn about it. So, I feel that it’s my responsibility in a way to share about it in any medium and form I can. So, thank you so much for giving me this platform to talk more about Sundarbans and the issues people and the forests are facing over there.
32:35
Lalitha Krishnan: Thank you Radhika, I feel the same way. I feel there’s so much we don’t know and I want to share. I am luck I found you.
32:47
Radhika Bhargava: One quick thing to add for our listeners. So, you learnt a lot about Sundarbans, and mangroves. So, one takeaway you can do for me and Lalitha would be if you can go and tell more people in your social circles about how cool and awesome mangroves are and how amazing Sundarbans is. Thank you.
Lalitha Krishnan: I hope you enjoyed listening to episode #31 and Dr Radhika as much as I did. If you know somebody who is doing incredible work and his/her story needs to be shared do write to me at earthymatters013@gmail.com Watch out for my next episode. Till then, take care. Bye.
Birdsong by hillside resident, the collared owlet.
Cover photo: courtesy Dr Radhika Bhargava. Podcast cover artwork by Lalitha Krishnan
Disclaimer: Views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the podcast and show notes belong solely to the guest featured in the episode, and not necessarily to the host of this podcast/blog or the guest’s employer, organization, committee or other group or individual.
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Show notes (Edited)
0:05 Lalitha Krishnan: Hi there, thanks for listening in to Season 4 episode 26 of Heart of Conservation. I’m Lalitha Krishnan, `bringing you stories from the wild that keep us connected with the natural world. You can read the show notes for this podcast episode on my blog Earthy Matters. Today I’m to speaking to Shaunak Modi. Shaunak is the co-founder and director of Coastal Conservation Foundation and a key member of Marine Life of Mumbai. He speaks of being a nature photographer in the past tense but I keep seeing his splendid photographs on social media. Do check them out.
Shaunak has worked in the wilderness travel space where he founded his startup, Naturenama.
I’ve been wanting to have you on Heart of Conservation for so long. Finally, it’s happened. So, thank you sincerely for making the time. And a very warm welcome to you.
Shaunak Modi: Thank you Lalitha for having me.
0:15 Lalitha Krishnan: Shaunak, you studied amphibians but your work and passion now have taken you to the source – the ocean. Tell us how that happened.
0:24 Shaunak Modi: OK. I didn’t study amphibians, I studied herpetology at Bombay Natural History Society (BHNS). That was another lifetime it feels like now. I have been going to forests for more than a decade now. And, there was a little hesitation whenever I came across a snake. What I realised was I would need to know them better I would need to not have that discomfort and I wanted to learn more about them. That is why I studied herpetology. So, that’s how that happened.
Then for a very long time, I was associated one way or the other with the wildlife community. I have been doing photography for a very long time. I also had a news website called ‘Project (lost in translation)? where I used to share wildlife news. That went on for almost 6 years before I shut it down. After Project Bhiwan, I was also working. I was in the wildlife travel space, that was where my work was; along with which there was a whale stranding that had happened in Mumbai and that was my introduction to the sea.
A lot has happened since and I’m sure we will have that conversation later in the podcast but that is how I am where I am today.
1: 40 Lalitha Krishnan: Alright, thanks. It’s very interesting to me to see that you’ve plotted a map of whale strandings. I’m not sure if this is the first of its kind in India of stranded/beached marine life. Why don’t you tell us more about this map?
1:58 Shaunak Modi: Yes. So, in fact, that was what I was talking about earlier. In 2016, there was a Bryde whale that had beached on Juhu beach. I was there. I had spent a considerable amount of time on the beach that night because 1) out of the fascination of seeing a whale for the first time in my life and 2) because there was some crowd control that needed to be done and I was just helping with that. And, you know, when a creature of this size washes ashore, you would expect it to cause, you know, to be a topic ofdiscussion. Especially in a community of wildlife enthusiasts and conservationists. But what I realised back then was that beyond the news that is 24 hours or 48 hours after that beaching, there was not a blip. I did not hear anything about it in the conservation community, largely the terrestrial conservation community. That’s when I realised that if something like this can happen and go without being noticed, I just wanted to see how often it happens. I started following news articles and news stories about whale and dolphin strandings happening across the country and I started mapping them. I did that for a year and realised that there was a considerable amount of activity that was happening. What I did not know is that the marine biologists and the marine scientific researcher community were already mapping this. So, clearly, I was not the first one to do it. There’s a wonderful website that has been documenting sightings and strandings for a very, very long time. It’s called the Marine Mammal Research and Conservation Network of India. And, the website is marinemammals.in. It’s been there since 2008. And, there is a database of strandings that is happening there. But, like I’m saying, you know, there’s sometimes a sort of echo chamber when it comes to conservation because there is so much to be done, so much happening that within the terrestrial conservation community, talk of anything beyond forests and big cats rarely makes a blip. That was exactly what I was going through. I was in an echo chamber of my own at that time and I had no idea these things existed. So that’s how I started mapping it but eventually, I realised that it wasn’t really a useful thing because this website already had all that data. But what that did was also sort of, inculcate this interest in me to know more about this ecosystem and this habitat that I had no idea existed.
But, like I’m saying, you know, there’s sometimes a sort of echo chamber when it comes to conservation because there is so much to be done, so much happening that within the terrestrial conservation community, talk of anything beyond forests and big cats rarely makes a blip.
–Shaunak Modi
Indian ocean humpback dolphin in Mumbai
4:54: Lalitha Krishnan: It’s amazing what’s out there and how little we know. There are apps where citizens can report road kills of all wildlife. We have, correct me if I’m wrong, around 6000km of coastline. Do you think a similar app can be created for marine life? Especially for marine life?
5:21 Shaunak Modi: See, again, the equivalent to a road-kill for marine life would be strandings and since this website already exists, I think it’s a great national database. There are a lot of researchers who are a part of it, there are a lot of people who contribute data to it. Rather than having another app, it would be great if people would contribute to this website. No one really owns this data so to speak. But it does help to keep everything in one place. There is no point having different silos-so to speak- for something like this because it’s always very helpful if everything is being co-related in one place. This website is a great place instead of an app. Hopefully someday if something happens an app can be made for this website perhaps–I don’t know—that would depend on the people who are in charge.
6:20 Lalitha Krishnan: Yes, I feel there are too many (apps) for birds but you’re right. If it’s all in one place then it would make absolute sense and accessibility also would be easier for everyone involved.
6:33 Shaunak Modi: For sure. eBird is a great example of that. I mean there is so much data that one gets by just by visiting ebird. You can search by species; you can search by national park or you can search by your own neighbourhood and see which birds are found there or documented from there. And, it’s not like eBird is saying, “We own this data.” You know, the data is still contributed by people, by citizens, by enthusiasts and wild lifers. It’s great that something like this already exists. It makes sense not to add more to it.
7:07 Lalitha Krishnan: Yes. So, CCF’s flagship project Marine life of Mumbai has become very popular. What exactly is the focus here and what citizen science activities do you’ll undertake?
7:23 Shaunak Modi: I’d like to say something here CCF, that’s Coastal Conservation Foundation came much after MLOM was there. Marine Life of Mumbai, for the first three years of its existence, was a collective. We were a bunch of people who came together from various backgrounds and we started working in different capacities doing different things with the single aim of basically sending out a message to … Our aim was to do outreach and familiarise the people to a very lesser-known side of Mumbai. So, outreach, again, was the main objective of the project.
So, it was started by Pradip Patade, Abhisek Jamalabad and Siddharth Chakravarthy in 2017. They started conducting shore walks. It’s basically like a nature trail but 2on a beach, during low tide so you can see the animals that live there. Along with shore walks, they also started uploading photographs to social media and that’s how a lot of people came to know that animals like this live in the city, with whom they share their natural spaces. That’s been one of the main aims of MLOM. It continues to be one of the main aims but what started happening was that we were collecting so much data. Because there were a lot of wildlife photographers even in the group. We were constantly taking photos.
8:50 What we started realising is that the things we were photographing were not documented before. So, we decided to have an open-access database. That is the second side of Marine Life of Mumbai, the first being outreach. The second is data gathering. So, we have a project on our website called iNatularist.org It’s a global database of enthusiasts, researchers, scientists…I mean it’s a mixed bag of people who are on the website. What we decided is, again, like I told you earlier, is instead of having our own database hosted on our own website, we started contributing all of our data to that website. So, we created a project there called Marine Life of Mumbai and started uploading everything to that and started getting help from across the world trying to ID things. If not help we started getting pointers as to how we should click a photograph, what we should look for in an animal to ID it… we got a lot of help from the scientific and non-scientific community from across the world. That was again, 2018; the start of 2018 was when we started uploading our data there and today, we have more than 41/2 thousand observations of about 500 odd species., just from the Mumbai metropolitan region. That’s where we are.
10:21 Again you asked what the aim of Marine Life of Mumbai was? One is to familiarise the people with the marine life of the city and the second was to document it in a structured way and also have all of this data that we have accumulated open access so that anybody could make use of it.
10:40 Lalitha Krishnan: So, this outreach programme and data gathering, the documentation… Do you think all this is the secret of MLOM’s success? What do you think? Also, you mentioned around 500 odd species, right? Tell us some of this.
Cuttlefish at Juhu beach – photographed on the shores of Mumbai
11:00 Shaunak Modi: If you’re going to ask me what the secret of MLOM or what its success is, I would flat out say the people. After the three of them started MLOM, people started gathering. Some stayed, some didn’t. But there was a very strong group of about 13 people. We were all just enamoured by our shoreline. We come from various backgrounds. There are editors, there are scientists, there are artists, there are water sports instructors; I come from a travel background… All of us are from various backgrounds but we were just united by our love for marine life and curiosity. We were just curious about the shoreline. That’s what brought us all together. For me, that would be the main reason why we succeeded. Because everybody was giving it everything they had and that’s how you end up with something so nice.
12:03 And if you were to ask me about species, I would like to be clear here that these are not species that are washed ashore dead or stranded like the dolphins or the whales we spoke of earlier. Our work is mainly in the intertidal zone. That is basically the part of the shoreline which is underwater during high tide and exposed to air during low tide. And, this is a highly dynamic ecosystem where you have a lot of animals that live right here.
So, you have, from the smallest ones being snails and clams that people are familiar with, you have octopuses, you have cnidarians(??) like zoanthids. Cnidarians are the same group of animals in which jellyfish are. So, you have zoanthids, you have coral—you have a lot of coral in Mumbai. This is something that no one really thought of you know, earlier? You have all sorts of things—the smallest animal being a few millimetres to the largest one being a couple of feet large. You find a lot of stuff here.
13:14 Lalitha Krishnan: It’s amazing that there was no record in the public domain of the marine life of Mumbai before MLOM started documenting it. What is the most amazing thing you have photographed on Mumbai’s shores? Or what has been the most fascinating thing you’ve seen?
13:33: Shaunak Modi: OK. There has been some research done from the city. One of the oldest and seniormost marine biologists in India, Dr Chappgar was based out of Mumbai and there has been some work done but all of that exists in scientific journals. What I meant when I said there is no work in the public domain is that there was nothing accessible to the people. People did not know. So, if you were to ask anybody about the wildlife of the city, the first thing people would talk about was Sanjay Gandhi National Park which is great because here you have a city which is filled to the brim with people and then you have a park right in the middle of it where leopards roam. You don’t see this everywhere in the world you know? That’s great and you have a lot of wetland spots where you have wetland birds which come every winter. You have some spots where you can see a lot of wildlife in the city but there is something that has been completely ignored all this while and that was the marine life. Again, it’s because this is so unfamiliar. Not a lot of people thought that they should go out looking for marine life.
So, ever since I was a kid, I’ve lived in Juhu OK? It’s a suburb. An area very close to the Juhu beach—that’s a very famous beach in the city—and I had never thought that there would be marine life here. In fact, the first time I saw, came across the Marine life of Mumbai’s Instagram account, and then shared some photographs taken in Juhu, there was disbelief. “No this can’t here”. Because, you know, in Mumbai, in the last 20 odd years, there has been such a strong narrative around the pollution and the sewage and the dirt and the beaches being dirty….the beaches need cleanups. While all of that is true, despite all the stress that the ecosystem is under, there is a thriving ecosystem right there. And that is the fascinating thing for me. These are not ideal conditions. And this is not a beautiful island on the Pacific where you walk on a very clean white beach and you happen to come across a coral reef or a coral.
You know, in Mumbai, in the last 20 odd years, there has been such a strong narrative around the pollution and the sewage and the dirt and the beaches being dirty….the beaches need cleanups. While all of that is true, but despite all the stress that the ecosystem is under, there is a thriving ecosystem right there.
-Shaunak Modi
False pillow coral at Haji Ali
15:57 Here there are areas, I don’t know if you are familiar with it, we have a very old dargah in the city called the Haji Ali dargah. It’s a little bit into the sea and there’s a pathway which leads to the dargah but on either side of the pathway is a rocky shore. And on some days when the tide is low enough and you go there—in fact, I have taken a video because I find it extremely fascinating—that you look down and you see corals; and you look up and you see the dargah. And you look in another direction you’ll probably see 1000 people walking to and from the dargah. Where else would you find something like this? And all this while, it’s sort of being hidden in plain sight. So that is the mind-blowing part for me.
Arabian carpet shark from Napean Sea Road
16:53 Again you asked me what I find fascinating or what is something I have photographed that has been fascinating? If you had asked me this last year, or before last year, I would have said that I happened to be walking on one of the shores and I happened to walk by a shark which was in a tide pool.
Lalitha Krishnan: Did you say tidepool?
Shaunak Modi: A tidepool, yes. OK, it’s not a large shark, it’s called the Arabian Carpet Shark. It’s a smaller species of shark that are found in the shore waters. But even then, to walk and reach a place where there is a shark in the water, it’s not something you say every day. It’s not a sentence you would say every day. But that was before last year.
Last year, between the lockdowns in the city we happened to go to Juhu beach which again, is a very crowded beach and just by the tideline, there was this bunch of black grapelike things. This is something that is seasonally found around this time in the city – a lot of cuttlefish which are similar to octopuses and squids. It’s an animal; they come and they lay their eggs on the beach. So, if you happen to walk on the beach when the tide is low enough, you can actually just walk up to those eggs. So last year a group of us happened to walk and we saw these eggs and we waited there. And there was this moment when I was taking pictures of the eggs and I am looking down at it, shining a light on it and this tiny baby which has not even hatched yet looked back at me.
Lalitha Krishnan: What a thing to happen. Fantastic.
Unhatched cuttlefish looking through its egg membrane at the photographer, Shaunak Modi.
So last year a group of us happened to walk and we saw these eggs and we waited there. And there was this moment when I was taking pictures of the eggs and I am looking down at it, shining a light on it and this tiny baby which has not even hatched yet looked back at me.-Shaunak Modi
Shaunak Modi: Yes, from within the egg. I have a photograph of it. I am not doing the sighting justice just by talking about it but something in me sort of changed at that time. And then, a few minutes after that, we saw some of them hatch. And when the tide came in, they just went into the sea. So again, not a lot of ecosystems…there aren’t too many times when you get to witness something like this. And when you do, it sort of changes you in some ways, you know? It’s a very personal thing, it may not mean the same to someone else but to me, that is the most fascinating thing and the most amazing thing I have photographed and seen in the city.
19:32: Lalitha Krishnan: That’s the most amazing thing I’ve heard happen to somebody on the shores of Mumbai. That’s your reward I think for being persistent, doing what you do to conserve the shoreline. It’s truly amazing. It’s also amazing that all of this marine life exists and survives when we can barely handle bad air quality. So Shaunak, is there a good time or better season for spotting marine life?
20:11 Shaunak Modi: I think other than the monsoon months, once it starts raining there’s not much point in going tide pooling, because you won’t see too much. But other than that, I think the shores are open throughout the year.
There are a lot of changes that happen seasonally. There are some things that you will only see in winter for example, the cuttlefish eggs that I spoke about. Similarly, there are squid eggs that happen during the winter months. So, those are seasonal. Other than that, I think, pretty much throughout the year, you can easily go tide pooling and see a bunch of animals. But along with that, you need to remember that a large part of the shore will open up only for a few days a month.
There is something called Spring tides and Neap tides. Neap tides are essentially the time of the month when the difference in the high tide and low tide is very less. So, a large part of the shore will probably be underwater. And during spring tides, the difference between the high tide and the low tide is much greater. So, the days of spring tide is when we go for tide pooling. So, I think other than that, seasons don’t really matter but you need to have a good tide. Any tide which is below, maybe 0.07 mts. on your tide chart or the tide app that you may check is a good tide for Mumbai.
20:30: Lalitha Krishnan: So, one should actually check the tide chart to have a better idea.
Shaunak Modi: Yes.
21:26 Lalitha Krishnan: OK great. What photographic equipment does one need for intertidal photography?
21:42 Shaunak Modi: I am so happy that you asked me this. Nothing. Your phone is enough. Again, it depends on the kind of photographs you want to take but we regularly have participants on your shore walks who have brought just their phones and taken beautiful photographs. I am also, increasingly taking more and more photos with my phone…unless you want a really macro photograph of a really tiny animal, you will need an SLR with a microlens but other than that, a point and shoot camera or your mobile phone are good enough. These days you even get macro lenses just for your mobile phone, you know, the clip one ones. So, with that, you can come out with really, really great photos and videos. So yeah, I don’t think you need much.
22:27 Lalitha Krishnan: That’s heartening to hear. Who wants to lug around stuff when you can do so much with so little? Perfect.
Shaunak Modi:
22:38 Lalitha Krishnan: I liked exploring the interactive map on your CCF website with all the popup photos and information. What is the CCF team busy with these days?
22:52 Shaunak Modi: Yes. So, that was part of the Confluence exhibit we did with Mumbai Water Narratives. The whole idea was to do a virtual shore walk for people. This happened during the lockdown so anyway, we could not go out, nor see the shore. So, Abhishek and Sarang, who were part of this project decided to do, a virtual shore where all three types of ecosystems that you find near the intertidal were close to each other and you would find an illustrated map – done by Gaurav. And, you click on an animal and you get more information about it and also the photograph. Again, the idea here was to familiarise people who are one, either not in Mumbai or at that time, could not go to the shore to see and probably learn more about what this intertidal zone is or what type of marine life Mumbai has, and things like that.
And what we are busy with now?
22:54 So CCF essentially was started by a few members of the MLOM collective. It was started to scale up MLOM’s work and have a more sustained impact. That is what we are working on right now. The main focus areas, for us, is outreach, research, education and citizen science.And within that, we are taking the work that we have done as a collective—that’s MLOM—and we are trying to scale it up to different cities, scaling it up to different audiences. We are constantly trying to find newer ways to get more people, to appreciate, and become ambassadors for marine life. That’s pretty much what we are doing.
24:38 Lalitha Krishnan: I enjoyed reading the water narratives project e about the old water fountains of Mumbai. We’ve always seen it but one never thinks of it. And, also the bhistees as the water carriers were called in a time before pipes. We so take tap water for granted. Tell us about your other two projects the Coastwise Marine Festival and Inhabited Sea.
25:11 Shaunak Modi: Sure. Yes, I’ll start with Inhabited Sea. It’s a wonderful project. I had an opportunity to work with a great group of people. What we were doing is essentially documenting Mumbai’s waters, basically the coastal areas and the sea in different ways, different aspects. There were architecture students, architecture professors who were doing it from their perspective. There’s Nikhil Anand whose project it was- he’s a professor at the University of Pennslyvania- who was looking at the artisanal fishing that happens in Mumbai. Sejal and I were representing Marine Life of Mumbai and of course, we were documenting the biodiversity bit of it. All of our projects are on a website called Inhabited Sea.org That was that project.
26:03 Coastwise is something we came up with. We’ve done 3 editions of this festival so far in three years. It’s a festival that is co-organised by CCF, the Mangrove Foundation which is a foundation of the mangrove cell of the Forest department of Maharashtra, and WWF India. So, the idea here was to again, create a festival that sort of familiarises people with different marine ecosystems. While our work at MLOM has mostly to do with the intertidal zone, as an extension, of course, there is marine life-but here, the idea was to do it at scale. So, we have a month-long festival in February. We do it every year when we host different events. Like there’s an art workshop, a photography workshop… Of course, the theme of all of this is to do with marine life in some way. We also host an annual photo competition which is a marine photo competition for photographers from across the country. We also do flamingo boat rides, mangrove walks… we also do walks at the fish….. centres in different cities. We started this a couple of years ago and started just in Mumbai and it has sort of grown. We’ve had more states, we’ve had our partners in different states come and be partners in the festival. And we’ve had ………………..(lost in translation) walks in Chennai. We’ve had shore walks in Goa as part of the festival. This year unfortunately we’ve had to delay the festival because of the current third wave that’s happening but hopefully, at the end of the year, we’ll have the festival with even more states. That’s what Coastwise is.
27:56 Lalitha Krishnan: There’s so much one can do with people from so many different fields coming together. Really interesting. I hope you get more people joining you next time.
Your website has a lot of resources as well for those who are interested. Would you like to talk about that?
28:13 Shaunak Modi: Sure. On the MLOM website, we have a Tide Chart. Of course, it needs to be updated for 2022—I’ll do it soon—but that has the low tides and the high tides for each month of the year so that people can plan their shore walks around it. We’ve also created small guides for different shores in Mumbai where it has illustrations and information about the most common animals you ought to see on the shore. So, anyone who wants to explore can download them, make use of them. We also have a lot of photographs that we’ve taken and under those photographs, there’s information about it. About what the animal is, where it is found, what its habitat is. This is also something that we do on our Instagram and Facebook accounts. We have a post every week about a different animal. We talk about what makes it interesting, where it is found, again, what its habitat is, how big is it? Things like that. All that can be found on our website, it can also be found on our social media accounts and that’s part of the digital outreach
30:11 Lalitha Krishnan: Fantastic. Do you have any advice for young or old citizens (because I think we are never too old to learn) who have never seen the marine life of Mumbai?
30:24 Shaunak Modi: Just pick a day with a good low tide. There are a lot of apps today which tell you what time the low tide is. An hour before that time, just go out on the shore. Whether it’s Juhu beach, Girgaon Chowpatty, whether it’s Carter Road in Bandra, it’s Bandstand in Bandra, it’s Haji Ali, just go out and look down. And, all of this marine life is right there.
30:49 We do walks every month. You can come and join us. We will show you around, we’ll explain what you’re looking at. Again, my personal goal is to make tide pooling a—and this is also what other people in the group want to do—our goal is to make tide -pooling like birding. People wake up on the weekend, pick up their cameras, binoculars and go birding. We would like to make tide pooling that. It’s an activity that you can do on your own, it does not cost money, you don’t have to travel for it. There are no tickets to be bought. You literally have to put on your shoes, go out on a shore, look down and you will see much marine life. It’s not limited. We have a 71/2 1000 km coastline in the country. And, there’s marine life everywhere. So, it’s one of those ecosystems where you don’t really need guides.
Of course, there will be times when you don’t really understand what you’re looking at because here you have plants that look like animals, animals that look like plants…it’s a mixed bag of things. I think it’s a great activity to do on your own. I would request people to go out and if they’ve seen something they don’t know what they see, they can send it to us, they can send it to me personally. I will help them ID, explain what they are looking out for. Yeah, just go out and go to the shore.
32:19 Lalitha Krishnan: It’s a whole different world from what we’re used to. Most of us are not used to it.
32:26 Shaunak Modi: You know Lalitha, there’s actually a reason why it’s gone like this for so long. Because there is no familiarity. This is why, as part of MLOM’s education pillar and now CCF’s education pillar, what we’re doing is also constantly going to schools and colleges, and giving presentations to very young students. If you look at other countries, for example, Australia. There’s a very strong beach culture in many of the cities there, right? Even in parts of the US, it’s like that. Even in parts of the United Kingdom, it’s like that. And, you’ll find this on a lot of pacific islands also. It’s not limited to these developed countries. Here we don’t have that.
For a very long time, even for me, I would associate Juhu beach with food. It’s not the kind of association that you’d make with an ecosystem. So, we really want kids to have a different mindset about it while they’re doing it/growing up. So, we take them on the shore, we show them all of this. We do presentations with a lot of photographs, with a lot of videos. We want to sort of pass on the message to them that there is something that is beyond our forests. I love my trips to the forests but you don’t always get a chance to do that. You probably take one or two holidays a year. Most of us do at least. But here you have an opportunity to –even if you have an hour or even half an hour before class—and you’re close to a beach just walk down. You’ll definitely see something. That’s the idea we want to familiarise people with. That this really exists and exists everywhere. And we want people from other cities to have their own MLOs. By MLOs, I mean Marine Life Of… and their own city. It’s not that we want to go there and create, we want them to have that. We’ll of course help them. We made some mistakes in the last few years and we’ve learnt a lot. We’re ready to share all of that information with them but it would be nice if groups or individuals or organisations came forward and sort of want to create their own collectives in their own city.
34:45 Lalitha Krishnan: And take ownership for what’s theirs. It’s their land, their backyard.
Shaunak Modi: That’s exactly why we don’t want to do it. It’s not our backyard. So, while we may be able to do it, we really need a partner who is local, because that is how these things should be.
35:07 Lalitha Krishnan: That’s really great. Shaunak, we are almost at the end of our conversation but before I let you go could you share a word or two that’s relevant for you that will improve our seaworthiness.
35:23 Shaunak Modi: I think we should start respecting the sea. There’s a lot that’s going wrong right now with our seas. We always hear about the sea in a negative way. We hear about it more in a negative way than a positive way whether it’s climate change or rising sea levels. There’s a lot that’s happening. Not a lot of it is easy to change or alter or reverse. But I think a good first step would be to respect the sea. Because we are if the sea lets us be. That’s all I would say.
36:00 Lalitha Krishnan: Thanks, Shaunak. That was poignant and relevant, and so interesting. Thank you so much.
Shaunak Modi: Thank you. This was a lovely chat. So much fun.
Shaunak at the shoreline in Mumbai. Photo courtesy Shaunak Modi
36:17 Lalitha Krishnan: I hope you enjoyed listening to Shaunak Modi as much as I have. Do check out CCF links and the whole transcript for this podcast right here on Earthy Matters. You can listen to Heart of Conservation on many platforms. You can also write to me at earthymatters013@gmail.com. I’m Lalitha Krishnan signing off. Till next time stay as safe as possible please and do subscribe for more episodes.
Birdsong by hillside resident, the collared owlet.
All photos including podcast cover photo courtesy of Shaunak Modi. Artwork: Lalitha Krishnan
Disclaimer: Views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the podcast and show notes belong solely to the guest featured in the episode, and not necessarily to the host of this podcast/blog or the guest’s employer, organization, committee or other group or individual.
Heart of Conservation Podcast. Ep #22 Part I Show Notes (Edited)
Lalitha Krishnan: Hi! I am Lalitha Krishnan and I am back after a very long time. You are listening to part one of episode #22 of Heart of Conservation podcast. This is season three. I bring you stories from the wild that keep us connected to our natural world. This episode focuses on bird life. I am speaking to three amazing women who are working for Nature Conservation Foundation, they manage and coordinate three programmes, Bird Count India, Early Bird and Nature Classrooms. Let’s find out what they’re all about.
A little warning. These interviews were conducted over Skype separately and they are not all of a consistent quality.
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Lalitha Krishnan:First, I am talking to Mittal Gala. She took the plunge into wildlife after several years of working a corporate job. She has worked at Agumbe, one of the wettest places in India, at a reptile zoo in Chennai and as the chief naturalist at an eagle lodge near Ranthambore National Park.
Lalitha Krishnan: Thank you so much for speaking to me on Heart of Conservation podcast Mittal.
Mittal Gala: Thank you, Lalitha
Lalitha Krishnan:So, you are a naturalist who runs Bird Count India at NCF, so can you explain what bird count is and your role?
Mittal Gala: Yes, so Bird Count India is an informal partnership of organizations and groups and then this includes government, non-government organizations, groups on Facebook, birding groups on Facebook, WhatsApp and naturalist birding communities, so with all of them we work together to increase their knowledge of bird distributions and the populations and Bird Count India aims to promote bird watching and bird monitoring with a view to generating knowledge and we do this through eBird. It’s a very useful tool to monitor birds.
Lalitha Krishnan:OK, so Mittal how did you start working for NCF?
Mittal Gala: So, for the last many years I have been birding but it was it was not until 2013 when I actually started looking at citizen science projects in India. I was introduced to this Citizen Science Sparrow where we conducted interviews with various public visiting the park that I was working and we were collecting information on sparrows because at that time it was believed that the sparrows are declining and we wanted to find out reasons and I was told that with this kind of documentation, scientists will be able to find out what is happening to sparrows, so that fascinated me a lot and then I started exploring other programmes in India that involve citizen science and I came across eBird and I think I’ve been using eBird for almost, since 2014 or so and then when there was an opportunity in Bird Count India to work with birds and promoting citizen science, I went for it.
Lalitha Krishnan:Great! Do you want to briefly tell us about eBird?
Mittal Gala:So eBird is one of the largest citizen science projects in the world that involves gathering information in the form of checklists, bird lists uploaded by birdwatchers. So many bird watchers like to keep a diary of the birds that they saw, where they saw it and how many they saw. So, all these lists were just gathering dust in their diaries, there were not being used for anything and when eBird became popular in India and the idea of having all this information put on a common platform and people started seeing this, it was a game-changer and a lot of birders got highly excited about it. A lot of old birders also went back to their diaries and then uploaded all their information on eBird. Like a digital diary that not only helps a birdwatcher to keep a record of his or her sightings but also helps the scientific community because all the information is gathered at one place for them to analyze and look at.
Lalitha Krishnan: Yeah, I think that’ll be useful for people who still haven’t used eBird.
Since the pandemic, a lot of people are just birding from their garden. They have got hooked to eBird on their phone so it’s very easy.
Lalitha Krishnan: Bird Count like you explained is pro citizen science right, so then give us a little detail about the projects that you all are working on.
Mittal Gala:A few years back if someone would have asked what is the most common bird in India there would not be a single answer to it. Everybody in different parts of the country will have different answers but now we have data to say that common mynah is the most common species in most parts of the country. This data is based on the list that gets uploaded during the great backyard bird count. It’s just based on this four-day data we were able to analyze to see what are the most common species, the most reported species in India across different regions, North, West, East, South and we found out that in most regions common mynah makes the top first species and this great backyard bird count happens every year in February with bird watchers across the world engaging in watching listening and listing birds through eBird and since this event is carried out around the same time of the year in February, it helps to create an annual real-time snapshot of bird distributions. This is a global event and it’s celebrated widely across the world but we also have national events and regional events following the same concept and yeah and a lot of interesting things come out when people participate in this event.
Lalitha Krishnan: So that’s interesting and so your regional and other events they would be spread out through the year, is it or is it around the same time?
Mittal Gala:No, most of the time it is, so for example, most of the time it is the harvest, some regions like Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Assam, they have it during the harvest festival, Pongal, Onam and Bihu bird count in Assam and then we have the national…BNHS has its Salim Ali Bird Count in October, yeah, during Salim Ali’s birthday, so yeah, it is you can say they are spread out but most of the events happen between October to March, I would say.
Lalitha Krishnan: OK, great! The monthly birding challenges also you have apart from all this. How well is that received?
Mittal Gala: The monthly challenges were designed to supplement the annual bird events and they were designed in a way that birdwatchers can keep a track of the birds they see on a regular basis, maybe on a daily basis. So for example in the winter months when we have a winter month that is December, January, our challenges are focused on the winter migrants that arrived in India from various parts of the globe and then again when it is too hot we have challenges where people can just be at one place, which is called stationary birding and they can make lists standing from one place from the garden or from the balcony and things like that. So, these monthly challenges also contribute towards our understanding of the distribution and abundance of birds. It also serves as a kind of motivation for many birdwatchers to go and observe birds regularly.
Lalitha Krishnan: Right, and specially I think now they must enjoy the number of birders must have increased, I am sure.
Mittal Gala: Yes, yes!
Lalitha Krishnan: So, what kind of groups or organisations of people approach you for help, you know, in studying birds of their locality?
Mittal Gala: So, we are approached by birding groups, mostly nonscientific organizations that are interested in training workshops on bird documentation and monitoring. We also support regional events as I talked about Pongal Bird Count in Tamil Nadu, Onam Bird Count in Kerala. So, initially, we used to help give support to these events but now over the years these events are doing so great they don’t need any help from us and we just help them to advertise that events on our platform, on our website but otherwise they are just doing well on their own and then many cities are interested in creating bird atlases.
I’m not sure if you’re aware of Bird Atlas of India. OK, so a bird atlas is a, is again a citizen science project intended to map the distribution and abundance of a region’s birds. So, in an active project, the region of interest is typically divided into cells that are often subdivided into smaller cells and then a design is created so that volunteer birdwatchers can go and do uniform sampling. So, Mysore city finished its two-year bird atlas and Kerala state had an amazing five-year bird atlas that just got finished, I think, maybe January this year or something and they are now working on the analysis. And Pune and Coimbatore just started their atlas, but with the pandemic, things are going a bit slow.
Lalitha Krishnan: Yeah sure yeah! Wow!
Mittal Gala: It is amazing to know that birders are interested to know what birds are migratory or what is the status in the city, they want to know each and every part of the city, they want to know what’s happening to their birds.
Lalitha Krishnan: It’s fascinating I myself amhearing my friends who are not, who probably don’t look at the birds, suddenly wondering what is this bird? Can you tell me what this is? You know and it’s so nice to hear that, not that I’m an expert but I do have books.
Mittal Gala: That’s really heartening to know because they started paying attention to these things which have always been around but ignored but now it’s nice to know that people are noticing it.
Lalitha Krishnan: Right, right! Do you also train birding guides?
Mittal Gala: Whenever possible. So, this is how it works, as I said people approach us to conduct workshops in their areas for the birding community and if when we are conducting such workshops we make sure that not only the bird watchers over there but if there are nature guides around they are also invited for those workshops and sometimes we also get approached by Forest Department. So, a few years ago we did a workshop for the guides from the Kanha Tiger Reserve and then recently we did workshops in East Sikkim where there were a lot of freelance birding guides who had attended this workshop and then in Rajasthan we did for the nature guide for the Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary and the guides for the Forest Department in Jaipur. So yes, we do train bird guides.
Lalitha Krishnan: This is so exciting for you also to travel to all these exotic places. Nice! Do you have any memorable moments you’d like to share with us?
Mittal Gala: Quite a few actually, so I would just share maybe a couple here. So at this place where I was working as a naturalist, this was in Ranthambore, so my lodge was quiet…it was outside the National Park but quite close, so we used to have wild animals walking in all the time. And I had been observing a pair of kingfishers that were nesting-this is in our lodge campus-and so I used to wake up early morning with my breakfast, go there and just wait to see with the first light what would the kingfishers do today? And at one point while I was watching them, at the corner of my eye I felt something is walking around and then I took my binoculars and I see that it is a small cat but it had spots on it and it happened to be a leopard cub.
Lalitha Krishnan: You are kidding me, Wow!
Mittal Gala: Well maybe the adult was around, maybe would have gone ahead or must be hiding somewhere but I saw the leopard cub, one single cub trotting along with this fallow land. So again, while birding I have passed a tiger, in a sitting… hiding behind grass, I had no idea and I had been just looking through my binoculars and I didn’t notice the tiger tracks on the path that I was walking and it was only when I turned around I saw my, the staff of the hotel telling me to come back because of the tiger in the grass.
Lalitha Krishnan: So birding has a lot of benefits, other benefits.
Mittal Gala: So yeah, you have to concentrate on the calls also, you have to make sure that you don’t miss any movement in the trees or around you, could be a bird so that makes you very, I mean, you are, your senses are active all the time and that’s when you see all the other things.
Lalitha Krishnan: Hmm! That’s really lovely actually, you’re so right, you stay still and you observe. Could you finally share word that’ll add to our birding vocabulary please?
Mittal Gala: Yeah, so one word which I learnt, a couple of years back, an interesting thing called ‘twitcher’. Twitcher is an obsessive list keeping birder who pursues rare birds discovered by others and sometimes these twitchers can go to great lengths to see that bird. They might just fly from one state to the other in few hours just to see that bird.
Lalitha Krishnan: Really!!
Mittal Gala: They are crazy birders.
Lalitha Krishnan: So that’s really a new word for me. So tell me people who lookat still looking for the Himalayan quail are they twitchers or are they optimistic?
Mittal Gala: If the bird is seen, for example, just a few months back there was a Red-breasted goose seen in Gujarat. Because of the pandemic lot of people in the rest of India couldn’t, but if there was no pandemic then people from Jammu or people from other states of North or sometimes Northeast would have taken a flight and gone to see it.
Lalitha Krishnan: Wow! I can imagine but I think at least they’re looking in our country, I feel we have so much diversity and you know when people go across continents to go to some National Park, you know, I keep saying hey there’s so much here come back, you know.
Lalitha Krishnan: Wow! I can imagine but I think at least they’re looking in our country, I feel we have so much diversity and you know when people go across continents to go to some National Park, you know, I keep saying hey there’s so much here come back, you know.
Mittal Gala: Yeah, that’s true.
Lalitha Krishnan: Anyway, this has been so great. Thank you so much!
Mittal Gala: Thank you Lalitha, I enjoyed it a lot.
Lalitha Krishnan: I’m now speaking with Garima Bhatia, she calls herself a chemical engineer by profession and a nature lover by passion. She followed her love for birds and joined the NCF and is now the project manager, education and public engagement, Early Bird programme. Garima, welcome to heart of conservation and thank you so much for being a guest on this show.
Garima Bhatia: Thank you so much Lalitha, it’s a pleasure to be here.
Lalitha Krishnan: Garima, let’s start with how you switched professions from engineering to more nature based ones.
Garima Bhatia: Sure Lalitha. So, I, as I, as you rightly mentioned I’m a chemical engineer by training and along the way, I got interested in bird watching as a hobby. And yes there were some seeds of it in early childhood because my father used to point out birds from our balcony, so while I was in an engineering job I got fascinated by birds and that’s mostly due to where I live in Bangalore. There was this huge abandoned lot where I would observe a number of colourful birds every morning and that got me interested again, and over time it just grew into an obsession really. So every holiday, every weekend whenever I had free time I would be out birding. So by the time, you know, it so happened that the company I was working for decided to close down its Bangalore operations and we were given three months of advance notice and to look for other jobs but then I decided that instead of looking for another engineering job I would try and do something related to my passion which was bird watching and travelling and I was also passionate about passing this on to the next generation. So one thing led to another and I joined NCS to start off this project called Early Bird which was six years ago.
Lalitha Krishnan: This is lovely Garima, you sort of opened the door for yourself and not many people are able to do that and to be able to work with nature is really nice. So are you the brain behind Early Bird? Tell me something about that.
Garima Bhatia: Yes. So I joined at the time, I was hired by Suhail who heads our programme in NCF, it’s called Education and Public engagement and this was a new project that he wanted to start off. And so I won’t say that I am alone, you know, solely the brain behind Early Bird, it’s a collaborative effort with Suhail and with lots of other people who helped along the way, joined the project and also a lot of partners on the ground. Because, we have always been a very small team, so we have a great network of well-wishers and supporters who give us feedback, who try out what we have developed and, you know, help us distributed it. So, it’s really been a collaborative effort in many ways.
Lalitha Krishnan: OK and could you tell me something more about Early Bird? What is the goal of this programme?
Garima Bhatia: So, when we started, this was six and a half years ago, we realized that bird watching is growing very fast as a hobby in India and we could see it in, you know, the number of people who were interested in birds, who were travelling to watch birds, the number of books that were coming out but we realized that there isn’t too much material for children. How do we pass on this wonderful hobby to children and get them excited? So, that was the motivation, you know, to try and get children excited about birds and the first step in doing so was to produce material that’s attractive, that’s very produced, that really get children hooked onto birds. So that was the start.
Lalitha Krishnan: That’s a great start. I also read something you have called the birding buddies and training the trainers, so would you like to tell us something about that?
Garima Bhatia: Yeah, so eventually we realized that you know, as a small team we don’t have that much reach, we really can’t do too many engagements directly with children but what we can do to amplify our impact is to train the teachers and the educators who really work with children on the ground. So we started this series of workshops called ‘how to be a birding buddy’ and these were meant actually not just for teachers but for any amateur birdwatcher because, you know, as birdwatchers we often get requests from our friends and family, you know, people we know in our neighbourhood to take children on a bird walk or children and adults or to come and give a talk about birds and, you know, what is it that one can really do to pass this on to children. So we designed a workshop where we take the participant through, you know, different techniques tips and tricks that they can use to get children excited about birds and it’s a lot more than just knowing how to identify birds, there are various different techniques to use, there is art, there is poetry, change and you know all kinds of creative techniques to use. So, we designed this workshop a few years back and we recently had an online version of this workshop because in the past year we haven’t been able to conduct any one on one sessions really, so a couple of weeks back was our first online birding buddy workshop and we hope to offer more of these going forward.
Lalitha Krishnan: Alright! That must have been quite a change, so how was it received?
Garima Bhatia: So, it was received quite well we had a lot of interest and the advantage of an online workshop is that you know, anyone can join from anywhere. So, we had a large number of applicants but we had to select a smaller group because, you know, while online we can host a much bigger group but our workshops are usually interactive and we like people to really talk to each other and share their experiences. So, we selected a small group of 30 educators, so most of them were actually teachers at different schools and many of them were people who are involved in nature education either in a voluntary capacity or through some organization that conducts awareness and outreach.
Lalitha Krishnan: With the pandemic I’m sure all your workshops must have come to a complete halt. So then what do you all guys do?
Garima Bhatia: Yeah, so with the pandemic, you know, we were really constrained in terms of not being able to conduct any events and also our partners who work with children were not able to conduct events, schools were closed and nobody was conducting bird walks. So we decided to do a series of online sessions about birds and we realized that there was a lot of interest in birds because people were homebound and suddenly started observing nature around them. So, there was a lot of interest in watching birds and nature, so we started a series of webinars and we’ve conducted 33 sessions in the last year in five different languages. And they start from a very introductory kind of level where you introduce two birds and the sounds around you, to sessions by scientists who speak about their work in very simple terms that even a child c could understand. So, we did a series of these webinars which are all available on our YouTube channel.
Lalitha Krishnan: For those of you who are listening, do check it out and I’d love to join a future webinar so yeah do let me know.
Garima Bhatia: So actually there’s been a lot of, there have been a lot of requests to us to restart the webinars, so initially, in the initial few months of the pandemic we did a lot of sessions but after a while, you know, every organization was conducting webinars and there was what seemed like an overload of online sessions, so we decided to give a break and take a step back but we may do, you know, maybe once in two months going forward, a session from a scientist talking about something interesting.
Lalitha Krishnan: That’s fascinating and interesting Garima, I wish you luck. I also wanted to ask you where can I find, you know, other resources?
Garima Bhatia: So, we have a website where we have a number of resources that are available for free download. And there are games that children can play, individual games as well as group games that a teacher can use in the classroom. There are interactive posters on birds of different habitats where you can really learn about their calls and these are available in nine different languages. We have print materials also that can be purchased, but our website is www.early-bird.in and that’s where you can find all of these. We are also very active on social media so you can look this up on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and of course our YouTube channel.
Lalitha Krishnan: Thanks for that Garima. I also wanted to ask you do you have any advice for birders, you know, most of us are still in our balconies not venturing too far and the seasons are changing, the birds are nesting, so do you have any advice for birders especially those with cameras and who might have something interesting going on just outside the window?
Garima Bhatia: Yeah, well my advice would be to start noticing, you know, even common birds that are around us because often now photographers are always searching for that new species that they haven’t seen before or some, you know, exotic bird but there’s a lot of beauty right around us and, you know, wildlife exists around us. So, to become a little more aware of that. And as we get into the summer and the monsoon so a lot of resident birds start nesting, so that can be fascinating to watch if you’re lucky enough to have a nest of a sunbird, a tailorbird in your neighbourhood but the advice would be to keep a distance and, you know, the welfare of the bird should always come first and that’s the cardinal rule of birding.
Lalitha Krishnan: Garima I just heard a bird behind you agreeing wholeheartedly. So Garima I have one last question, could you share a word related to birding, if possible, that would help us increase our vocabulary.
Garima Bhatia: Yes, I have one, it’s not one word, it’s two words. It’s a brood parasite. So a brood parasite is a species that relies upon another species to bring up its young and in the world of birds we have a lot of brood parasites around us and they are the cuckoo family and the most common one is the Asian koel which is spread across India and what’s fascinating about it is that it lays its eggs in the nest of another bird usually a crow’s nest. And the crow or the other target species brings up the chicks not knowing that, you know, it’s some somebody else’s egg that they are helping to incubate and hatch and bring up the babies. So that’s my word for the day.
Lalitha Krishnan: Thanks Garima! I have also seen pictures of, you know, these cuckoos laying their eggs in the nests of really small birds and it’s fascinating and how these little birds are feeding these chicks that are really double their size sometimes.
Garima Bhatia: So yeah, absolutely, and actually it’s really fascinating because the reason for that is that the cuckoo tries to match the colour of its eggs to the colour of the host species’ eggs, so that, you know, they won’t find out that there’s an extra egg because they all look the same. So, it turns out that, you know, sometimes those host species are much smaller birds, you know, I think the evolutionarly, they are evolved to, you know, to ignore any visual differences and maybe they just think of they have a really special offspring that looks different from all other offsprings.
Lalitha Krishnan: They won’t be the first species to want super kids, right! Anyway, thank you so much Garima it’s been so interesting talking to you.
Garima Bhatia: Thank you Lalitha, it was a pleasure talking to you.
Lalitha Krishnan: I hope you enjoyed this episode, stayed tuned for Part 2. I am Lalitha Krishnan and you are listening to Heart of Conservation. You can read the show notes on my blog Earthymatters. You can also write to me at earthymatters013@gmail.com. Heart of Conservation is available on several platforms, so do check it out and till next time stay safe and keep listening.
Birdsong by hillside resident, the collared owlet.
Disclaimer: Views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the podcast and show notes belong solely to the guest featured in the episode, and not necessarily to the host of this podcast/blog or the guest’s employer, organization, committee or other group or individual.
Photos courtesy: Mittal Gala and Garima Bhatia. Artwork: Lalitha Krishnan. Special thanks to Akshay Shah who helped transcribe the show notes.
Let’s Talk about Thano. Ep 21 Lokesh Ohri. Abhijay Negi. Sanjay Sondhi. Show notes (Edited).
Lalitha Krishnan: Hi, I’m Lalitha Krishnan and you’re listening to Season three, Episode 21 of the Heart of Conservation podcast. I bring you stories from the wild that keep us connected with the natural world. This episode is about the Thano forest in the Doon valley (Uttarakhand- the state where I live.) This forest in Dehradun has been in the news lately because the Uttarakhand government has sought the National Wildlife Board’s approval to transfer 243 acres of forest land to the Airports Authority of India. The what, where and why are questions everyone wants answered. You can hear the facts from three prominent Doon citizens who are my guests on this episode. Lokesh Ohri is an anthropologist, historian, writer, and a cultural activist & also the founder of BTDT which is the ‘Been There Doon That’ group. Abhijay Negi is a young activist-lawyer, also the founder of MAD which stands for Making a Difference. Both are active drivers of the #savethano movement. I am also speaking with Sanjay Sondhi, who is a well-known naturalist, founder of the Titli Trust, and community development and livelihood expert.
Lalitha Krishnan: Lokesh Ohri,Thank you for speaking with me. With reference to your article in the (Daily) Pioneer, you heard about these plans way back in 2003. This expansion will flatten a large chunk of the Thano forest. Could you start by telling us what transpired in that conversation? I think it’s important to know the history.
Lokesh Ohri: Yes, so it was a meeting for tourism stakeholders which was happening in the Tourism Dept. and because I do several projects with the Tourism Dept. I was part of that meeting. The chief minister was also part of that meeting. He was addressing all of us. At that point in time, the Union civil aviation minister walked in. It was unscheduled. He was probably visiting Dehradun and he decided to call on the chief minister right there at that meeting. And, that’s where I first heard about this plan of expanding the airport and having the night landing facilities, because until now, Dehradun airport does not have night landing facilities.
Lalitha Krishnan: That’s right.
Lokesh Ohri: We don’t have a lit-up runaway, we only have flights in the day time. So that was the time when the state’s civil aviation secretary first introduced this idea that perhaps we could have night-landing facilities and we could expand the airport. So, the minister questioned him about why they wanted to do it. The reasoning he gave at that point in time was that at times there’s a lot of congestion at the Delhi airport, So Dehradun being just 45 flying-mins away from Delhi, probably, the aircraft could here and give some additional business to the state. So that argument was rebutted by the (civil aviation) minister saying that these services would not be required because very close to Delhi we have a place called Greater Noida…in Jewar…we’re already building India’s biggest international airport. Even bigger than the Indira Gandhi Terminal which is the Delhi airport. So, all the night landing…if there is congestion or if there is fog in Delhi–which there is during winter-time, there is a lot of fog in Delhi—so, visibility being poor, the flights cannot land. So, he suggested that perhaps they could perhaps take a call later on. At that point in time, one of us realized that the expansion would happen at the expense of the forest. Right now, the airport abuts, you know, two areas. One is the Thano forest area and the other area on the other side, toward the western side is already an agricultural area. As long as the airport expands in the agricultural area and people get compensated for the land the govt. acquires, we don’t have any issue…we don’t mind expansion of the airport. But we are concerned about the 10,000 trees that will fall for this planned expansion. This has only come to light now because once we have seen the environmental impact assessment report of the National Airports Authority and then we’ve come to realise that this is what the government is planning. And that raises the hackles.
Lalitha Krishnan: I know. Doon citizens have been working for years to save the rivers. The Rispana has been given a special ‘perirenal stream’ status
Lokesh Ohri: Yes.
Lalitha Krishnan: And this proposed airport also, if constructed will be close to the Song river. The implications of this for the river, for wildlife for all life around it, would be quite huge.
Lokesh Ohri: Yes, definitely. It’s a huge cost involved.
Lalitha Krishnan: Right. There’s also talk of the airport not only being used for commercial flights, parking of the aircrafts in the night and stuff but also for use by the air-force- both of which according to you is really not necessary because there’s another (air-force) airport/base close by.
Lokesh Ohri: That’s a veracious argument. I think all the projects being undertaken in Uttarakhand now…so the moment people start opposing them, they use this, you know, a smokescreen to say that it’s because of national security. And all these people who are crying about the environment and ecology, these people are posing a security risk to the nation. So, I just wanted to counter that argument. What is the security issue? What about India’s water security? Because if the Song gets polluted, and the Song contaminates the Ganga, then one-tenth of humanity is at risk because the Ganga supports one-tenth of humanity in terms of its water requirements.
Lalitha Krishnan:True.
Lokesh Ohri: Now, we already have two air-force bases. We have an air-force base at Sarsawa, near Saharanpur which is like, you know… an air-force aircraft takes about eight minutes to reach Dehradun from Sarsawa. We have another big air-force base near Delhi. I think…so most of these fighter aircrafts are super-sonic, stuff like that. They take a very, very short time to reach the Himalayan frontiers. So, if we already have air-force bases which already have air-force materials, how is a commercial airport going to help the security of the nation? That is something I don’t understand.
Lalitha Krishnan: Point. If it’s already there, why (build) another one?
Lokesh Ohri: So, I’m saying, because we already have these two air-force bases and we have air-fields much closer to the border…so we have two airfields, one, right in Pithoragarh and one in Gauchar which cover Garhwal and Kumaon—which are the regions on the India-China frontier. So, expanding the runaway in Dehradun means you are expanding it only for airbus flights to land. Now airbus flights are essentially commercial flights. They have no security angle to them. Now we have been talking to various agencies, like agencies under the Ministry of Environments and Forests. The sense I am getting from Delhi is that Uttarakhand as a state has been the most reckless in terms of forwarding proposals for infrastructure. They have not looked at the wildlife angle. They have not looked at the forest angle. And, they are very callous about the ecological angles. I am getting information that even states like Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim which are much more precariously placed in India, in terms of security issues…they still look at the environmental costs in great detail. In the case of the airport in Dehradun, the forest land has been transferred to the National Airports Authority by making just one reference to the environmental angle saying that: “in conversations with forest officials it was found that no Schedule I species were found in the forest.
Lalitha Krishnan: Yes. That’s amazing because it’s an Elephant Reserve. What were they thinking?
Lokesh Ohri: Why did they name it Shivalik Elephant Reserve if no elephants are found there? It is common knowledge. Even when we went to the protests, we saw deer marks on the sand. There are so many research papers that say that this is the last surviving habitat of the Great Slaty Woodpecker.So, the Great Slaty Woodpecker is the largest woodpecker species found in the world—it’s the largest bird among all the woodpeckers in the world. The Thano forest is the last surviving habitat for the Great Slaty Woodpecker. And, you know, this is a highly endangered species. And even when we look at Schedule I, it has the elephant, it has peafowl; and all these species are very commonly seen in the Thano forest. Any person who has walked through the forest can tell you that these species are found there. So, what were they thinking, who was consulted? They said, “We have consulted forest officials”. They did not even name forest officials. That’s why I wrote in the article that if they had named forest officials, these forest officials should be sacked. If a forest official does not even know what Schedule I is, then how is he expected to know the other schedules. And it’s their job to protect the forests. That’s what they are paid for. That’s what they are trained for.
Lalitha Krishnan:What you said is so true in many ways. We are creating tourism infrastructure by destroying the very experience a visitor seeks.
Lokesh Ohri:Yes, it’s very ironical.
Lalitha Krishnan: Also, very sad. What next? When are they going to make this decision?
Lokesh Ohri: Actually, they still need approvals from two key bodies, from the government. So we are working on a strategy that we should raise that much noise that these permissions do not come through. But, given Uttarakhand’s track record…they don’t even wait for the final approvals to come and they start work on the project. We have seen that in the case of the Char Dham Mahamarg project: 4 lane highways going all the way up to Badrinath, Kedarnath, (Gangotri and Yamunotri). They did not even conduct an environmental impact assessment report and just went ahead with construction. So, given that track record, we are also keeping all legal options open. We are collecting the data; we are consulting the lawyers. A lot of groups in Dehradun have come together. For the first time, I am seeing that all the environmentally conscious, socially conscious groups have come together and we are all working in a coordinated way so that a legal option is also ready.
Lalitha Krishnan:That’s good to hear. That’s hope. And I hope the Jolly grant stays the way it is. It’s so quaint and lovely. There’s a sense of homecoming when you reach there unlike these big commercial airports. Thank you so much for your time and for enlightening us about what’s happening on the ground.
Lokesh Ohri: You’re welcome.
Lalitha Krishnan: Thanks Abhijay for speaking to me on the Heart of Conservation podcast.
Abhijay Negi: Most welcome and thank you for having me.
Lalitha Krishnan: My pleasure. As the activist founder of MAD which stands for Making A Difference by being the difference, you have spearheaded several environmental causes including river rejuvenation, wall transformations, plantation activities, earthquake relief operations, etc. You are an original Doon resident. Now with the proposed expansion of the Doon airport, up to 10,000 trees, they’re saying, could be chopped down. This must be very close to your heart…as a resident of Doon. What does Thano mean for you? I thought let me ask you that first.
Protest Photo Courtesy MAD
Abhijay Negi: So, Thano means to me and to every nature-loving Doonite…one of the last remaining green spaces where you could hear birds talking in their own language, where you can spot the occasional deer. Where you can just be lost in the awe of nature and be at one with your inner self. People called Dehradun the city of grey hair and green hedges. It was meant to be this kind of a conservation bastion for the country, for the state. It was not a burden imposed on Dehradun. It came naturally to the Doon valley because it was a valley. If you look at Dehradun district or the Doon valley, it is uniquely placed between two major river systems of India. Ganga is on its east and Yamuna is on its west. When we talk of Ganga, four tributaries go into this river, and one of these main tributaries, which is the Song river comes and cuts across right through Thano. Maldevta is also very close by. Thano is very close to the Rajaji National park and acts likes a natural bump (lost in translation) to it. That entire route to Rishikesh via Thano is also one of the most beautiful drives the city residents can find. So Thano means a lot to any nature-loving Doonite and therefore this crazy, crazy plan deserves to be opposed tooth and nail.
Lalitha Krishnan: Right. It is the prettiest stretch. Even going to the airport …it’s so lovely to drive through that forest. I’m always looking out to see if I will spot any wildlife and invariably, I see some beautiful birds, you know, and it makes my day. So, this approval hasn’t come as yet from the…
Abhijay Negi: National Board of Wildlife
Lalitha Krishnan: …and MAD and other concerned citizens have held protests to oppose this expansion. It’s been compared to the Chipko movement, right? So, tell me something about it. How did it start? How did you organise and get so many people to participate?
Abhijay Negi: Yes,one thing about MAD, if I can give you a small context, the organisation started functioning in 2011. And more than an organisation it is like a movement. Much before this entire talk about Swachh Bharat, we as teenagers who had just passed out from school had got together, pooled in our resources, and started organising activities every Sunday—because that was the time when we free. And, we used our own pocket money resources to conduct these activities.
Gradually, with time, we started realising that just us cleaning waste or us planting trees is not going to solve systemic or chronic issues which is why we needed to work on policy. Even before this Thano movement, MAD has been successful in protecting the teas estates in Doon valley near Premnagar where an equally foolish and hellish plan was being discussed which was to concretize the tea gardens of Doon valley. And, to replace the lush green tea estates with repulsive structures in the name of a ‘smart city’. So, we at that time, in 2016, had campaigned that we should first be making the existing city smart instead of trying to be the most unsmart people and concretise green areas.
In addition to that we have also been successful in pressuring the then Chief Minister of Uttarakhand—and directly so– because we went and met him -Mr. Harish Rawat in reversing the cycle ban in Mussoorie. Imagine, they were banning cycling. We had some success with that. So, this is probably the third or fourth major policy initiative of the government which we are opposing. I wouldn’t count the river rejuvenation here because that is something we are proposing. So, it is not just a group of opposition. Many people who are our detractors look at us as permanent pessimists. No. We do oppose anything and everything that has no green footprint. Which has no green thought. But that doesn’t mean we are people who are opposing things. Now coming back to Thano specifically, we have a very large volunteer base of around 50-60 youngsters who themselves get activated on such issues. And I would really, Lalithaji, attract your attention to some of the visuals of the Thano protest where you will see that all the banners that MAD volunteers carried…they were all carrying cloth banners.
Lalitha Krishnan: Yes, I noticed that.
Abhijay Negi: We didn’t use any plastic banners. We were wearing our masks, we were very conscious, and then too, we were on the streets because this required to be challenged. It was not just MAD as you rightly noticed. Several organisations, individuals turned (up) on their own for something like this. And, we will do it many times. All of us are loosely in touch. We are coordinating amongst ourselves (to) what should be the next step. MAD for one, has been organising daily nukad-nataks outside Gandhi park—I just got back from one this evening. We will be having one tomorrow, the day after. We are also planning a series of other protests. We are having meetings. We had one with the Principal Chief Conservator of Forests—a pretty disappointing one—none the less, we had one and we had one with the Uttarakhand Biodiversity Board. And we have urged the biodiversity board to into this situation. So, we are doing all that we can to stop this both on the street and off it.
Lalitha Krishnan: That’s incredible. I was reading somewhere that you attended an internship in an ashram in Thano run by senior lawyer Mr. Mehta, is that right? I wasn’t sure what internship that was. Would you like to speak about it?
Abhijay Negi: Yes. In fact, I’m glad that you brought it up. It was in June 2015 that Mr. M C Mehta who is India’s most renowned environmental lawyer; he organised this camp at an ashram that he owns in Thano. There, we went for birdwatching…it was an experience of a kind where we were one with nature. We went into the forest, into the jungle, we heard the birds, spotted the deer, weren’t very lucky with the panther (aka leopard), but never the less we could always sense it around. That is how I can tell you that I know that place first hand. It is a beautiful place. That is why it is very sad for us to hear the Chief minister… The day before yesterday, he said, it’s a political conspiracy. He labelled all our efforts as a political conspiracy. And, it’s very sad that in the 21st century, for a hill state created on environmental issues—as one of the important issues why this state was created. And here we have a chief minister who would probably have even labelled the Chipko movement a political conspiracy. So anything that is celebrated worldwide would be a political conspiracy to him. He doesn’t even make the effort to understand these issues and that’s why we are trying to sensitize the forest dept., the Biodiversity Board… It’s just looking at it from the context of cutting and felling trees. It’s not just the trees. It’s an entire ecosystem you are jeopardising. It’s the air of the valley. Nobody’s stopping them from going into Doiwala and buying private land. Please buy private land and expand your airport as you please. But, why do you have to so easily and readily come into the Thano forest like this?
Lalitha Krishnan: What is the timeline here. What next? There’s a petition for it already.
Abhijay Negi: We are alert and prepared for any eventuality. If we get to know that they are actually getting on the ground with any tree felling our 100s of volunteers will be rushing there and stopping it be so physically. The second thing is we are preparing legally for all the steps we have to take. So far, we are still waiting to hear from the National Wildlife Board. We are trusting our institutions and we hope that the Uttarakhand Biodiversity Board specifically will play a role here. (It) will step up to save the biodiversity of the area that the government is so eagerly willing to put on the axe. We are also working with other like-minded organisations since this is genuinely a city effort. Several organisations are up in arms against it and we are coordinating with each one of them. At the same time, we are also working to get into a dialogue with this government. We plan to call upon the relevant bureaucrats, relevant ministers, if possible, even the chief minister to put forward our point of view and to request them to roll it back. So, we will do everything in our power.
Lalitha Krishnan: Good to know. One more question. Does your activism come in the way of your career as a lawyer?
Abhijay Negi: Yes, that is why…I wanted to have this conversation myself in the afternoon. It does come in the way of my lawyering sometimes. If we do file a public interest ligation where I am representing the cause, then all the interviews and everything will stop. I restrict myself to the courtroom as our legal ethics require. I have been involved in several public interest litigations, even for environmental causes. One of them…we’ve got a stay on any construction activity between the Rajpur area of Doon valley which is on…………. (lost in translation), a stay on any blasting activity in the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve. We also have worked on the health care system in Uttarakhand wherein an ongoing public interest litigation we’ve asked all primary health centres, community health centres, and district hospitals to submit to a questioner that we have prepared. We asked them if they have the basics of health care. So, these are issues I am actively grappling (lost in translation) within the courtroom…in the Nainital High Court. So of course, I can’t generate public opinion on them as much as I might want to but since the organisation is involved here, and we are very, very ably led by Mr. Karan Kapoor who is the current president, who has been working very hard in facilitating all these meetings. And with several volunteers, who are also up and doing the job, the movement goes on.
Lalitha Krishnan: I wish you all the best for your career and your activism and thank you for your efforts.
Abhijay Negi: Thank you for having me Lalithaji.
Lalitha Krishnan: My pleasure. This is close to my heart too because the thought of it (Thano ) disappearing forever is not acceptable.
Great slaty woodpecker photo courtesy Sanjay Sondhi
Lalitha Krishnan: Sanjay, thank you so much for speaking with me on the Heart of Conservation podcast. As a naturalist, I’m sure you’ve gone to the Thano forest a zillion times. Could you tell us a little about its biodiversity, the species, or what it is you love about it?
Sanjay Sondhi: So, you know, we’ve been going to Thano on multiple occasions in the last decade and I think close to Dehradun, it’s one of the best bird-watching sites you can have. In fact, in recognition of this, its bird diversity, the 5th Uttarakhand Spring Bird Festival was held from 9th-11th March by the Uttarakhand Forest Dept. and during the festival, we released the Preliminary Checklist of Birds of Thano. At that point in time, the checklist was 175 birds. Of course, this is just a preliminary list because even during the festival, we added another 6 or 7 species. My estimate is that it would have more than 250 species if properly surveyed. It’s incredible.
Lalitha Krishnan: That’s incredible. And there’s so much there than just birds. The forest itself…the trees over there…what species of trees are more common.
Sanjay Sondhi: The forest itself, it’s a lot a broad-leaved forest. There’s a lot of sal over there. It’s a great spot for woodpeckers. I’m sure other people have also mentioned that it’s one of the few locations close to Dehradun where the Great Slaty woodpecker can be sighted.
Lalitha Krishnan: Which is (IUCN) vulnerable, right?
Sanjay Sondhi: Which is IUCN Vulnerable listed. Absolutely. You will not believe it that if you go to Thano, and you stand just in front of the forest rest house, just standing beside the road, you will spot between 30 – 35 species in the forest around. Just standing in one single location. That’s the kind of avian richness the forest has.
You’re right, it’s not just birds. There are butterflies, there’s a lot of other stuff which actually hasn’t been properly documented. The butterflies… has just been opportunistic. We’re out there for a bird walk and whatever butterflies we see we document. But the quality of forest in that area is such that it’s clearly a biodiversity hotspot. And, to be cutting that to build an airport which is not required is just a travesty of justice I think. Somebody said we need fresh air. We don’t need more planes and another airport.
Lalitha Krishnan: Yes, and nobody is talking about the noise pollution that airports create or an international airport would.
Sanjay Sondhi: Correct.
Lalitha Krishnan: But Thano is not a designated hotspot is it?
Sanjay Sondhi: No, I don’t think there’s a formal designation as a hot spot but…There are designated important bird areas…I don’t think it is even designated as an important bird area but solely by the number of species that we see…and not just birds but other things…it’s a very, very rich biodiversity hotspot which is so close to Dehradun and so easily accessible.
Lalitha Krishnan: Right. Sanjay we’ve covered the wildlife, but you also wanted to speak about the people in and around Thano.
Sanjay Sondhi: I said, Thano is such a biodiverse area and if we develop it properly, it has such a great potential for birdwatching, homestays with benefits going to the local community. In fact, Titli Trust-that’s our NGO and Cedar, jointly we are running a nature guide training programme for rural youth which extends from Thano to…………jheel and it’s a 2-year programme where we’re training local youth in that area to become bird guides and nature guides in the hope that it becomes a livelihood opportunity plus they are strongly focused on conservation because if the biodiversity is not there, they won’t earn anything from nature guiding. And the response has been great. There have been lots of people who have joined and the youth is very enthused because they see this as a win-win where they earn from the area’s biodiversity and they also help conserving.
Lalitha Krishnan: And they can stay at home rather than leave the state
Sanjay Sondhi: Absolutely. And the benefit goes to the local community who belong to that area. What could be better than that?
Lalitha Krishnan: Right. Absolute win-win.
Sanjay Sondhi: There’s no better incentive for conservation than livelihoods that they can earn living in or near their home.
Lalitha Krishnan: It’s a great initiative. Thank you for this Sanjay.
( I hope enjoyed episode 21 of the Heart of Conservation podcast. I’m Lalitha Krishnan. You can read the show notes on my blog: Earthy matters. If you want to know more about the Thano movement, or about the work my guests do there’s lots of information on the net. You can also hear my podcast on Spotify, Apple podcast, or other platforms of your choice. Till next time, stay safe and keep listening.)
Heart of Conservation podcast Ep#18 Show notes (edited)
Lalitha Krishnan:Hi. I’m Lalitha Krishnan and you’re listening to episode 18 of Heart of Conservation podcast. I bring you stories from the wild that keep you connected with our natural world. This monsoon has turned everything green and fresh and wild again, maybe a bit too wild for some of us. S,o what do you do when you see a weed occupying space with your favorite flower? Fling it aside, right? I pretty much do the same, I actually find weeding quite therapeutic. But how can you be sure you’re getting rid of the right plant? My guest today will enlighten us about the ordinary weed. She is Nina Sengupta an ecologist who lives in Auroville and works around the globe as an independent consultant, integrating biodiversity conservation and sustainable development options. She’s worked in South & Southeast Asia, Africa, Finland, and the USA. She’s passionate about food forest, food gardening, art, films, and making life science active and participatory for all. She’s also published a coloring book for adults, the first of its kind on edible weeds.
Lalitha Krishnan:Thank you so much for coming on Heart of Conservation podcast and am excited to talk to you. I will start with a very basic question. So, what is urban foraging and how did you get into it.
Nina Sengupta: Get into it is entirely by chance but what is urban foraging? What is foraging? Let me explain that, that may help. Foraging involves searching, wandering and collecting food on your own from the wild or where it grows naturally but for free typically the items that are foraged are vegetables, fruits, roots, honey, and edibles but if you look at it ecologically, the theory foraging involves two key decisions of the foragers – what do forage and where to forage and for most animals who are surviving in the wild, wild animals, these are the two very critical decisions. So up until you know about 10,000 years back when humans started agriculture, humans were hunter-gatherers, and out for a lot of their survival they depended on their skills to forage. So urban foraging is nothing but within the concrete jungle of urban areas that you find areas where things are growing wild, where you can forage or collect your food or greens or whatever you choose to, sometimes it’s also flowers for beautification but also definitely food items for free, for yourself, not for selling, you know, for yourself. That’s the key thing about foraging.
Lalitha Krishnan: That’s interesting! I never thought of flowers as foraging but you so right and also to me, you know, foraging has always been a western concept, you know, you hear people picking mushrooms and strawberries and stuff like that in the woods. But I am sure in our country in rural areas, people with traditional knowledge do this all the time regularly and already and I’m sure their kids also, you know, know what is edible and what’s not. So I’m curious in urban India when you’re talking of foraging and for free is this, you think, is a recreational activity or are the people doing this regularly?
Nina Sengupta: Let me address this whole idea of the western concept, the term foraging is perhaps what we have tagged to a certain recreationally activity which is primarily coming to us from the West but, you know, if you really step back from it, how can gathering food that is seasonal, accessible and you can get it for free, how can that not be part of any culture and in any century really. So, you know, once I worked with a tribal group in India and one person, I clearly remember him saying, he kind of famously made a statement; that as long as the forest lives tribal people will not starve, you know, so I kind of remember, like it was amazing to me, because then I kind of thought that I am not there, I mean, where he is and there’s a huge truth to that and if you really look into the, you know, traditional village life you have there are people who would say, you know, after school they would come by while coming back home they will pick up this and this, this and that which they learned from their parents what to pick and those are the greens they seasonally picked. So, picking where, you know, it was not recreational at all, it was often not poverty-driven either. It was part of the lifestyle whereas if you right now look at, you know, what the foraging is, in the urban areas you find people who are consciously shifting to a healthier lifestyle. They are getting into foraging and those are, I won’t say recreational, it’s really going back to a more sensitive way of living but you can call it, you know, borderline recreational too but you also find, you know, people who are foraging when they have the access to, urban poor, those who actually forage to supplement their income. I always find this, you know, amazing this – typically old ladies who would come to the fringes of a market. They never get probably a place in the market but they would have their fares on the footpath, next to the footpath, in little portions, no weight or nothing and they always bring the seasonal, you know, greens and seasonal this and that, very small portions of each. Now what they’re doing is basically they are foraging, they are foraging for themselves and a little bit extra they go and sell for this little extra money. There is some kind of seasonal weed-like what you call chickweed (Portulaca quadrifida) this you actually rarely ever find in any of the supermarkets or any of the, you know, formal shops, you always find seasonally with these ladies. So, we do have a tradition of foraging, even urban foraging, but yes, the middle-class foraging perhaps came to us from the West.
Lalitha Krishnan: Right. When you speak about it, I do remember seeing, you know, women with very little selling these greens and I always presumed it was from their garden but it’s interesting that they probably foraged it. So, Nina, in a city where would one, you know, I mean without being specific, what is an ideal spot to start forging in the city.
Nina Sengupta: My recommendation would be – the first step to foraging is recognizing. In your city if you have weed walks, like the one I conduct and many cities do actually, it’s best to join them because if you are new to this, not just once, join it as many times as possible until you recognize a handful say 5-6 of them almost like second nature, like you know, kind of see that and you know it is that. Now where you are seeing and recognizing it may not be the ideal place for collecting it because often these are in the cities, these are next to the gutter or next to a leaky pipe, or pretty terribly bad polluted water but these are actually quite excellent places to see them, know them, and recognize them. It’s actually a good source of collecting seeds because you cannot collect and eat them because these plants also often bio-accumulate & bio-concentrate which means that if they’re growing in polluted water they are actually would concentrate those and heavy metals and pollution in them, so you definitely don’t want to collect and eat where you are not very sure that the water is relatively clean. So in an urban area, once you have recognized and if you’re going for a guided walk you will already know where you know it’s a safe place to collect but otherwise, you know, you say you are very confident of 5-6 plants that you are sure you can collect, then look at the fringes of the gardens even the edges of a flowering bed often, you know, where they get a lot of TLC -tender loving care every day the Flowers and all that get but you know the edges of that they start getting a little wild and start getting, you know, other plants which are not intentional, these are the places where it is absolutely safe to collect from and if you know that what they are you can. And sometimes, like you know each area in India for example has a primary seasonal flowering time. Once the garden kind of gets over there is a period when it says lull, know there is not the next, you know, set of plants hasn’t been planted, these are also the absolutely ideal time to forage because the weeds kind of takes over and it’s very easy to pick them at that time and you’re also very sure that they are safe.
Lalitha Krishnan: Wow! That’s interesting. Nina, I hope you’re going to be free after COVID time because I don’t know anyone else who takes people out on weed walks. Is there a network of people who do that or is, I think, it’s only you?
Nina Sengupta: I think is there somebody I mean there are lots of this you know pop up lunches and dinners where they do farm to plate kind of thing, you know, so I am just guessing when they’re doing farm to plate some of the things that they’re collecting, I am hoping, they’re also wild and not necessarily the vegetables but yes I know I didn’t realize that I was only one but you know hopefully not, hopefully, we are a tribe.
Lalitha Krishnan: And, you know, you’re also talking about foraging being free but, you know, free for us but is there a law, is it legal, I mean, could you be arrested for eating wood sorrel or would you be doing a city a favor by clearing the weeds out?
Nina Sengupta: In India, really, who cares what (plants) you eat or as long as what you eat is not commercially super attractive or declared a narcotic. If it’s not either of this category whether, you know, I have, you know; whether I’m surviving on wood sorrel or something else really, you know, nobody, to me it feels like, that they have the time to but there’s an interesting anecdote I must share with you. There is a particular solanum like you know Solanaceae which is in the nightshade family is usually you don’t eat the leaves usually, you know, people kind of stay away from it, but there is a particular Solanaceae which is a lot in Solanum nigrum which is very, very nutritious, wonderful to eat and tasty and all that and I, it is it’s quite popular in South India, even though the plant grows anywhere actually pantropical not only everywhere in India but you know beyond, it is not something very popular elsewhere in India. So I went to Calcutta and I see that I am eyeing, that right all along on both sides of the road I’m walking there this Solanum nigrum is fruiting, beautiful, lush and nobody is collecting because nobody eats them and I have eyed them and eyed them for several days as I walked up and down. And then one day I decided I’d stop and just take some fruits as you know seeds so that you know I bring them back and plant them and as soon as I start collecting them, there were lots of benevolent people who just kind of crowded around me and said “Madam don’t, don’t you are going to die” so I must say that they were very sweet, very concerned people who were very bothered that what I eat I might, you know, might kill me but otherwise there is no particular law to stop me from eating something which is I collect, not that I have encountered but I don’t think so.
Lalitha Krishnan: Tell me why do you forage? Is it just for the pleasure of I,t for the taste and also what do you get what do you get from it personally and also what would you forage for, you did mention a few?
Nina Sengupta: Actually to begin with it, I mean I primarily again it still is, it’s fun, it’s a sense of discovery and there’s a wow factor because there is that sense of discovery and if you see something beautiful, you know, you inhale a chest full of air in wonder and that wonder-appreciation of nature is quite priceless and it almost does not happen it doesn’t matter if ultimately I get to pick something, you know, I think or eat or collect enough but that I know that they are there kind of has a huge a sense of security and well-being. That is, you know, it’s hard to articulate that sense that you get that despite being an urban area I have this amazing, you know, a wonderful bounty around me, it’s like even in a concrete jungle like nature kind of lets you know that it is there for you, you know, very close to you if you choose to pay attention. So for me, I actually got very attracted to this tiny little flowers which many of the weeds have and you wonder at the detailing, you know, it’s just too good and you know, I have a haiku which I actually had included in my coloring book which says that ‘a flowering weed hearing its name, I looked anew at it’ and it’s so true because you figure out its name because of course I, first of all, it was a wonder for me, then being a trained ecologist it’s not that difficult even though I’m not a botanist, it’s not that hard to figure out, OK! let’s identify this species and then you read about it and then you’re like amazed by the different qualities of it and soon you realize that many of them, you know, natural remedies that you are very familiar, which comes in bottles, familiar bottles, they’re actually growing right next to you. So, this is how they look and some of them you can actually eat so that’s where it is that it started and it continues to be that because I still am discovering and figuring out absolutely new things almost regularly. So the things which I get to absolutely love, there is this particular weed, one I already mentioned, Solanum nigrum locally called manathakkali and there is a cousin of it called Solanumvillosum which looks like tiny little red tomatoes and it’s beautiful and for me personally, there is a plant called Commelina benghalensis and it grows… it’s prolific, and has one of the most delicate blue and beautiful flowers and it turned out to be that it is amazing for, you know, intestinal health, gut health and yeah so and of course punarnava- it’s a very well-known ayurvedic medicine but it is also amazingly edible and quite tasty too. What I actually personally revel in discovering is that the ones which are not traditional, there so many greens, you know, locally if you ask they will say, you know, it’s a goat food. When there is terminology like that, you know that they are perhaps not in their traditional pantheon or things that they are using which also may indicate that it had become naturalized much later it is not part of Ayurveda sidha and all the other medicinal tradition but if you really investigate and find out about them we can be edible, they can be amazingly medicinal, they are just, you know, awesome. So, I’m still discovering, I’m still at that wow stage.
Lalitha Krishnan: I can hear the wow in your voice. I guess every time you are attracted to something it sort of begins a whole voyage of discovery because then you go into it and find out more and more and more. Nina, you created a coloring book called “Edible Weeds and Naturally Growing Plants of Auroville for Adults” on weeds, I love the idea but what made you think about it? And what do you think the experience of drawing weeds does, you know, for a person?
Nina Sengupta: It’s a variety of things and since I have kind of come up with the book it has also extended into several other things which kind of justifies it, but for me it was, you know, I was very bothered about one character in me, I have noticed in me, that for example, there is deforestation going on in some part of our country and we’re all very bothered, we are, you know, signing up in some kind of a petition signature and then something else comes up – social, environmental, other factors, we’re totally, you know, shift to that but hardly ever there is an update on what actually happened to the other one and it bothered me that how we can let go of that, you know because there are people who for them it’s a part and parcel of their lives and they are, whether you forget or not, they will not be able to forget it. So I kind of thought that perhaps that nature doesn’t, you know, in urban life, nature is not such an integral part because you know we get our food from a grocery store, supermarkets, we, you know, have a park nearby too, so it’s not like if one goes, we go to the other , you know, it’s not such an end of the story and I kind of started asking people that you know how do they connect with nature and somebody who had made a statement famously that “I really don’t have the time and I don’t afford to go and a visit, I don’t connect with nature because I really don’t have the time and I don’t afford to go to a National Park every now and then”. And it struck me that, Oh my God is nature so disconnected that for an urban individual to connect to nature one has to actually physically take themselves out of the urban areas and go somewhere? Now, of course, there is always the bird watcher group and the other you know other wonderful tree groups and in different cities but what about people in general like they do they connect with nature? And I started thinking that what I can offer? What I can kind of point out for me and for all of us that we cannot ignore that it is right there in the cities? And I could come up with weeds because they are everywhere and so that’s how I started on, you know, focusing on weeds more carefully to make into a book. The reason I wanted to make it into a coloring book for adults because it is a concept that has remained with me since I was doing my studies abroad, that I had walked into a genetics class and I always, you know, was interested in art and here I walked into a genetics class and the professor was telling that you know you can pick yourself a coloring book and you can see the snow, learn about the cell structure that that way and for me mainstreaming coloring which is doodling and coloring was always like and you shouldn’t be doing in the class kind of training I had. So suddenly mainstreaming coloring as part of your education really seemed very attractive and from then on I always thought that you know, we should have our education also made a little more fun, little more light so that you can do it yourself so that when I made the coloring book I want it to be experiential that by holding the book it feels different, it is made in handmade paper, it is hand-stitched, it has no use of plastic in it and when you are a coloring, when you are sitting and coloring, I really believe that this calming act of coloring has an effect like osmosis, the kind of the information gets to you even without you paying attention and so it kind of gets to you in many levels, it kind of wraps you in in a certain experience, it informs you about plants. If you want to, you know, paint it crazy purple – that’s fine but you can still have a colored insert by which you can take outside and identify the weeds you want because everything is drawn to scale. So yeah that’s why.
Lalitha Krishnan: You know, I really hope people are listening with this lockdown we’re talking about growing our vegetables and microgreens, and people are thinking of taking up farming seriously. I mean, this sounds like the perfect climate to go foraging. Don’t you agree?
Nina Sengupta: It happened in our community how as I was and how it evolves here is… I had made the book and I actually thought everything has been very organic, you know, making thinking about making the book, making the book and I let it be, you know, I didn’t, you know, start off with uh doing weed walks and it turned out to be that some people… they were gathering up to know about local food and it didn’t have so much of interest that, you know if you publish a recipe people look at it but you know they’re not very sure so they didn’t know. So, there was a group which started, they started taking people’s small groups to different farms and actually there will be a demo on how to cook it. So one of them in one of these farm demo visits that they had gone, they found that they are using my coloring book as a reference so for a lot of people that was the first time they were getting to know there is something called you know edible weeds so they called me up and said you know can you show us a few? So that was the beginning of the weed walks and I realized that you know, one weed walk and one session was not enough so it kind of became regular but even then, even when you know very well, that this is edible, people are very interested learning, taking notes. I saw, barring a few exceptions, there not many people who graduated from knowing the weed to actually cooking and eating them. Even though, you know, we have plenty of safe places where it can be collected. But come lock down suddenly with this knowledge which was already they had gathered, they decided that let’s, you know, use it so there was absolutely amazing amount of energy we had, you know, there was a WhatsApp group but with hardly about 10 members it became soon a group of 90 which each one sharing their recipe on how differently they can use this weed and that weed, incorporate that a little technique, taking pictures and, you know, getting congratulation from each other. It actually really brought it into a full circle in which right now there are several people who who eat it and also this is their way of avoiding to go and stand in the line in a grocery store, they know that, you know, they can just go around and collect and how healthy and I call it ultra organic food and, you know, it has been right simply wonderful, you know, there are recipes which I would have never thought which, you know, part of this community, you know, it has developed so it’s yeah it has been a great journey as far as that is concerned.
Lalitha Krishnan: ‘Weed recipes’, that’s your new book I think. Yeah but definitely I think, you should do a webinar. There will be thousands of people who’d be really, really interested so that’s another way to promote but so do you do a lot of walks and how else can we promote foraging – school groups? I mean now it’s all online. Is there a platform that one can go to and read or forums to participate in?
Nina Sengupta: There are forums to participate, I have actually initiated a new Facebook group and also a Youtube channel where I actually, regularly, tell more about the weeds, individual weeds so that they, you know, sometimes if you see 10 and then you forget all of them. So we thought that we will concentrate on one or two at a time so that, you know, it can percolate and you know make more concentrated writeups on that, make a little video how it actually looks in the because… you know, the walks we cannot do at the moment until like, since the lockdown in March, we haven’t had a walk and we thought that it’s, instead of people using what they had already gained other than the ones which are already using, it’s a good way to connect to people who are… who can just look around their own homestead and start foraging from then on? So, yes, we do have… and also, you know, I feel that this activity is such a calming and grounding activity in a way that this has to come to each individual at their own pace. So, if it’s OK to just, you know, sit with a coloring book, read about it and then go out and, you know, get something, read about it before you actually try out. It’s OK, but there are others who do it much, you know, at a faster pace, so the pace is decided by you, but out once you already what is really nice is that…a couple of things. Most of the foraging weed that we are talking about they’re pantropical, there available everywhere and sometimes even in the temperate regions, in the summer months they are available. So I find it an amazing connection that I am eating a wild here in that wild grows in somebody else’s backyard halfway across the world or a half way across the country and I find it very connecting, you know, that factors are very connecting and we make those connections to our websites and the channels that we are trying to make and so what we’re trying to do here is …part of it is reclaiming our tradition because many of the weeds as you get to know you see that there are traditional users then we just, you know, we may have forgotten or lifestyle didn’t permit so we didn’t know whatever, so we are reclaiming our past in a way then we’re building on it at the present because culture and tradition are never static. It is dynamic and part of that dynamism is that there are weeds which are probably not part of our tradition but they’re here and now so you learn about them and you add to that… add to your repertoire of weeds that you forage from and thus kind of you are building on that culture, you know, that you are connecting with the past and your building in the present and the next obvious step is to take it to the future which you have not touched upon just now in your question, is to take it to the next generation. And I think that there cannot be anything more amazing that as parents and adults we can do is to take this knowledge to the kids and have them that sense of wonder from a much earlier age and so that’s one of the things that we are trying. Personally in my effort, I’m trying to reprint this book because now it is out of print… reprint this book and have two more volumes and the way I want to do is through crowdfunding because one more uh interest in doing so in that way that I want to involve people not just printing and publishing book but also take it as a package to the schools, you know, the schools will have all the three books may be and as part of this whole initiative, the teachers will get trained. I will have different sessions with the teachers and then with the kids so that there will be many more of this weed walks and the weed knowledge that will go and percolate amongst the children in the schools and that’s where, you know, that’s where you start picking up you know things will really get rolling, I think.
Lalitha Krishnan: You’ve given us so much food for thought…
Nina Sengupta: And the idea that it is getting in touch with the wild, it is actually the best wilderness that you can remain in touch with being an urbanite. So it, you know, when I am really connected to the natural world around me I am much more sensitive and sympathetic to somebody else elsewhere and I hope that that kind of feeling comes in the decision making in the choices that we make as consumers or as individual citizens in making our decisions. So that is hope from weed to changing the world.
Lalitha Krishnan: Well this is the time to change the world. Nina, I also wanted to ask you where do you draw the line when it comes to foraging?
Nina Sengupta: I say the word foraging comes from a very western concept of foraging, where actually people do go and collect themselves to eat but it has also escalated to being a part of tourism, you know, that eating wild is part of the exotic feeling sometimes not even going to the wild, you know, sitting in the city there are famously this some restaurants in Nairobi, famous for over decades but we also now have started having them in India is that if you go there you will be served wild food.Now that’s to me is not foraging for if you are sitting in your city and somebody else is smoking the heck out of the rock bee to provide you the most amazing honey then that honey has a lot more ecological problems with it then values because the demand actually forces— demand beyond self and beyond the local area— forces a greater amount of, you know, taking off these resources and it’s a concern. One of the things that I probably … one of the things that I also am very interested in films, I do screen an environmental film series every year and I’m … you know a lot of my metaphors come from films… and if you even look at Satyajit Ray films or any films as such, you see people treat the forest as the edge of civilization. So when you go to the forest you let your hair down and you be somebody else and this feeling remains there and as people have in the risk they say the last couple of 20 years people have started moving more. You know there are more people who are working you know young people there working away from their family; they are traveling, they are going into tourism, there lot more people movement and these people when they’re moving and going into a very exotic place, they’re not necessarily sticking to their, you know, traditional meals or even the very hardcore vegetarians don’t remain vegetarian. So many wild foods are getting overexploited to serve… one thing is to serve the people who have moved away from their own community elsewhere so that they have, you know, a touch of their home and other people who are visiting and as tourists to their place and want to experience that taste of the wild without foraging. So, these two are actually very even, though it is termed as foraging, it’s called forest food you are eating local honey. You know, how healthy can it be? How sustainable it can be? It is actually anything but sustainable.
Lalitha Krishnan: One more question Nina, I usually ask my guests to share a word to improve our vocabulary and I know, I’m suggesting now, ecotonal and the term edge effect. So, would you mind explaining both?
Nina Sengupta: Yes, gladly but I will start with that I will take again a little step before I go to ecotonal, that much of our lives are now locked up in the screens, you know, be it, you know, in our mobile phone or computer screen and that bit hasn’t probably changed in our lockdown period either but, you know, life happens in the periphery. So it is that peripheral vision individuals have started losing more urbanities than not but there are you know it’s becoming our character like you know we are all if you’re going in the bus or train or plane you’re still looking at a screen, we’re looking at a screen, many are watching… The screen is our lives yet our lives are happening around so this is kind of in ecologically speaking ecotone is the region which is a transition between the two 2 biological communities two ecological areas. For example, an estuary is an ecotonal area because the river meets the ocean and the land is there in that area… that confluence is the ecotonal area and naturally, the ecotone between which is the confluence between the two habitats is always richer in species than either of the two. So, you know, given the area, you know, per unit area, there usually ecotones hold more species. Now the edge effect. You can have both, a positive and negative tilt to that. Edge is something that you create, it’s not always the ecotone, not always the natural boundary. Suppose I have a boundary of the forest, the natural boundary of the forest and grassland, that is an equal ecotonal area, that area will have more species but say I have cut a forest, I have cut a road in the forest and have created an edge, that edge is the boundary between the two communities, like nothing and forest would also have quite a bit of different, you know, different creatures but usually they tend to have the more generalist species. So suddenly you are favoring the generalist species rather than the forest dweller one, so it has, it can have negative impacts also and therefore, you know, as an ecologist always say that if you were actually… have a forest is better not to have it fragmented, better not to have a cut a road or cut a railway through it because you are creating more edge and that will actually affect the forest interior species or the overall health of the forests.
Lalitha Krishnan: That’s great. Thank you so much, Nina!! That was enlightening, to say the least. You have introduced foraging, I mean, we knew it was somewhere on the edge of our consciousness now you have brought it right to our minds, into our hearts. Thank you so much.
I hope you enjoyed this episode of Heart of Conservation, I’m Lalitha Krishnan. You can listen to Heart of Conservation on Spotify or SoundCloud and other platforms of your choice. Keep listening and do check out Nina Sengupta’s YouTube channel. It’s called ‘Edible Weed Walk’. Stay safe and start foraging.
Photo courtesy Nina Sengupta.. Podcast interview and Artwork: Lalitha Krishnan. Special thanks to Akshay Shah who helped transcribe the show notes.
Birdsong by hillside residents.
Disclaimer: Views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the podcast and show notes belong solely to the guests featured in the episode, and not necessarily to the host of this podcast/blog or the guest’s employer, organisation, committee or other group or individual.
Lalitha Krishnan: Hi. I’m Lalitha Krishnan and you’re listening to episode 17 of Heart of Conservation podcast. I bring you stories that keep you connected to our natural world. Today, I’m speaking to India’s acclaimed wildlife/environment film make, Rita Banerji. She heads Dusty Foot Productions and in 2015 she founded The Green Hub a ‘youth and community-based fellowship and video-for-change program’ based out of northeast India.
Dr. Schaller renowned biologist, conservationist, and author has actually visited Green HUB. He was so impressed by what Green Hub is doing and wanted to know what they are doing and how they are doing it. Rita and her team of The Green Hub Fellows have interacted with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge who has watched their films.
Rita has recently been selected as an Ashoka Fellow which is a lifelong fellowship for the world’s leading social entrepreneurs. Check out www.ashoka.org. In 2017 she was awarded the National Geographic – CMS Prithvi Ratna Award, and in 2018 the RBS Earth Hero Award for contribution to the environment through films. Rita, welcome to Heart of Conservation Podcast, and thank you so much for speaking with us.
Rita Banerji: It’s great to be here on the call with you.
Lalitha Krishnan: It’s great to finally connect with you. So, to start with you made some incredibly powerful films. You’ve been filming in the Northeast since 2002 starting with the film on orphaned bear cubs. Your film on the wild meat trail won the Green Oscar. Now that it’s confirmed that the Coronavirus is zoonotic and there’s a link to wildlife trade and the interface between human, animal, and environment, your films seem particularly relevant. So, would you like to briefly tell us about the makings of these films?
Rita Banerji: This was right at the beginning of when we were starting our own production house Dusty Foot Productions, before that, I had worked with Riverbanks Studios for almost 10 years and most of my films were around human and wildlife issues. So we heard about this project which was about rehabilitating of re-introduction of orphan bear cubs into the wild and that was supposed to be in Pakke Tiger Reserve in Arunachal and that was the first time they were trying something like that in India. Wildlife Trust of India was trying this, so we thought it would be something very important to record, and also, I do feel connected to the northeast because my mother is from Assam. But I have never lived here or never worked here so that’s how we decided to, me and Shilpi, who started Dusty Foot with me, we both decided to start documenting the story. During this period, I think we covered it over five years. 2002 we started… we kept filming till 2007 actually… in between we didn’t have any savings. Whatever other projects we were doing we were putting in our savings into this project but while we were documenting the story of the orphaned bear cubs, one thing became very clear that… and curiosity about it that it was clear that it’s because of hunting that there were so many orphaned cubs so that’s why there was a need to re-introduce them into the wild because you can’t keep them in zoos. So our question was that is there, you know, is there hunting which is related to illegal wildlife poaching which happens? Or is it also to do with just consumption of wild meat? And this is a question we wanted to explore further so that we didn’t want to make a film which was just based on our notions that traditional hunting is fine – it’s for sustenance and illegal poaching is bad. We really needed to understand whether wild meat, you know, hunting for wild meat had any impact on the status of wildlife in the northeast and that’s how we kept you know… it was linked to the bear story so we kept exploring you know this whole question kept filming and finally in 2006, I think both Shilpi & I took off for at the end of 2006 beginning of 2007 we saved up some money and just traveled around the northeast of 4 months to different parts, to Arunachal, Nagaland, Mizoram, parts of Assam and that’s where we came across wild meat markets and we realized that you know it was quite extensive and it wasn’t just to do with traditional hunting that was different. I mean I think earlier the hunting was like that the hunters had a lot of prestige in the village, very few hunters were there but over time with guns coming in and then a lot of the people moving from the villages to the towns, the demand for wild meat in towns increased and suddenly for something which was food for the village became a commercial commodity, you know, and that’s what kind of changed the whole balance. In a way, anything you saw was hunted and I think so that’s what the film explored – how do you strike the balance between traditional indigenous knowledge as well as adapt to changes, which are better for the environment and the people actually. So yeah that’s how this film happened and I think it was a big learning for us and I think it also laid the foundation for it was a turning point for us because this film made us realize that film is not enough. One has to work on the ground get connected to the community, work with the community, learn from them as well as then come with, you know, our own perceptions, or our own ideas of conservation.
Lalitha Krishnan: I also wanted to ask you, did you have a hard time filming all of this you know seeing wildlife meat being sold and talking to locals, or were there any uncomfortable moments?
Rita Banerji: It is an interesting question but as a filmmaker, actually because the film is such a visual medium, you know, unless you really get the content it will not have the kind of impact you want to have. Right? You can keep talking about the wild meat market but unless I see it myself and film it myself, the film or the story kind of, does not come across. So for us, it was really, really about exploring the facts and trying to really understand the issue in a deeper way. So yes, when you went to the market and you know, you saw these hundreds of birds, bunches of birds, civets in the market, it was a numbing experience. It was a numbing experience but at the same time, I think if your idea of a film is that you’re doing it to understand something deeper for making a difference then I think that objectivity comes as a filmmaker. So I won’t say there were challenges as such because for us it was something you know, every step was an exploration, every step we learned so many things about not northeast, about the forests, about the people, even the market. I mean it wasn’t just seeing wild meat and getting numbed by it but trying to understand the extent of it, you know, and talking to those people so I think for us it was more a learning journey and not really, what can I say, I think in some ways very difficult to say that it was challenging because it’s something which kind of we really felt was important in terms of doing and I think we really enjoyed the journey in terms of filming it because we spent so much time in the villages, we spent so much time traveling across the northeast.
Lalitha Krishnan:I wonder if you have a similar response to my next question. You worked with Mike Pandey on his film ‘Shores of Silence- Whale Sharks’ in India which also won the Green Oscar in Wildscreen 2000. It’s one thing for me, watching it on my phone but I can’t imagine you actually being there watching a huge whale shark being hunted and dragged half alive and then watch it being gutted into small basket sized portions. I guess that also might have been quite a learning experience and an unforgettable experience for you.
Rita Banerji: ‘Shores of Silence’ and filming that, being part of that film and filming those moments I think those are times which are just frozen in your memory, you know. I think what was important to, I think, for Mike, me and Shibani, we were there when we got the first shot of the whale shark it was on the, I still remember, it was on the Veeraval port. We were filming and we were asking about this whale shark which is called the beral in the local language because of the barrel which is used to capture it and so in the local language they call it a beral. We saw this huge fish we had never seen it earlier, at least me and Shibani hadn’t, Mike had seen it in his childhood and we saw this huge fish being tied between boats and trawlers and being cut open. It was a very shocking kind of a moment but at the same time you know in India I think what happens is that anything you’re doing with wildlife is linked to people’s livelihood also and you cannot isolate your work only with wildlife or only with people it’s very difficult because every way you’re seeing communities which are vulnerable at the same time you’re seeing wildlife which is vulnerable. So when we saw that, I think all of us were very clear that one we have to see what the… we were sure that the whale shark has to be protected that was a clear thing at the same time we were sure that we did not want to make it a sensational kind of a clip. It could have been that the first shot you get you just release it in the news and it becomes big news and that’s the end of it may be or it just leads to a debate, right, so we really wanted to make a film where we understood it well and this is the same thing about getting facts right and I think we spent two years going back to the place. We didn’t get any shots there I think for two years… we just spoke to a lot of people and then one of the days we were walking on the beach and we found this small village and suddenly we saw these 3-4 whale sharks on the beach being cut up and I think it’s the same thing as a filmmaker you always if you have to protect something I think you have to also be able to record it and you should have to tell that story in a way with which leads to much larger protection of a species. Sometimes it’s a difficult thing to do but I think as filmmakers or as a camera person specially, you end up shooting so many things that somewhere you keep your vision in mind, why you’re making the film and I think if that clarity is there then it helps you. So yes it was not easy to see that it was not easy to see a whale shark being killed, it wasn’t easy for us to see the fins being cut and right in front of you but what happened after that was quite amazing; how people got together it wasn’t us the film just came out but other people took it up and it became a, you know, it got put under the wildlife protection act and I think that’s where… then you say, OK! you know, the film was worth it. I mean there are so many people involved with it I think everybody who was part of it I think at the end of it felt that the whale shark was protected.
Lalitha Krishnan: Thanks for explaining that. That sounds like every conservationist’s environment/wildlife filmmaker’s dream come true.
In your recent Mangabay interview on Green Hub the first thing that stood out for me when you talk about the diversity of the fauna and flora you also speak about the diversity of communities. Often, not always, conservationists/policymakers tend to separate wildlife from the human as two different entities rather than ones that coexist. But your films, I feel, are the opposite. They are all made working with communities to save wildlife and preserve the people’s way of life simultaneously. Could you tell us about your journey with the filming alongside communities?
Rita Banerji: I started my journey as a filmmaker in ’90 what…we joined Riverbanks in ‘91, I think, and over the next 20 years I think as part of Riverbanks as well as part of Dusty Foot I think we traveled a lot across India and all the films which we did, a lot of them were on wildlife. Like we did this whole film called the ‘Turtle Diaries’ or another film called ‘Right to survive’ which was on the Olive Ridley turtles conservation as well as the likelihood of traditional fish workers and many other stories like this. In no situation was any issue related to wildlife isolated from issues of people but the key thing which we saw in all these while filming all this was that solutions always there, you know. Even with the traditional fishing community, the scientists working there, the Oliver Ridleys coming to the beach, you know, the combination of the science, community and the wildlife, if one went into the facts, if you really got into the technicalities of what was required for conservation, everything was there. The solution was there but it comes down to the intention or the governance you know? Do you want to really be driven by that idea of coexistence, you know? And when the solutions are right there, will you work towards doing that, or are there larger interests? And that situation one has seen replicated in many of the situations when you’re talking about human-wildlife interactions across India so in the northeast also. The northeast is an amazing place because here the forests are primarily community forest, especially in the Hill states, in Arunachal, in Nagaland, and so community plays a big role in how do natural resources will be protected and because they’ve lived with those resources the kind of knowledge people have is incredible. They may have been hunters but those hunters, when they walk into a forest, know where the squirrel is going to eat, where the wild boar is going to cross the path, where the deer is going to be trapped… It’s the kind of knowledge which needs to be respected also. So, when we talk of conservation if we don’t use this knowledge or we don’t respect their relationship with the landscape, their relationship with the forests and rivers, how are we going to talk about conservation? So, I think, that has always been the, what you say, the trigger for our films that one has to, has to be inclusive and I am very happy to also say that the if you talk to the uh the narrative even amongst the wildlife conservationist, amongst the young filmmakers, amongst the people now working with conservation I think the narrative has moved to that. Most of the people today like, you know, and so many people like you have Aparajita, you have so many other scientists with all these people working on the ground but everybody is working with community and conservation. So, I think, that whole narrative has shifted and people are much more sensitive to the idea that conservation cannot happen without involving the community, so yes.
Lalitha Krishnan:Rita, you’re so right. Ok So now,I’m quoting you here, “We have this false notion that traditional hunting is fine and illegal wildlife trade is the problem…” What do you mean exactly?
Rita Banerji: I can only talk from my own experience. So when we are filming the ‘Wild Meat Trail’ we had long conversations with people we were filming with, as well as, we also saw a lot of the wild meat markets and the way the amount of wild meat which was being sold; we attended a lot of festivals, the indigenous festivals, which also involved hunting to some extent. Now some of the observations which were there were very interesting. One was that earlier, for example, if there was a traditional festival which involved hunting, for example, macaques or something in their community forest, if you speak to the older hunters, you know, they would tell you that it was right near the village like we just walked across and spent some time in the forest, got back what we wanted but now it’s not that easy because now for the younger hunters or the younger people in the community they really have to walk deep into the forests, sometimes come back with nothing, you know, so when we’re talking about sustainable hunting, if there is anything like that, then this would not have happened, right? And so, many of the forests… it was so difficult to see any wildlife not because they were dense, they were dense, but at the same time you did not see much and this we saw across different festivals… it wasn’t just one community and one festival. We saw this in different places then also during some of the interviews, say, for example, we interviewed the oldest hunter in the village and we were at that time developing our eco-club ‘Under The Canopy’ manual and we wanted to know the local names of animals and it was such a fantastic session, 2 hours we sat with this person and he told us about the behavior of each and every animal, he would identify them on the photograph, he would tell about their behavior, he would tell us where that animal was found and he would give the local name. It was like it a 2-hour lecture on wildlife and it was just stunning, you know. Then, over the next two days we met another hunter who was maybe our age that time, mid-40s mid-30s or whatever, and we were asking about bears actually and we said that you know, what about if there was a mother bear would you kill it and it was a very straightforward answer that, ”Yeah I mean we won’t have any problems killing it”, and also his knowledge about wildlife wasn’t as deep as, he hadn’t seen so many animals. Then there was this young boy who was a teenager, I think, who made lovely sounds of birds, that’s how we came across him. He would also go hunting and make these amazing sounds of birds, mimic birds and all, but he had not seen any of the mammals for example which we were showing in the book. So you can see that overtime so much has gone and these are all indigenous communities we are talking about and I think what has tipped the balance is not the… maybe earlier the difference was that you had few hunters in the village, you know, they were highly respected because of their knowledge they would have even (?) customs before they went into the forest for hunting, come back with something and when they came back with the deer or something, the whole village shared it or at least 5-6 families shared it. Overtime the wild meat started having a commercial aspect to it because people started moving to the small towns and when you move to a small town the circle officer or the person working in the town is also part of that community and it has been a big jump. It’s not like our parents or grandparents or, you know, generations back when they were farmers or something but it’s like my father maybe somebody who’s never even stepped out of the village and I’m working in a town. So the fact is if you’re eating wild meat you’ll also want to eat wild meat if you’re in the town and that demand, I think, kind of tipped the balance because then wild meat started coming into towns or quantity increased, it had a cash component. It’s almost like an ATM that you have a bird you can sell it, you get cash and I think that has increased the extent of hunting and that’s what I meant by you know from where maybe years back when it was sustainable, we cannot say it is sustainable anymore in some ways.
Lalitha Krishnan: Yes, thanks for explaining that. Alongside your filming, you also started a wildlife education programme which you just mentioned: ‘Under The Canopy’ and the Hoolock Gibbon Eco Club in Nagaland. Could you tell us about that?
Rita Banerji: When we were making the ‘Wild Meat Trail’, one of the key things about the film was that…see with the Whale Shark film, it was a highly impactful film. Sometimes a film alone can make a difference. You make a film, the visuals are strong and you know that you make that film and it’ll make an impact. The whale shark film is like that.You can also see the clips of, in recent times the Amur Falcon clips which were shot by Ramki, Shashank, and Bano. They made a huge impact and, you know, the Amur Falcon got protected. But ‘Wild Meat Trail’ was a film which showed a certain thing which was happening for many years and it was many communities involved, it was the wild meat market, it was a way of life, it’s not something which can just change by making a film, you know. It was a very important moment for us when we realized that the film is important, yes, and it has been viewed and people appreciate the fact that this thing was brought out but then what? And I think that is what was pushing us to think, how can we work with the community? How can we actually go back …show the film? Talk to people? Then we were fortunate to get a grant from IUCN to make an extension plan with the ‘Wild Meat Trail’ which involved education and that is something which we could do. We also had to see what is it that we could do in the community because we did not have any experience. So that’s how we got together and as an extension of the ‘Wild Meat Trail’ we created this education module called ‘Under The Canopy’ which was along with a friend of mine Payal Maloor and she has something called ‘Grow Wild’ and we worked on the manual and the idea was to have a Training the Trainers programme and so our budget allowed us to have kind of two Training the Trainers workshops. So, our idea was that we’ll do it in the village where we had shot the ‘Wild Meat Trail’ and we will do it with North East Network which is an NGO which is working in Nagaland, Assam, Meghalaya. The main thing was that we wanted to do the workshop in a way where it continued beyond just doing the workshop and we didn’t know at that time whether we’ll manage, but that was one of the ideas we had. That we should partner with people who have been working here for many years. So that’s how our journey started with North East Network and us kind of had the first Training the Trainers programme with local teachers who were invited from different villages including Khonoma, Chizami. This was in Chizami, North East Network has a centre in Chizami, Nagaland and that’s where we had the first Training the Trainers programme and it was really interesting because many of the teachers were into hunting, so this whole idea of not hunting, the whole idea of looking at wildlife differently and also understanding, you know, the ecosystem through the eyes of a frog, a bird, and everything. It was a very interesting workshop and the idea was that these trainers would then take it up with children in their schools where they were teaching, it could be a Sunday school, it could be a regular school and we also showed the film. So, the good thing was that ‘Under The Canopy’, that workshop became like a catalyst and everybody really enjoyed the workshop and they said can we make it a slightly longer programme. In fact, North East Network, the NGO I work with, said “can we make it a longer programme” and that’s when we designed this whole eco-club for kids. And the idea was that we’ll take 20 kids every year and they’ll be with us for three years and different resource people would come and just make them fall in love with wildlife. That was the main idea. So yeah, that model worked really well, the wonderful resource people, Sanjay Sondhi was part of it, Payal was part of it, Maya, one of our birders, was part of it. So we kept training the local trainers also and so this eco-club programme kind of then got adopted by other groups and they took it up in other villages and yeah that’s how ‘Under The Canopy’ happened and it is still running in 1 or 2 places including the Amur Falcon village Wokha, where the Amur Falcon project is ongoing.
Lalitha Krishnan:Rita I am so much in awe, this makes you a very unusual filmmaker, one who goes way beyond the call of just filmmaking. We haven’t even started talking about The Green Hub. I’d love to know about this project and how a partnership between a women’s rights organisation and wildlife documentary filmmaker is empowering youth and community in the northeast states.
Rita Banerji: Yes, Green Hub is a different project altogether. I think the interesting part is that all these have been kind of you know you move towards a certain idea and all these kind of strengthen that work on the ground. So Green Hub was an idea which I had a long time back while I was making my films, I think, one of the things I felt was that if somebody young wants to get into conservation films, it’s not an easy thing, there’s no platform in India such, unless you work with another filmmaker, right, and at the same time, I felt that the video documentation which we do is so valuable for, at multiple levels. We make, say the wild Meat Trail is just a 25 minutes film but the amount of recording we have is like hundreds of tapes. Now out of those tapes if I actually go into it and really dig out all the materials that can be useful for, at multiple levels, for researchers, for educators, for trainers. So, these are the two thoughts that would keep running in my head that how do you get youth involved with conservation films or conservation, and at the same time how do you make video documentation a more valuable asset for people working on the ground. But finally, I was able to like, I think, from the seeding of the idea till when we started, it almost took me almost 15 years when we actually ended up starting Green Hub. One of the things, when we were doing Under The Canopy, was that we felt it’s a fantastic programme we saw children’s eyes lighting up when they look through the binoculars and, you know, we saw these kids who used to hunt take a pledge of not hunting, we saw them getting influenced, influencing their parents. So it was a very interesting project but at the end of it, you felt how do you really scale up conservation. What we’re trying to do, all the groups working in conservation put us all together, the scale of what is happening against it is so large that we have to have to work together and figure out how do you scale the idea of conservation? How do you scale up the idea of protecting all whatever we have? And that’s where, I think, the Green Hub model kind of fitted in and when I wanted to start it, I wanted to start it in the northeast because I spent so much time here and I also felt that North East Network was an organization I’d worked with earlier and they work with women and they had been working for more than 20 years that time when I started working with them, you know, I felt it such a strong kind of collaboration because women are so connected to natural resources, they are core to – whether you are looking at farming, whether you’re looking at the forest, whether you’re looking at NTFPs, whether you’re looking at the wellbeing of our community- and so I felt like when we are talking about conservation, when we are talking about environment collaboration between these two thought processes would be so strong which are somewhere both grounded on compassion in some way. That’s how I spoke to Dr. Monisha Behal the founder of North East Network and I told her about this idea and I think we both connected very strongly with the vision of involving youth and conservation and women and youth would be like the strongest combination. So that’s how we started Green Hub.
Lalitha Krishnan: This is excellent!! Tell us more and also, I’d like to know how your green hub fellows and the communities are coping with COVID-19
Rita Banerji: So, what the Green Hub is, is actually a fellowship programme and it’s based in the northeast, our hub is in Tezpur, Assam and every year what we do is we select 20 fellows from across the northeast states, all the states including Sikkim. It is quite a rigorous application process, we receive applications, we go through a phone interview, then there’s a face to face interview and our primary target group is the youth from remote areas belonging to indigenous communities or marginalized communities as well as their youth from urban centers also but somewhere we’re looking at that commitment to conservation and social change in some way and we started this in 2015 and this is the 5th year now we have 88 fellows including the drop-outs and what we do is then when they join us there with us for one year and then one year the first three months is intense training and video, and photography documentation, storytelling and there are different resource people who come from across the country for teaching and while there’s a lot of attention on the technical aspect of it they also get exposure on what’s happening on the ground. So for that what do we do is we partner with several organizations working in the northeast, as well as outside and the fellows have to make a work plan with the organisations and through the year make films along with these organizations. So, what happens is that they actually, if they’re making a film on human-elephant conflict, they have to actually go on the field and see what is happening, and record it. So, the understanding somewhere through the video documentation seeps in, you know, then there is the whole process of watching the footage, editing the footage, so the whole process of making the film is what we use for them to learn about the environment and conservation. The idea is that at the end of it, either they can take this field on but also the prime idea is that can they form a network of change-makers on the ground. Many of them, many of the Green Hub fellows have gone back, they are working with the communities, on restoration, on livelihoods on making youth collectives as well as documenting a lot of things happening in the northeast. So, it’s the network of youth across which we are hoping will kind of become a changemaker kind of a movement, you can say, which helps to protect the biodiversity here. In this COVID situation, the interesting thing has been, you asked me about COVID, the interesting thing has been that after the lockdown we couldn’t continue with our fellowship for two months because it starts in May but the immediate thing was that we had to get down to relief work because they’re a lot of daily wage workers and the lockdown kind of impacted a huge amount of community. So while we were doing our relief work here with food rations, the network of fellows helped a lot because – there was Johen who works in Karbi Anglong, there is Salibon who works in Karbi Anglong, there is another Amen who works in the Silchar district, there is Rehan who works near Guwahati. So, what happened was that the alumni, many of the alumni called us that we need to help people in and we are doing relief work. So, it became an amazing network, thanks to the fellows, where we could reach out to various parts of Assam and Arunanchal for that matter. So, if we didn’t have the network fellows, we may not have been able to reach out to so many places. So you know, COVID time, somehow, for the first time one felt less……………. All these young youth fellows are there who are actually concerned about what is happening and are there to help their community during this time. I think that was nice, what do you say, a revelation.
Lalitha Krishnan:That’s such a positive story. And it’s so nice that they thought for themselves that they wanted to do something for their community. Ok Rita, a few more questions. How do you to ideate? If someone were to make a wildlife film, where you ask them to start.
Rita Banerji: I think, the way we approach a story…the first thing is that there are stories all around you. Through making an environment film or wildlife film… earlier you know, this whole thing of resources was there; cameras were expensive now all that is reduced, technology is better, so one thing is stories are all around us so one is to really observe what is happening around you. That is one but the other thing is if you want to make any stories, our approach is really to get down to researching and finding the facts and really going on the ground to understand the issues before you start making the film. I think, for anybody, it’s very important especially anybody getting into this field, it is very important because every issue is so complex, there are so many layers to it. It’s never black and white. You may see a wild meat market but it’s not just a black-and-white story of hunting and wildlife getting killed there are so many layers to it. So I think, for a good filmmaker it’s very important to really spend time learning, travelling, researching, talking to multiple people, getting their perspectives right and then getting down to making their film and pushing it to the way they feel what they link up with the most. Like, I may link up with the community and wildlife situation, somebody else may be very closely linked to telling the wildlife story, the Natural History part of it, that is also very beautiful. As long as your facts are correct, as long as you’ve researched it, I think you’ll come out with a good story. And to also work on your technical, like, when we talk about a film, this would be the first way to, the more you explore the more ideas come that is one thing, also watching a lot of other people’s films helps a lot. Even today I do that, I watch other people’s work, your mind opens up to that and the third thing is not to compromise on your technical, not the camera but the way you film, the way you edit, the way you use sound. You have to work on each aspect of the film, not just one aspect like just shooting something well it does not make a good film, or just using good sound does not make a good film. Each aspect of it has to be worked out, including the voice over, the words you use. I think it’s a very intense process but it’s a combination of all this which makes a good film. Working hard at it.
Lalitha Krishnan: What I actually mean is, youhave this idea, you have the story in your head, you desperately want to make a film but you don’t have the technical skills is it still possible to direct that movie without the skills?
Rita Banerji: Yes, absolutely! You can be a director and really get a good camera person to work with you, you have editors, you have musicians, you have freelancers all over. It’s a market where a lot of people are there and you can do that. What happens with wildlife films and environment films is that, what helped us because we ourselves were camera people and editors, you know budgets are so low with films, right. Any film, whether it is a documentary, whether it is a wildlife film, with wildlife what happens is you need to spend a lot of time in the field, so that’s why you will see most of the wildlife filmmakers are the directors themselves and are doing multiple things themselves. It’s not like, because you are so passionate about that subject, the subject needs passion, you have to be mad enough to be in this field also. So you know, where you enjoy being in the field you don’t mind spending hours and hours walking the beach or sitting in the forest getting bitten by insects… So it’s that passion also which drives a lot of wildlife filmmakers to just get that one shot and be happy with it. So that’s the only difference, I would say, that’s why you see that you know, a lot of wildlife filmmakers, environments filmmakers are directors, camerapersons themselves but at the same time, if you’re not a technical person but you are passionate about that story, it’s absolutely possible to make it because you have people to do that for you, as long as you have the vision and the idea but you need to be with people who really relate with you, sync with you, understand what you’re saying, you know, but it is absolutely possible for a person who wants to do a story even without the technical skills.
Lalitha Krishnan: That’s so encouraging Rita, I’m going to go and write that storyboard right away. I request all my guests to share a conservation/wildlife related word or term that means something to them. Do you have one?
Rita Banerji: I think the word which comes to mind, there are many words actually, I guess, you know one of the things is interdependence, right, what we see in nature, right, I mean, why interdependence? Because there’s something in nature that lets (one) survive based on each other’s qualities, right? If there is respect for each other’s way of being, nature is the best teacher in that sense, right? How to survive how different… like there will a canopy, there will be a fern, there will be a leaf, there will be a frog, probably but everybody is dependent on each other strengths for survival. I think if, we can learn that, even in the way we are with the way a way of being you know where we understand that we cannot operate alone as a single person. We are interdependent on each other for so many aspects of our being and if we respect that interdependence, I think, it can solve a lot of issues of protecting it. Whether it’s to do with protecting our forests, whether it’s to do with respecting human rights, whether it’s to do with the egos for example. So, I think, that respecting interdependence and learning from nature I mean that’s the best teacher I would say.
Rita Banerji: Thanks.
Lalitha Krishnan: That’s a good one. A good many.Thank you, Rita. It’s been wonderful speaking with you and so inspiring. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Heart of Conservation podcast. You can listen to previous episodes on Spotify, Soundcloud, Apple podcasts, or several other platforms. If you know somebody who’s doing interesting work or whose story should be shared, do write to me at earthymatters013@gmail.com. Stay home, stay safe, and keep listening.
Photo courtesy Rita Banerji. Podcast interview and Artwork: Lalitha Krishnan. Special thanks to Akshay Shah who helped transcribe the show notes. Birdsong by hillside residents.
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Disclaimer: Views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the podcast and show notes belong solely to the guests featured in the episode, and not necessarily to the host of this podcast/blog or the guest’s employer, organisation, committee or other group or individual.
Lalitha Krishnan:Welcome to Heart Of Conservation Podcast Season 2, This episode 13. I’m Lalitha Krishnan, you host, bringing you inspiring stories that keep you informed and connected with our natural world. I’m talking to Almitra Patel today. She’s an environmental policy advocate and anti-pollution activist, and also one of the most unusual and amazing persons I know. Her Public Interest Litigation in the Supreme Court against the open dumping of municipal solid waste was instrumental in the drafting of the Municipal Solid Waste Management Rule in India. Her clean up India campaign started 20+ long years… long before it hit our billboards and screens perhaps even our conscience. While you and I were travelling to pretty places she was visiting garbage dumps all over the country. Somewhere in between these visits, she lost her sense of smell.
Her endless energy and determination have resulted in waste management policies being implemented at the home level, village level, small and big towns and cities all over India. It’s no wonder then that she was the best-qualified person to draft the Swach Bharat manual. Not one to sit still, Almitra is now looking into phosphorous carrying detergents that are polluting our water bodies. She wants manufacturers to label their products so we make the right choice. Her’s is an ongoing journey of activism but let’s hear it from her.
Welcome and thank you Almitra for being a guest on Heart of Conservation Podcast. Almitra, I’ve known you for 25+ years and I’ve never been able to keep up with all the incredible things you do. In 1959 you became the first Indian woman engineer to graduate from MIT. You’re also associated with saving the Gir Lions, being a tree warden, saving Ulsoor Lake, and building low-cost homes. Our country has its first ‘Municipal Solid Waste Management Rule or MSW thanks to you. It all started when the frogs stopped singing in your backyard. Is that right?
Almitra Patel: On the beautiful country road to our farm. Because Bangalore was dumping its garbage on the roadside there. It was a horrifying thing with stray dogs turning feral with no leader of the pack. They would gather together in the evening; and attack children going to school in the mornings, farmers going home after dusk and, killing livestock by day or by night…coming into farms and killing fowls…chickens, ducks. So there was no human restraint to their behaviour. They all became wild and followed a pack leader and at dawn and dusk, the dogs would gather in packs and chase two-wheelers, chase farmers and go out marauding and killing animals, even in the day time, even at midday. So, when I tried to help Bangalore clean up its act…in the meanwhile, there was a Capt. S. Vellu, from EXNORA, Chennai. I had been in touch with him for almost a year. Then there was the Surat plague on 24th September 1994. He said, “India is sitting on a time bomb.” Surat became like that because the garbage blocked the drains. The choked drains flooded the rat holes which made them come out and (caused) the plague and so on. So he said, we got to do a Clean India campaign- 30 cities in 30 days, starting on 2nd October. Which was what, 8,9 days away? And, we did it. We did the 30 cities and it was such an eye-opener because all the municipal people we met-all the commissioners-when we asked, “So what are you doing with your garbage?” They’d say, “I don’t know.” Ting. Ting. Ting. Call the sanitary inspector. He’d yell out, call the driver. And only the lowest man knew where he chucked anything. So all the municipal officers… when we explained, “Keep your wet and dry waste unmixed so both can be recycled, and have doorstep collections so there’s no waste on the road, and so on, they said, “Oh Won’t you start a scheme for us? Won’t you come back at the end of your tour?’’ And so, it became apparent that there was a need to do something on a national level. We went around in my high roof red Maruti van and the banner which Velu put up at the back (read) ‘Clean up and flourish or pile up and perish’.
Lalitha Krishnan: I like that. So, the municipal commissioners did take you seriously?
Almitra Patel: They did. They welcomed us. They said, “Nobody has ever told us what to do. We only see pictures in the newspaper of overflowing dustbins, choked drains, burning garbage and no one says what to do. That was the need for the rules so that everyone could have a road map.
Lalitha Krishnan: Sounds like Capt. Vellu knew what he was doing
Almitra Patel:He had worked with EXNORA in Chennai- Excellent, Novel, Radical. This was MB Nirmal banker who went to Hong Kong with 11 other bankers on a study tour. The others went shopping and sightseeing and he kept going around, wondering, “How can this place be so clean?” And he came back to Chennai and he conceptualized this. He found the waste pickers grubbing in dustbins and he asked them, “What are you looking for?” (They replied) “Trying to take out recyclables to feed our families and educate our children. So then he said, “I’ll give you uniforms, I’ll call you ‘street beautifiers’ and I’ll ask you to collect dry waste, clean separate dry waste from every home.” Then he called some actor, cricketer for a neighbourhood meeting so everybody came. Then, those people said, “Keep your waste separate, don’t chuck it 24 hours a day at your neighbour’s gate, you know? Wait till it will be collected.” So, the whole policy which we have, I mean the rules, actually came from NB Nirmal’s EXNORA. And, Vellu had been sent to Bangalore after a year in Vijayawada, to spend a year in Bangalore implementing that model somewhere. Then he said, “I can’t be sitting around. If I take a year per city it will take 300 years to cover India’s 300 Class I cities, means, one-lakh plus populations. That was the drivers first for the Clean India Campaign and after that, I was told, “If you want to get anything done, then go to the Supreme Court and ask for it.
Lalitha Krishnan: That must have taken a great deal of patience and determination. Tell us how that went?
Almitra Patel: Well, I thought I’d walk in, ask the court that municipalities need land for composting.Municipalities can’t do composting within their limits in a big centralised way. Because they can’t purchase land outside their municipal limits, the state has to give it to them. So, I thought I’d just ask for waste management sites, say thank you and go home. And the case took 20 years. 54 hearings in the Supreme Court…for three-four years nothing happened. Then it went to the NGT and I think there were 15 hearings there till December 16. So, from December ‘96 to almost to the date, December ’16, it finished.
Lalitha Krishnan: Goodness. Hats off and thank you from all of India. I heard you have visited multiple dumping grounds, over 170?
Almitra Patel: Now it is 206 dumping grounds and their municipalities in that ’94 trip all over India. And, if I visit one, more than once, I don’t count them twice. 206 different ones. Some, I’ve been 3, 4 5 times.
Lalitha Krishnan: Really?
Almitra Patel: Yes. Over these 25 years.
Lalitha Krishnan: it’s pretty potent stuff. Frankly, I am not sure if I would be able to stomach that. I ‘am not sure how many listeners could either.
Almitra Patel: A fortunate thing that happened is my nose stopped functioning about 17 years ago. Everyone goes around with a hanky on their nose and feeling sick. I don’t notice a thing and I have to ask my driver, “Has the smell begun? Is it worse?”
Lalitha Krishnan: I love the way you’re laughing about it. Without meaning to sound rude, not smelling anything sounds like a good criterion for checking out garbage dumps.
Almitra Patel: The most amazing thing is that the court-appointed this expert committee in Jan ’98 and we gave an interim report in November ’98 that’s eight of us, meeting every month and so on. And then, one of the members said, “Eight people cannot decide for the whole country. And so (we) asked the court for permission to present this interim report to all the commissioners of 300 Class I cities. So, 75 each, at Calcutta, Chennai, Bombay and Delhi. Delhi had the least attendance. Calcutta had the best from the eastern region. One of them presented all our things and said, “Do you have comments and so on?” There was very good buy-in and I am very proud that these rules are perhaps, the first to my knowledge, that is framed by a committee with consensus. Otherwise, you have a group of 6-7-8 out of which 2-3 are active, and it’s a rule for everybody. Luckily, the 2000 rules-it was early days. People didn’t even know the difference between compostable food waste, which we call, ‘wet waste’ for short and recyclables, which we call ‘dry waste’ for short. In those days, there was only compostable, recyclables and debris-innards, the third kind. It was only between then and now; now the 2016 Rules which have come are much more detailed and elaborate. At that time, you couldn’t afford to tell someone, “You shall…”. You could only say, “You should advise citizens to do this…”. Now it is a rule. Everyone has to do this because the situation has gone so much more out of hand. Kids in schools are also learning about it now. ‘Wet’, ‘dry’, ‘doorstep’, ‘recycling’, ‘composting’. These are all now household words.
Lalitha Krishnan: But not terms like leachate, windrow, biomining etc. I know you are going to explain all of this.
Almitra Patel:I also, as a city person in Bombay, would give my waste to the servant to take downstairs. I never followed him downstairs to see what he put it in. Or ask the people in the vehicle, “where is the waste going?” “To Deonar?” Or anything like that. So, only after I got onto this journey, did I begin to worry about where is it ending?
Lalitha Krishnan: Garbage has become such a huge issue but most of us don’t know much about handling it or know where it’s going or rather choose not to know.
Almitra Patel:I think it’s important for people to know from Vedic times, until the late 70s, there were no dumpsites. No Indian city needed a dumpsite because there was no plastic. The only thing that came out of a house was kitchen waste. And farmers, after bringing their produce into town would actually fight over the dustbins and have a teka, “this is my lane”, “my lane”, and take it back for composting on their farms. Two things killed this. One was the Green Revolution which told the farmers, “You just add urea and your crops will jump out of the ground and you don’t need to worry about composting” Second thing, the plastic yug began. When people said, “I don’t need this food waste, this plastic waste…in those days if we had the wits and foresight and told people, “Don’t chuck plastic in the food”, we wouldn’t be where we are today. So, there were no real mountains of waste at that time. It began, as I said, in ’91 and in ’94, we decided to do something about it when they started dumping this unwanted mixed waste on the roadside.
Lalitha Krishnan: What can we do at home to minimise the pile up on the dumping sites?
Almitra Patel: The whole idea is people will keep their dry and wet waste separate. It will not lead to mountains of mixed waste in some poor villager’s backyard with the leachate going into their groundwater and methane coming out and causing global warming. My latest interest has been to bring down these old heaps and that is done by bioremediation or biomining. What cities are doing at present; they’ll drive to some dumping ground, they’ll unload the truck, have an earth mover level it, drive over it, compact it…maybe, cover it with earth occasionally. But, instead, if they would simply only do which has to be done in every compost plant…that is to unload the waste in windrows which means, long, narrow heaps-parallel heaps, about 2-2.5 metres, not more. And these heaps can be very easily formed as a tipper truck moves slowly forward while unloading. So, it can just unload it in a long heap. You need one parking lot manager-type person saying, “This row is over, now start a parallel one and Truck no. 6, 7, 8, 9 can form the next one. Then, if you spray that with bio-cultures and turn it weekly, then the moisture goes out and some of the carbon turns to carbon dioxide with air. That’s why it’s called ‘Windrows’. So, wind can blow between the rows and aerate the heaps. And the volume comes down to 40%. Imagine that?
Lalitha Krishnan: That’s nearly half. And not so difficult to do either.
Almitra Patel: Almost half. So, if they do that then, you won’t have a big new heap. And, after four turnings, that waste is stabilised like leaves on a forest floor. There’s no leachate, no methane, no smell. That stabilized waste can be used anywhere. If we give it wet waste, compostable waste, then all of that can go straight, as is, to farms or restoring degraded land. So, now there are new options available where if you go to YouTube, Almitra Patel and look for Gurugram, Faridabad or look for Nagpur or Kumbakonam. These are three which describe simple ways of bioremediating. What they want to do which gets them a lot of money and a lot of excuses for land to flog to someone and pollute is ‘capping’. This means just covering with a plastic sheet, soil and grass, so it will look pretty but it’s like lipstick on mouth cancer. Everything is still decomposing inside generating leachate into the ground and the methane is slipping out of the sides of the cover. You can’t seal it because it was not lined in the first place. So, this capping is what they do in the West when they have a full bottom and side-lined pit and then if you put a liner on top – what they call a dry tomb. So, it makes no sense when you have an unlined dumpsite in India or anywhere else.
Lalitha Krishnan: I just hope people are listening. It just seems like we don’t know enough about handling solid waste.
Almitra Patel: Another thing which is a new kind of solid waste is fecal sludge. Septic tank sludge. This is something that your listeners should know. We have been coned by advertisers into using phenyl, bleach and strong microbe -killers which all go through your toilets and drains into your septic tanks killing the microbes which are supposed to live there and digest your solid waste. People complain why they have to empty their septic tanks every year, at huge expense – six to seven thousand (rupees) or more. At our school in Devlali, near Nashik, with 4000 kids, all day scholars, they used to empty the septic tank annually. After we started adding a bio-culture, from one supplier, for eleven years we haven’t emptied the septic tank. That’s because we stopped using phenyl, and we started using liquid soap, one tbsp in the bucket to clean the toilets or composting bio-culture itself to wash the toilets so that it would end up in the septic tank. All the sludge would get digested in the septic tank. So, you never need to clean it. And that water doesn’t overload your sewage treatment plants which empty into lakes and destroy the lakes. Because the sewage treatment plants in Indiaonly lower the Ph. They monitor the Ph and COD which is Chemical Oxygen Demand, and BOD which is Biological Oxygen Demand. They try to reduce that but they don’t reduce the nitrogen and phosphorus which are nutrients that are flowing with wastewater into the lakes and growing water-hyacinths and all the aquatic vegetation.
Lalitha Krishnan: Where can one access bio cultures? Is it easily available?
Almitra Patel: Not yet but if people begin to ask their supermarkets for them then it would show up on the shelves. Otherwise, just use Fem and that kind of liquid soap, not the microbicidal, bactericidal handwash. Use plain liquid soap. That’s good enough to wash your toilets.
Lalitha Krishnan: Almitra I know you must have many stories to tell but what part of your journey gave you made you feel satisfied or made you say This is what I hoped for?
Almitra Patel: What was for me, a great success, in this case, was, you know, I had asked for hyenic, eco -friendly management for 300 Class I cities, (I Lakh plus population) but the rules came out applying to all urban, local bodies, which means even 20,000 plus populations. So, that covered 4-5000 more cities. Another thing; in the beginning when the court directed all the states to give composting sites to their major cities, it happened. And I was happy about it. But all the cities misused this. Instead of dumping it on the highways, they said. “Yeah, now I got land and they rushed and dumped everything is a huge dump pile on a site which was meant for composting and doing it properly. So, what was non-point population along the highways – no man’s land of road-shoulders suddenly became point pollution for the villagers around these dumps. So, my dream became my nightmare. Now what we’re saying is that cities don’t have a right to ruin the life and heath of villagers outside for no reason with waste that isn’t there’s even. So, the trend, in the 2016 rules also, they are preferring decentralised composting with the city. There’s a lot of push back. Everyone says, not in my road, not in my park, not opposite my house…” But it’s your waste.
Lalitha Krishnan: That’s so typical. We don’t want to see anyone else’s garbage; we barely want to see our own.
Almitra Patel:So that has to change.
Lalitha Krishnan: What’s (a fitting example of a city/town) that comes to mind which has adopted good waste management practices.
Almitra Patel: Bangalore is the first in HSR layout park which has a Compost learning centre where they’ve got a shed with 13 different ‘home-composting models’ from -1,2-5-10 kgs. and a row of 7 open-air ‘community composting’ solutions. Anything from 50-500 kilo or one ton a day. What I like the best are lane composters. They are like large well-lit boxes raised off the ground so that air can go in from below and you put in some dry leaves; the waste can go in from some 40 houses and (you) sprinkle some bio-culture…it can even be sour curd and jaggery water or purchase bio-culture. Or a dilute 5% solution of fresh cow dung and again, some leaves. And you need twin boxes like this. One fills up in 15 days and you work on the second, leaving the first one to mature in 15 days. Then you empty that and begin again. And, that is so inconspicuous. You need people in the lane whoa re prepared to host it in front of their gate and take responsibility for managing it in order.
Lalitha Krishnan: Almitra thanks for sharing these But, if we want to know more about your work or delve into solid waste management a little more deeply where would you direct us.
Almitra Patel: http://www.almitrapatel.com/ So on the home page, top right, is a winking thing saying, ‘Free download. SWM guide Book’.
Lalitha Krishnan: Excellent.
Almitra Patel: That’s a 70-page manual that I wrote for the Swach Bharat Mission. Unlike the other manuals which the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs brings out, which starts with metro cities, this one begins with villages. Then goes to tiny towns, little bigger towns, medium towns and so on.
Lalitha Krishnan: In your long mission to clean up India, you must have come across some interesting people.
Almitra Patel:I’d like to share with people my hero. In 2003, I heard about a commissioner in S. A. Khadar Saheb, in Suryapet, which is about 3 hours east of Hyderabad. On his own, without even having studied the Solid Waste Rules, he just came up with the same idea. So, if people will look up Suryapet on my website, they can read about him. He also broke away from this common practice of Group-cleaning. So, after the morning work, a dozen workers are put together to clean the street. One or two do it while you can see the others sitting around. So, he gave a half kilometre stretch of a drain to one person with a wheelie-bin to take out the silt and not leave it on the drain-side. Then he had a separate leak-proof lorry going around so that the wet silt from the drains could go from the wheelie-bin into the lorry and then it went on to road shoulders for road widening, pothole filling. He needed no dumpsite at all. The amazing thing was this was a town of one lakh, three-thousand population. And, he managed everything on a half-acre site right in the heart of town. Quarter-acre was where he did compost. Stack composting (which on my YouTube channel, you can look at Kolar). After the stack compost was partly decomposed, he put it into vermi-bins for earthworms. And the driveway he constructed a shed on the quarter-acre with partitions for walls and he engaged, on salary, eight waste pickers saying, “Put your thin plastic, thick plastic, paper, cardboard, wood, metals in different gallas. He invited the kabbadi-wallasto come and purchase it from them. And within 6 months, his income every month from a one lakh population was one lakh rupees. Rs 45,000 from compost sale. Rs. 55,000 from the dry waste sale. Minus four workers for the composting and eight waste pickers for the dry. It was an amazing self-sustaining model. He didn’t get a pie of support from the state, the centre…no grant, no NGOs…nothing. Just manging with municipal funds. So, he innovated beautifully. He took eight self-help groups to the bank and said, “The municipality is going to engage them for door-door collections so a tractor would drive every 6-7 houses and stop and collect the waste (wet and dry, separate) from the houses. Near the driver was a high well-meshed cage for dry waste and near the tail the wet waste. And everyone standing there could see clearly that the wet and dry were being managed separately and that their efforts were being valued. He went to the bank and said, “Give them a loan for brand new tractors. And the EMIs for it, the municipality will pay directly and deduct from the fees which we are going to pay them for the collection”. At the end of five years, the tractor belonged to a self-help group. Even while they were doing the collection, after they collected the waste in the morning, in the afternoon, if they wanted to move sand or lumber, they could use them and use the extra income on their own. It was their tractor. That was a beautiful model.
Lalitha Krishnan: Definitely sounds like it. Almitra so when it comes to small towns v/s big cities where so do you think SWM will work more efficiently?
Almitra Patel: My hope these days is for small towns. Because the big towns think they know it all. They are dragged away on foreign tours to sell them inappropriate technology like ‘waste to energy’. How do you burn waste which has 60% food? Waste, which is 85% moisture? How do you get energy out of a rotten tomato? Unless you are doing bio methanation which is OK but incineration is an absolute No No. Big cities go for all these promises. These foreign people dare to come and say, “Don’t bother with your rules. Don’t bother to segregate. Just give your mixed waste, we’ll take care of everything. But you see what’s happening in Delhi. They promise 100% waste will end up as 5% ash. But in Delhi, Jindal in the middle of Okhla is sending over 30% of their intake as semi-burnt stuff to the dump. You can see charred coconut shells. Partly burnt cloth… Obviously, it’s not reaching temperatures of 1200 or whatever temp. it should if you can recognise it as a cloth or coconut. So, it’s a big fraud. Waste to Energy is the current big scam. So, my hope is with all the small towns. I think small-town people all know each other and can get together easier.
Lalitha Krishnan: Knowing you Almitra I can ask confidently ask what else is on your plate?
Another thing I have been working on is the pollution of surface waters. Ulsoor Lake in Bangalore. Village ponds. Nobody can go and swim in the village pond like their fathers or grandfathers used to. It’s all fully choked with water hyacinths. And the reason is—which was discovered by scientists in the US and Canada, when Lake Eerie between the two countries was turning green with aquatic vegetation, which would sink to the bottom, die, consume the oxygen, kill all the fish. That’s called eutrophication. And they wondered what to do to save the lake. They found that in the late 60s, synthetic detergents had been invented and they were using phosphorous. Sodium tripolyphosphate as an ingredient in synthetic detergents. Not soaps but in synthetic detergents. So, over a three-year battle, we fought in the courts with all the multi-nationals also. They succeeded in limiting the phosphorus content, in 1973, to 2.2% phosphorous, by weight, in the detergent. And that rule is still followed and practiced today though the Washington State says, “We will have no phosphorous in dish-washing and clothes-washing machine detergents and so on.” Europe also followed suite with 2.2%. India has not. And the same MNCs who are following the rules abroad-in US, Canada, and EU…they control 80% of the detergent market in India. There may small, small brands who are all making detergents for the big guys and they refuse to lower the phosphorus content.
Phosphorus is what is called a limiting nutrient. If you cut off the phosphorous, you cut off the aquatic plant growth. If you give phosphorous, it’s like a special booster nutrient for aquatic vegetation. Just like what urea or nitrogen is for land crops, phosphorous is for aquatic vegetation. So it’s so simple. I’ve been saying if the government doesn’t want to bite the bullet and restrict it at least make it mandatory to label the phosphorous content in detergents so that environment-conscious citizens can buy a low-phosphorous detergent. It’s an ongoing battle which hasn’t been won yet. But we need more voice to demand it.
I was speaking with environmental activist Almitra Patel. Check out her website almitrapatel .com. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Heart of Conservation Podcast. I’d love your feedback. Do write to me at earthymatters013@gmail.com. If you know somebody whose story should be told or is doing interesting work, do contact me.
You can download Heart of Conservation podcast episodes for free on Soundcloud, Apple podcast, Spotify, Google Podcast or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can also read the full transcript on earthymatters.blog. Bye for now.
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