Eco- Warrior Extraordinaire

A one-man army fights for the east Kolkata Wetlands that hold the key to the city’s survival.

- Devalina Mookerjee

IF HEROISM IS MEASURED by the number of people it impacts, the act of trying to save an entire metropolis from itself must rank quite high on the list. This is what Dhrubajyoti Ghosh, 70, engineer, ecologist and defender of the East Kolkata Wetlands (EKW) has been doing since the early 1980s.

“Why is the cost of living so low in Kolkata?” Ghosh asks. He explains that this is because of the EKW, an approximately 12,500-hectare system of transformed wetlands comprising waterbodies, vegetable gardens and paddy fields that fringe the eastern edge of the city and act as its kidneys,filtering out toxins from the waste. The cost advantage is wide-ranging— vegetables grown here have a short distance to travel to market; around 10,000 tons of fish, a staple of Bengali cuisine, are farmed annually here; the trash of the entire city is sorted and recycled by hand, and sewage cleaned naturally, for free.

If this is not enough, he says, there is another lesson. That of Chennai, which, like Kolkata, is a low-lying city and was saved from the perils of rising water by wetlands that acted as a buffer zone. During floods, the wetlands took the brunt of excess water, protecting the city behind it. But Chennai permitted extensive real estate expansion into the wetlands—only 27 of the original 650 surrounding wetlands remain—and the floods of 2015, inflicting damages worth $3 billion (roughly ₹20,000 crore), displacing 18 lakh people, and killing 347, were a direct consequence of this decision.