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in Calcutta Marshes
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Calcutta is one of India's most beautiful cities; it is also the most squalid. Kipling's 'City of Dreadful Night' was built for one million people; it now houses ten times that many. The municipal authorities are crippled by apathy and overmanning and the public services are a disgrace. Yet in one field the city is a world leader: every day 20,000 people living and working in the East Calcutta Marshes transform a third of the city's sewage and virtually all of its domestic refuse into 20 tonnes of fish and 150 tonnes of vegetables. "It is a system of genius," explains Dr Dhrubajyoti Ghosh, executive engineer for the Calcutta Metropolitan Water and Sanitation Authority, "and it's perfectly suited to countries in the developing world. The two basic requirements seem to be poverty and sunshine, and we have plenty of both." The journey towards the marshes takes you through some of the grimier parts of Calcutta, past the rancid slums of refugees, the tanneries of Chinatown and up to the city refuse dumps of the Dhapa Square Mile. Here the gangs of men, women an children comb through mountains of rubbish, picking out metal, plastic, wood, indeed anything with a recyclable value. What is left is a rotting mass of organic matter, the ideal substrate for growing vegetables. Soon after you leave the dumps you enter an area of startling beauty. The East Calcutta Marshes are a sort of tropical version of the Camargue or the Norfolk Broads: an intimate patchwork of tree-fringed canals, vegetable plots, rice paddies and fish ponds covering some 20,000 acres in all. At the heart of the marshes is the Bantalla sewage works. Built by the British in 1943, these closed down two years later. The fishermen and vegetable farmers of the marshes - the natural ecologists, as Dr Ghosh calls them - had already developed a cheaper and more productive way of dealing with sewage. Approximately a third of the city's sewage enters the marshes. While some goes straight to the bheris, the sewage-fed fish ponds which cover around 7,500 acres, some is channelled towards the garbage farms. These are mainly clustered around the area of inflow and the Dhapa Square Mile and they are hugely productive: the vegetables here are grown on a rich layer of organic matter taken from the refuse dumps and irrigated with sewage water. In the bheris algae feed on the raw sewage, whose nutritional value is transformed into edible protein with a dozen commercial species of fish gorging themselves on the thick algal soup. The effluent from the bheris is also used, mostly by the rice paddies which are dotted around outer reaches of the marshes. This is a system of great complexity and the fact that we now understand how it works is largely thanks to Dr Ghosh, who first visited the marshes in 1980. "The law and order situation was terrible then," he recalls. "Gangsters frequently looted fish and the local political leaders were sometimes keen to keep the dishonest happenings quiet. In the early days I was frequently threatened and told, "We'll kill you if you come back." Dr Ghosh kept coming back and by 1985 he had mapped the entire area. Since then he has persistently argued that Calcutta's self-help sanitation system is replicable elsewhere in India and the tropics. His work has made him many enemies. Engineers, he points out, have little enthusiasm for such self-help schemes: "Conventional sewage systems are invariably funded by multinationals or other highly financed groups - and they are prepared to pay engineers large sums of money to design and build them." However, it has been the property speculators who have proved to be Dr Ghosh's most unsavoury adversaries. Over the years various developments have chipped away at the marshes. In the 1960s a large chunk was lost to a housing scheme; in the 1980s a new road brought the marshes closer to the city and many fish ponds were drained to make way for housing for the rich. Dr Ghosh, who attacked many of these schemes, was constantly threatened for many years. Recently the state government saw sense and recognized the area officially as a waste recycling region. There is now a general presumption against further development, though whether that holds good remains to be seen. During the past few years Dr Ghosh's department has helped to install a number of low-cost, self-help sanitation schemes outside Calcutta. At one site I visited, 21 hectares of land had been set aside to treat 1 million litres of sewage a day. He hoped that the ponds, which were in the process of being dug, would yield 50 tonnes of fish a year. "This isn't a money spending exercise," he said. "It's money saving, and we could do something similar almost anywhere else in the tropics." A keen supporter of these natural systems of sewage disposal is the West Bengal Fisheries Department. The department has appointed a technical adviser who had done much to help a number of fishermen's co-operatives. The best known of these is the Mudialy Fishermen's Co-operative Society, whose 430 members harvest over one tonne of fish a day from ponds at the heart of Calcutta's dockland. Since 1980, the Mudialy fish catch has risen by a factor of seven, reflecting both the hard work of the co-operative members and the expertise of the Fisheries Department ecologist who has helped to refine the system. The 23 million litres of polluted water which enters the ponds each day contains not only sewage, but industrial waste as well; by the time the water leaves it is almost drinkable and it can support 40 species of fish. Water hyacinth is used to leech out heavy metals, while other plants absorb the grease and oil. "Nature has given us the means to purify water and that's what we do here," explained the chairman of the co- operative. A study carried out by the National Environment Engineering Research Institute attests to the efficiency of the system: 99.9 per cent of faecal coliform coming into the system was removed during the passage through the ponds. Mercury levels in the incoming water were high, but none could be detected in the outflow. Several dozen of the Mudialy fishermen are reformed criminals: fishing, they have discovered, pays better than crime. "When I joined the co-op in 1961," the co operative accountant (never a member of the criminal classes) told me, "our living conditions were dreadful. I lived in a one-room mud hut and couldn't afford to eat much. Since 1986, our standard of living has risen dramatically." Now the accountant has a three-room house with a pleasant garden and view over a large pond. His children eat three decent meals a day, with fish every lunch. The educational costs, as well as medical care for the whole family, are paid by the co-operative's earnings from fish. In 1980, barely a fifth of the fishermen's children attended school. Now they all do. Kipling described Calcutta as the city "where the cholera, the cyclone, and the crow come and go, by the sewerage rendered foetid, by the sewer made impure." Since Kipling's day, sewage has taken on a new meaning for Calcutta: it has become a resource rather than a nuisance, thanks to the 20,000 natural ecologists who have created the marshes.
Charlie Pye-Smith is a freelance writer on environmental issues and co-author of "The Wealth of Communities"
This article first appeared in People & the Planet, Vol.4, No.1 1995 and is reprinted with permission. � Copyright People & the Planet 1995 [http://www.oneworld.org/patp/index.html]
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