First published in 1994, The Wealth of Communities presents the stories of ten communities from Philippines to Poland, from Los Angeles to Zimbabwe, where they are making intelligent and sustainable use of the world around them. It brings case studies of reviving depleted fisheries; finding novel ways of waste disposal; controlling industrial pollution; and replanting forests, to show how they are shaping their own destinies and meeting their own needs while at the same time protecting the environment in the face of hardship and opposition.
With a Foreword by HRH The Prince of Wales, this is a book about hope and ingenuity, written in a vivid and memorable style to which the accompanying photographs lend immediacy and depth. In an age of climate crisis, these ten tales will pave the way for the success of future ventures, and they are a tonic for hard times.
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‘Nature has given us the means of purifying water’
‘Before I joined the fishermen’s cooperative’, explained Niranta Makal, ‘I was a robber, a bag-snatcher. I used to hang around with a gang – there were about seven or eight of us – and we’d rob people in the docks and break into factories.’ Niranta was a thin, swarthy character with a broad smile; he was somewhat abashed about his nefarious youth and giggled nervously when invited to discuss past misdemeanours.
We were sitting with Shambhu Mondal, the chairman of the Mudialy Fishermen’s Cooperative Society, on the third floor of their new office block in a suburb some ten miles south of central Calcutta. An orange sun was sinking fast, throwing the feathery fronds of scattered palms into sharp relief. From the dusty streets below rose the excited babble of an Indian dusk. A dozen children were playing cricket in a narrow alley with a table-tennis ball and a bat which had seen better days; three teenagers stood among them, oblivious to the noise, fluttering their distant kites across the pale blue sky. Women lounged on the doorsteps of their pantiled shacks, or attended to goats, babies and the washing; a group of men sat cross-legged outside the office, chatting quietly while they smoked beedis and repaired fishing nets.
‘Before Niranta joined us’, explained Shambhu, ‘his gang was causing all sorts of problems. Then one day he and some of his accomplices came to us and asked if they could join the society. We took them on probation and I went to see the police. I told them that the gang was going to reform. The police weren’t very happy about it. They said: “OK, but if there’s any more robberies, you’ll be responsible”.’ The society always tried to help people in trouble, explained Shambhu; and in any case, turning crooks into fishermen was in the interests of the whole community. Of the society’s 430-odd workers, Shambhu reckoned about 50 were reformed criminals.1
Early the next morning, an hour before dawn, we clattered along Calcutta’s pot-holed streets towards the small wetland managed by the Mudialy fishermen. The city’s history, and the nature of the port, seemed to be written in the names of the streets: Karl Marx Sarani, King George’s Dock, Oil Installation Road; there was even a Proposed Road. At the heart of this shabby landscape with its miserable bustees and monumental godowns, its vast container parks and fly-tipped wasteground, was a remarkably beautiful oasis of ponds and greenery. It was still dark when we arrived but a score of fishermen had already begun work in one of the larger ponds. Some held one end of a long net close to the shore while others waded out, a hundred yards or more, unravelling it as they went. Once the net had been stretched to its full length the distant fishermen curved back towards the shore, drawing the net into a circle and splashing the water to drive the fish into its clutches. It took them a quarter of an hour to draw in the net, by which time dawn had broken in a blaze of gold and red over the cranes and gantries on the far side of the pond, and we could make out the glint of fish leaping high above the heads of the fishermen as they tried to escape. Most didn’t, and were transferred to aluminium urns and floated back to the shore. The process was repeated three more times and by 8 o’clock the day’s fishing was complete. A group of merchants had gathered beneath the trees near the main entrance to the wetland and it took an hour to auction off the catch.
When Shambhu Mondal’s father arrived here in the 1930s with five other families – all poor fishing people who had left their homes in Howrah District when the Damoda River had dried up – they found a large area of soggy marshland with scattered ponds and a floating population of criminals. Over the years the owners, the Calcutta Port Trust, nibbled away at the marshes, converting some areas into industrial sites and using other parts for the dumping of waste. Between 1960 and 1980 the wetlands shrunk from 250 hectares to 80 hectares. By 1980 the Mudialy Fishermen’s Cooperative Society was well established – it had begun life in 1961 – but the fish catch was relatively low compared to the present. In 1980/1, the society harvested 65 tonnes of fish; ten years later the annual yield had risen to 288 tonnes. Over the same period earnings had risen from 800,000 rupees ($42,000) to 5 million rupees ($263,000), and today the only criminals you’ll see at the Mudialy wetlands are reformed ones like Niranta Makal.
Niranta had abandoned the life of crime and turned to fishing for two good reasons. First, he was afraid of the police: ‘They shot at me once’, he recalled, ‘and even though they missed, I decided it was time to become an honest man.’ More importantly, Niranta saw that the Mudialy fishermen had steady work and a regular income which far exceeded his own.
Few places in the world have been so persistently reviled as Calcutta, Kipling’s ‘City of Dreadful Night’, whose very name conjures up images of poverty, overcrowding and death. Founded just over three centuries ago on the marshy banks of the River Hooghly by an English merchant called Job Charnock, Calcutta’s past has been both glorious and gruesome. With its marvellous collection of neo-classical palaces, its fine churches and splendid government buildings, Calcutta’s architecture is a match for any city in the world. And there is much else to recommend it too. Its people, for example: the native Bengalis possess a wit and intelligence which makes India’s more prosperous cities – one thinks, for example, of Delhi or Madras – seem parochial. Nevertheless, the misery of the millions who live on the streets and in the overcrowded slums is as palpable as the pollution which at times renders the air almost unbreathable. A city built for a million people is now home to over ten times that many; starved of funds, and crippled by apathy and overmanning, the municipal authorities struggle to keep Calcutta working. The public services – whether of transport, telecommunications or power supply – are a shambles, although the situation is by no means unremittingly bleak. 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’. Perhaps; yet over the last hundred years Calcutta has developed a system of sewage and waste disposal which is among the most enlightened in the world.
The architects of this system – which transforms sewage and organic waste into fish and vegetables – are the fishermen and farmers of places like Mudialy and the East Calcutta Marshes. Every day the Mudialy Cooperative takes in 25 million litres of polluted water – an oxygenless cocktail of sewage and industrial effluent – and every day it harvests over 1 tonne of fish and expels some 23 million litres of reasonably clean water. Meanwhile, on the other side of the city, in the East Calcutta Marshes, 20,000 people daily transform over a third of the city’s sewage and almost all its domestic waste into 150 tonnes of vegetables and 20 tonnes of fish. This is not only one of the most efficient and productive systems of sewage treatment in existence, it is very probably the cheapest. In India’s expanding cities, the links between people and nature become ever more tenuous: the Mudialy wetlands and the East Calcutta Marshes provide a marvellous exception, with the fishermen and vegetable farmers doing the people of the city, and the municipal authorities, an immense favour.2
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Shambhu Mondal’s father and the small group of associates who came to the Mudialy wetlands over half a century ago were not concerned with looking after the environment; they simply wished to scratch a living at the one occupation they knew, which was fishing. Life was very difficult for them at first. The wetlands were covered with garbage and the scattering of shallow ponds provided just enough fish to sustain the newcomers. ‘In 1950’, explained Shambhu as we wandered around the tree-fringed ponds one afternoon, ‘my father and five others decided to organize a samity, a society, and they approached the Calcutta Port Trust and asked for a lease on the wetland.’ In 1952 they were given a three-year lease for a fee of 16,000 rupees. They shifted some of the waste, enlarged the ponds and began to prosper in a modest way. ‘Then in 1957’, recalled Shambhu, ‘a rich zamindar, a landlord from another district, bought the lease off CPT and my father and his friends were forced to become his labourers. They became poorer and poorer.’ The following year they decided that each member of the samity should make a daily contribution of 25 paisa – a quarter of a rupee – to a collective fund. After a year they had raised 4,500 rupees; a further 12,000 rupees were collected from other sources and in 1960 they bought back the lease. In 1961, at the insistence of the CPT, they formed the Mudialy Fishermen’s Cooperative Society with 53 members. The next 20 years witnessed steady growth in the society’s membership; sales from fish provided each family with a respectable living, in addition to which the society was able to pay some of the members’ education and health costs. However, in 1986 the society’s activities – and the wetlands themselves – were transformed following the arrival of Mukut Roy Choudhury, a mild, self-effacing ecologist from the West Bengal Fisheries Department. ‘We call him remote control,’ said Shambhu affectionately.
‘When I arrived the fishermen resented my presence,’ said Mukut as he drove us out to Mudialy one morning. Shambhu agreed: ‘Yes, we were angry at first. Mukut said we should change the shape of the ponds and plant trees. We said: “No, why should we? We’re bona fide fishermen. We don’t know anything about trees”.’ It took a while for Mukut to convince the fishermen that great improvements could be made to the fisheries. ‘I spent months talking to them,’ he recalled. ‘I lived with them, I got to know their problems and gradually they saw that I had their best interests at heart. In those days there were still many rowdies hanging about here. I often met them at night, and they threatened to kill me if I tried to evict them.’ The rowdies gradually drifted away as Mukut’s plan to improve the wetlands took shape.
Since 1986 the society has planted almost 100,000 trees, two-thirds of which have survived, and the whole system of water use has been refined. Previously, the polluted water which seeped in at one end of the wetland was subject to a fairly anarchic process of filtration by wetland plants. Now this water is passed through a series of six square tanks and connecting canals. ‘In this one’, explained Shambhu as we peered into the first of these, ‘there’s no oxygen at all and the BOD, the biological oxygen demand, is sometimes as high as 250.’ BOD, he explained, was a good index of water quality; the higher the figure, the worse the pollution. ‘By the time we discharge water back into the Hooghly’, he continued, ‘the BOD is down to around 15, the water is thoroughly oxygenated and it’s almost drinkable.’ Indeed, by the time the polluted water reaches the third tank – just a couple of hundred feet away from the point of entry – it has been purified enough for several hardy species of fish to survive; further along the line, in the main stocking tanks, it is clean enough to support over 40 species, 14 of which are commercially important. ‘We don’t use any chemicals except lime, which kills anaerobic bacteria,’ explained Shambhu. ‘Nature has given us the means to purify water, and that’s what we do here.’ Dense beds of water hyacinth (Eichhornia crasspies) and reed (Phragmites species) leach heavy metals like lead and mercury out of the water, and Leptocloa chinensis (Shambhu’s love of Latin suggests a classicist manqué) absorbs the oil and grease. The water which reaches the stocking tanks is a sewagy soup devoid of nasty chemicals but rich in nutrients. This is the food of the algae and animal plankton, which in turn are devoured by the fish.3
Attention to detail is not confined to life in the water, and many of the 70-odd species of tree planted along the embankments are here for a good reason. The leathery-leaved fig trees along the boundary of the park help to absorb the dust which comes swirling in from the industrial estates nearby; species like neem absorb a variety of gaseous pollutants; and beside the water’s edge leguminous trees provide extra fodder for the fish. The trees have already begun to generate an income. last year’, explained Mukut, ‘the society sold 40 tonnes of timber. This year we’re hoping to double that.’ When Mukut arrived in 1985/6 the yield of fish per hectare was 1.9 tonnes and total earnings for the year were 1,300,000 rupees (or $68,000). By 1987/8, the yield had risen to 3.75 tonnes per hectare and earnings had almost trebled. Two years later, in 1989/90, the yield had risen to 5.6 tonnes and earnings were past the 5 million rupee mark. The fishermen are ambitious: they see no reason why they shouldn’t get 600 tonnes of fish a double the 1995.
The society’s book-keeping is exemplary, and the members know exactly how much money is earned and how it is used. Approximately half of all earnings goes on salaries and daily running costs, and half is ploughed back into developing the fisheries and the society. The most experienced members of the cooperative – and the six members of the board of directors (all of whom are elected) – receive 51 rupees a day, or 1,500 rupees a month. To put this in perspective, it amounts to double the wage a manual labourer would receive for industrial work, or four times that of an agricultural day-labourer. Those beginning work for the society – they will generally be unmarried teenagers – start at the bottom of the scale, with around 20 rupees a day. Gradually, their salaries rise towards the higher level. Each member of the cooperative also receives an annual bonus of between 4,500 rupees ($180) and 10,000 rupees ($400), which most invest in government bonds.
About a tenth of the society’s earnings goes on educational costs, medical care, funeral expenses, building loans and charitable donations. An indication of the society’s rising prosperity can be gauged from the amount of money spent on festivals: in 1982/3 it was 10,000 rupees; by 1989/90 it had risen to 30,000 rupees. Talk to any of the fishing families in Mudialy and they will tell you how their lives have improved over the past ten years. Take Astam Kumar Bag, for example, now the society’s accountant. ‘When I joined the society in 1961’, he said, ‘our living conditions were dreadful. I lived in a one-room mud but and couldn’t afford to eat much. Since 1986, our standard of living has risen dramatically.’ We asked him whether he considered himself wealthy now. He laughed: ‘Yes, more or less, I suppose!’ Like most members of the society, he lives a couple of miles away from the wetland in the suburb of Mudialy. He has a three-room home beside a large tank, or pond, with a pleasant garden and plenty of space. His young daughter and son eat three decent meals a day, with fish every lunch; it is a far cry from the penury of his youth. He is especially proud of the community’s educational achievements. In 1980 barely a fifth of the members’ children attended school; most were sent out to work from an early age. Now that the society pays educational costs from its profits from all the members’ children to school.
The most tangible sign of prosperity is in the building boom at Mudialy. After we left Astam Kumar Bag we went to inspect a half-built house a stone’s throw from the society’s office. A young man with the looks of a film star and the build of an athlete proudly showed us round the ground floor, then took us on to the roof, where his family were drinking up the dying rays of the setting sun. In another couple of months, he explained, their house would be complete. He and his brother had saved 60,000 rupees ($2,400) from their salaries and taken an interest-free loan of 70,000 rupees ($2,800) from the Mudialy Fishermen’s Cooperative Society. They would pay the loan back within ten years: ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘We’re making enough money from fishing; we’ll find it easy to pay off our debts.’ He said they were going to paint the whole house bright green. It should clash nicely with the lurid orange building – also constructed with loans from the society – next door. On our way back to the fishermen’s office – a chasmy, concrete job four inelegant storeys high and constructed with the society’s profits – he showed us the home which he and his family of eight would soon be leaving: with its russet pantiled roof and mottled walls, it was certainly picturesque, but it was cramped, dingy and less than half the size of their new house.
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In the early weeks of 1992 the magazine India Today ran a short piece under the title ‘Sewage Nightmare – Calcutta in eco-peril’. The article suggested that if the East Calcutta Marshes were developed for building – or parts were turned into a trade-fair park and zoo, as the state government evidently wished – the city would soon smother in its own sewage. At last, it seemed, Calcutta would really deserve the opprobrium heaped upon it a century before by Kipling. In February an organization called PUBLIC – People United for Better Living in Calcutta – filed a writ in the high court to halt any further development of the wetlands; the judge passed an interim order prohibiting any changes in land use while the court duly considered the issues in detail. Nine months later the order was made permanent. (Pradeep and Bonnari Kakkar, two prominent members of PUBLIC, were in Delhi when the final judgement was made. The hotel receptionist handed them the following message from their lawyer, who had telephoned the news from Calcutta: ‘We have one hand towel. I will be in Delhi tomorrow.’ What he had actually said was: ‘We have won hands down. I will be ...’)
The person who has done most to establish the significance of the East Calcutta Marshes is Dr Dhrubajyoti Ghosh, a sanitary engineer by training and now the executive engineer for the Calcutta Metropolitan Water and Sanitation Authority. We met late one morning in his office in BBD Bagh, the square named after three revolutionaries – Binoy, Badal and Dinesh – hanged by the British for conspiring to kill Lord Dalhousie, the first governor of Bengal. We were soon reminded of Calcutta’s revolutionary element when a Marxist demonstration within the decrepit and dusty building made conversation all but impossible. However, we struggled on during the occasional gaps in the chanting and clapping.
The East Calcutta Marshes, explained Dr Ghosh, constituted the largest and finest traditional sewage and waste-disposal system in the world. He estimated that somewhere in the region of a third of the city’s sewage ended up in the marshes, to be processed in the most ingenious ways. A little under 7,500 acres is taken up by sewage-fed fishponds or bheris. Each year these fisheries produce 7,500 tonnes of fish. While some of the sewage goes straight to the bheris, some is detained for use by the ‘garbage farms’. Much of Calcu...
Table of contents
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Preface to the new edition of The Wealth of Communities
Original Title Page
Original Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Foreword by HRH The Prince of Wales
Acknowledgements
1 Calcutta
2 NEPAL Annapurna Conservation Area Project
3 Zimbabwe
4 Uganda
5 Mauritania
6 Krakow
7 Los Angeles
8 Costa Rica
9 Ecuador
10 The Philippines
Conclusions
Notes and References
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