Title: Continuing wetland degradation dissociates socio-ecological systems and affects interconnected goals of environmental health, equity and wellbeing: A case study from the Lower Gangetic Floodplains

Unplanned urbanisation and industrialisation have severely degraded natural ecosystems, particularly wetlands. The Ganges-Brahmaputra Basin support 630 million inhabitants; yet continue to be altered rapidly, jeopardizing the region’s social and ecological integrity. By conducting qualitative interviews and participant observation in a wetland dependent village located in the Lower Gangetic Floodplains we investigated how degrading wetlands in suburban landscapes were affecting socio-ecological systems. Not only did the wetlands provide livelihood options, mainly fishing and farming, but also provided prestige and autonomy. Vulnerable sections of the society across class, age and gender were solely dependent on the wetland. In absence of political will to safeguard wetland health, industries emerged by altering wetlands, which hampered local community’s livelihood and lifestyle. Further, our study demonstrated that local ecological knowledge could provide qualitative baseline information for fast-tracking identification of important wetlands and creating inventories to initiate wetland conservation and management. Finally, we recommend local governance structures should be strongly tied to international or national wetland policies so that wetland functions along with human health and well-being could be sustained. We strongly advocate that contradictions in policies be resolved to strengthen efforts to conserve wetlands which provide resilience to marginal communities in the face of calamities.


INTRODUCTION
Human cultures dependent on their immediate natural resources have demonstrated sustainable use of the same by evolving community-based robust decision making systems and resource utilisation protocols (Ostrom 1990;Agrawal and Chhatre 2006;Newton et al. 2015). However, colonial and capitalist expansion and post-globalisation economic orders have mounted extreme pressure on natural resources on one hand and detached people from nature on the other (Guha 1983;Unnikrishnan and Nagendra 2015;Srinivasan and Velho 2018;Unnikrishnan et al. 2020). Studies across developing countries in South and South-East Asia have shown how development policies in terms of rapid industrialisation have rendered communities depending on natural systems vulnerable in terms of life chances and life qualities (Zaman 1996;Bisangkhe 2004;Elmhirst 2012;Parasuraman 2016).
One of the ecosystems that have been facing maximum exploitation postindustrialization is wetlands with recent estimates suggesting an 87% decline in global wetland area since pre-industrial times (Walpole and Davidson 2018). Conversion and loss is continuing in all parts of the world, and particularly rapidly in Asia (Davidson 2014). This has implications for sustaining socio-ecological systems, as unsustainable use and conversion of wetlands can permanently damage such systems (Jaramillo et al. 2018). Indeed, wetlands contribute in diverse ways to sustain livelihoods of local communities by preventing floods and droughts (Bullock and Acreman 2003;Westerberg et al. 2017;Penning-Roswell et al. 2019), regulating water and sediment quality, pollutants and nutrients (Chalov et al. 2017) and ensuring food security (McCartney et al. 2010). They also sequester significant amount of carbon, thus playing a critical role in mitigating the climate crisis (Mitsch et al. 2013;Fennessy et. al. 2018). Therefore wetlands are intricately linked with global targets to achieve ecological sustenance and human well-being such as the Sustainable Development Goals The rapid degradation of such an ecosystem which is a critical lifeline for the future of humanity is largely driven by a lack of an ecological understanding of wetlands (Mulamoottil 1996;Mitsch and Gosselink 2011). The complex ecosystem is characterized by hydrological processes and exhibits daily, seasonal or long-term fluctuations and might therefore have an ephemeral presence of water such as in a marsh that experiences monsoonal flood pulses or in a tidal swamp (Keddy 2010;Mitsch and Gosselink 2011). Such vacuum in knowledge have also inevitably changed wetland dependent cultures. Academicians have stated that the domination of the 'hydraulic civilization' (of European origin) that sought to control water-flow through building dams, dykes and pumps as against the 'aquatic civilization' in Asia that was better adapted to nature's pulses such as flooding, is responsible for the wide-scale wetland loss in the world (Mitsch and Gosselink 2011). Such cultures included the Marsh Arabs of Southern Iraq which lived for centuries in marsh islands at the confluence of Tigris and Euphrates (Richardson and Hussain 2006) and human communities in the Shandong district of China that lived amidst wetland canal systems and harvested aquatic plants for food and fibre (Kam 2010).
The international basin of Rivers Ganga and Brahmaputra, endowed with diverse wetland regimes, is a key biodiversity habitat and provide for the basin's 630 million inhabitants with food, water and climate security (Kumar and Ambastha 2018). The basin countries have evolved policy frameworks to secure the health and ecological integrity of these wetlands, yet, alteration of the natural flow regimes by intensification of agriculture and urbanisation continues (Kumar and Ambastha 2018). Damodar-Hugli interfluves 1 in the Lower Gangetic Floodplains of this international basin hold an expanse of marshland (Sinha et al. 2013). One of the authors (TA) conducted extensive surveys in the region to study the status of a wetland dependent felid species, Fishing Cat (Prionailurus viverrinus) (Adhya et. al. 2011). During the survey, it was found that the marshlands at Dankuni wetlands located in the Damodar-Hugli interfluves was being converted by industries against which a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) 2 was filed by non-government organisations (Adhya 2015). The destruction was happening despite Wetlands (Conservation and Management) Rules 2017 (Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change 2017), a national policy guiding conservation and management of wetlands, which designated marshlands as 'wetlands'. It was also observed that marginalized communities depended on these marshlands. This prompted the authors to conduct the present research to examine the level of dependency of such communities on these wetlands.
The specific objectives of the study were to investigate -a) dependence of marginal communities on the affected marshlands at present, b) their perception towards changes in marshland character, and c) impact of reported degradation of marshland on local livelihood and lifestyle.

Study site
Rather than implementing a survey in a number of villages, we decided to do an indepth study of a single village which could be representative of the other villages in terms of wetland dependency, livelihoods and lifestyle. We found Jhakari (  The Dankuni wetland complex is approximately 30 km 2 in area and is perhaps one of the last contiguous marshy stretches in the Damodar-Hugli interfluves of the Lower Gangetic Floodplains. It is traversed by one of the busiest railways tracks of the region and is bounded with a national highway in the east.

The wetland complex is dominated by emergent vegetation 3 such as Typha and
Phragmites and is dotted with small ponds that are used for small scale aquaculture with strips of slightly higher dry lands in between. The wetlands become seasonally inundated during monsoon (June -November). During the dry season (December to May), cultivation takes place in some portions (Hazra et al. 2012). The wetland attracts both resident and migratory water birds throughout the year (Hazra et al. 2012). It is a home to a major wetland flagship speciesthe fishing cat (Mukherjee et al. 2012) Jhakari is a typical peri-urban village which is neither completely rural nor urban. Due to the close proximity to the metropolitan city of Kolkata, much of labour and capital circulates between the village and the city. In that sense, the village is in a transition; to be engulfed by the expanding city in the near future. Almost 1000 families inhabit Jhakari. The community structure is mostly heterogeneous and people across class and caste are present.
Marginalized groups belonging to economically weaker sections, Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) form a significant part of the community. Apart from few houses built with concrete, most of the houses are earthen with roofs made of straws, bamboo leaves, tiles etc. A narrow concrete government made rural road runs through the middle of the village.
The village has got one government sponsored play school for children. For higher education, students have to move to nearby towns. There is a primary health centre in the village.

Methods
To understand wetland dependency of people at Jhakari on the adjacent wetland, we adopted a predominantly qualitative approach where we collected people's testimonies of their dependency on and perceptions of the wetland. Our major modes of data collection were semi-structured interview and participant observation. For the semi-structured interview, we prepared an interview guide with questions related to demography of the respondent, their tangible dependencies on the wetland such as agriculture, fishing, livestock rearing and collection of other important resources; their intangible dependencies such as the importance of the wetland's existence and spatio-temporal changes of the wetland, their perspective on threats, governance and implications of the changes in the wetland-based services.
The interviews were conducted in 2019-2020. We conducted 26 semi-structured interviews and 2 focus group discussions with respondents belonging to Jhakari. We adopted snowball sampling for conducting interviews. The interview duration was around 30-40 minutes and we conducted the interviews in local Bengali language. Our respondents were aged 25 or above, as we wanted to understand the changes in the wetland that happened in their lifetime. We wanted to have equal representation of men and women respondents in our study but due to social and cultural norms, it was difficult for a male interviewer to interview women. 23% of our respondents were women. Most women denied participation in the interview as either they were extremely busy with their daily household chores or they felt that the male member of the household was more knowledgeable to appear for an interview.
In this case, participant observation was used as key tool to understand gender-based dependencies. We conducted participant observation to document livelihood-based or leisure activities that people do with respect to the wetland.
All respondents were informed about the objective of the project and asked for permission to be interviewed and for the same to be recorded. Later, the audio-recorded interviews were transcribed and translated in Microsoft Word software (version 16.0). The transcripts were then coded to find themes related to our objectives. The themes were then compared and contrasted for each transcript to identify the patterns. Observations were noted in the field diary and it was later analysed to triangulate with the interviews.

Wetland Dependency of the People of Jhakari
Due to transition in life and livelihood of people at Jhakari, the dependency of people on the wetland has also changed in last two-three decades. We found both tangible and intangible dependencies on the wetland (see Fig 2). Tangible dependencies were specifically material dependencies i.e. the wetland resources were directly consumed at Jhakari or monetized in markets. The intangible dependencies depicted ways in which ecologically healthy wetlands in Jhakari maintained stable societies through flood and climate regulation.

Tangible Dependency
72% of the male respondents depended on the wetlands for their primary livelihood which was supplemented by other sources of income such as causal/urban labour. Widows and elder community members reported total dependence on wetlands.
The major part of the wetland remained inundated in the monsoon months. But, in the dry season (from December to April/May) the water receded, exposing pockets of nutrient-rich dry land which was used for cultivation by the local people. Currently, the main crop cultivated was onion and ladies finger. Apart from this, other minor crops like spinach, coriander, beans, cow pea, Indian pea etc. were also cultivated (see, table 1). Many people also cultivated jute and a high-yield variety of paddy. The paddy cultivated was used for home consumption and for sale in the market. The paddy cultivated here is preferred locally; BP (24), a young farmer and casual labour told that "The rice we cultivate is very fine in texture and much tastier than that given in ration shops". Elucidating this view further, HT (78), an old farmer said that "the agriculture in the wetlands presents a prospect for earning 'food of self-respect'." Some minor crops like water spinach foliage or kolmi shak and water lily stems or shapla were also obtained from the semi-wet areas of the swamp. Pulses and vegetables like ridge gourd, bitter gourd, drumsticks etc. were also cultivated. The majority of the vegetable was sold at nearby markets, villages or urban centres. [Add table 1 here] 10/4-5 bundles 0.10 water lily (Nymphaea nouchali) 10/4-5 bundles 0.10 The wetland is nutrient rich and acts as a good habitat of different types of fishes.
Fishing has been a major part of the livelihood portfolio of people of Jhakari, providing more economic and nutritional benefits than even agriculture (see  In this scenario, Indian Jointvetch or kathshola (Aeschynmene indica) which was found to be locally available at the wetland was often used by the villagers as cooking fuel. Apart from kathshola, jute-sticks grown in the wetland was often used as cooking fuel in the households.
Harsh Jointvetch or Bharshola (Aeschynmene aspera) was collected from the wetland which was used for making crafts and religious decorative. RB (38), who was a craft maker at Jhakari told, "Shola from the swamp is used to make decoration items like chandmala, mukut (decorative items) etc. by the Malakars (craft-makers). The supply of shola from the swamp falls short of the actual demand. People from Sonarpur, Canning (50-70 km away from Jhakari) come here to buy shola from us." This freely available material from the wetland was sold to external buyers. Bharshola was found to be wild but some people have started cultivation to some extent. It grew quite easily and was found to require minimum labour.

Specific tangible dependency
Different social groups depended differentially on the wetland based on their social and economic status. We found certain patterns of gender and age-based dependencies on the wetland.
Men in Jhakari had higher opportunities than female in terms of income diversification as they could migrate to urban centres to work and also fish or farm in the village. Women mostly described themselves as homemakers. They were involved in wetland based activities which were important for the households but did not necessarily have monetary outcomes. For instance, women were involved in sowing, weeding and land preparation for agriculture during the dry months on the dry pockets of the wetland. Apart from fully responsible for household chores and carework, women also collected fuel and fodder materials from the wetland to support the household activities.
Widowed women were totally dependent on the wetlands. AK (65) depended on the wetland to sustain herself and her young children after her husband passed away. LK (68), another widow said, "We don't have any farmland. My in-laws didn't have any property. I was married to a person who worked as hired labourer. When he died, I faced a lot of hardship while rearing my children." These women were mostly landless and illiterate whose only means of livelihood was to collect molluscs and gather reeds from the wetland. They formed groups of 3-4 and collected molluscs for the entire day. There were some women such as SB (60) who along with collecting molluscs also used to catch fish using their bare hands without using any fishing gear. They evolved their own techniques to catch catfish which is capable of inflicting painful stings. These women also collected water spinach from the wetland (which men usually didn't). BT (50) ran a small hotel where she used kathshola collected from the wetland as cooking fuel.
Many reported that their sons have now grown up and were hired as daily wage labourers due to which their economic conditions have improved. The women still stuck to their work of collecting resources from the wetland as it assured their independence. For example, AK (65) said, "if I want to go to my parents' home, suppose, I could buy saree (women's cloth) as a present or I could feel like eating something special or buy cosmetics.
For that, I can depend on myself." Older people could not migrate to urban centres for work and depended upon the wetland for their only livelihood. They undertook less labour intensive work like collecting vegetables, molluscs, small fishes and shola from the wetlands.

Intangible dependencies
The wetland functions to control flood and purify water. RB (38) informed us that "The swamp acts as a reservoir of water accumulating it from the surrounding higher grounds". Other respondents informed that the wetland regulates flood. Thus, Jhakari has never faced severe flood events even though nearby urban areas were inundated. As the wetland was connected to the river Hooghly by a canal, the excess water got drained into the river.
Older respondents informed that the quality of the water in the wetland was once drinkable. It used to be naturally purified and clean. HT (78) compared the water with the present water that people get from filters. Indeed, wetlands have water purification properties.
Many reed plants are known to purify water (Al-Samawi 2000).

Changing nature of the wetland and its impacts
Despite being a life sustaining system to many, the Dankuni wetland is facing threat due to unregulated development. 'Factories' were ranked as the primary threat by 72% men and 43% women followed by 'clogged canals' as reported by 22% men and 29% women.
Such changes have affected the lives and livelihood of the people of Jhakari (see Fig 3).

Changing nature of the wetland
About 20-30 years ago, the wetland was well connected to the river Hooghly through a canal named Baidyabati khal. Due to waste materials being discharged into the canal from newly established buffalo shelters on the banks, the sluice gate present at the junction of the canal and river got clogged, thereby affecting the inflow and outflow of water from the wetland to the river. KB (63) said, "The water from the swamp used to flow out to Bander beel (another wetland). This canal extends up to Bally. There it connects to the river Ganges.
But the buffalo shelters there have obstructed the canal. There is no dredging." He further added, "The swamp has become hadh (full of thick vegetation of grasses) and is inaccessible now. It impedes boat movement deep into the marsh." A majority of the respondents reported waterlogging even in mid-February which is when the wetland is supposed to dry up. In addition, many factories have come up on the wetland by partially filling it up. Respondents unanimously felt that this has led to a contraction in the size of the wetland and due to the mixing of poisonous effluents, water quality had deteriorated. They opined that the water from the wetland had become unsuitable for drinking and was negatively affecting fish populations.

Impacts on the primary livelihood
As the natural water outflow system of the wetland has been disturbed, seasonal farming has also been affected. Many land owners could no longer cultivate their lands and had sold or leased off their lands for aquaculture to outsiders in the last two years. Few who owned land at a slightly higher elevation in the village could use it for crop production and had to wait till the water had receded. The time for water to recede has increased over the years. So, farmers who were previously totally dependent on farming lost their primary mode of income. Due to a decrease in the cultivated paddy which was mostly used for selfconsumption, people now have to buy rice from subsidized public shops which cost more but were poor in taste.
NT (43)  Not only that, other materials obtained from the wetland such as molluscs, water spinach have also decreased, leaving the dependents in a state of erratic income from wetland resources. The elders of Jhakari were increasingly losing their independence and found to be relied on their sons who work as migrant labourers to support them.

Loss of income
Due to loss of the primary livelihood i.e. fishing and agriculture, the villagers have Factories and buffalo shelters which had degraded the wetlands over the years have not compensated the loss by offering jobs to the people of Jhakari. Most of these factories required skilled labour which was unavailable at Jhakari. Rather, the labour force in these factories was outsourced.

Increase in market based expenditure
Due to decreasing food provisions from the wetland, the people of Jhakari became more dependent upon the market to meet their basic needs. Buying rice and vegetables had increased expenditures significantly. The situation is getting worse due to increase in market values of daily needed commodities and food products over time.

Degradation of wetland quality
Respondents informed that water snakes had increased and many residents had been bitten by these snakes. Leeches had also appeared recently which were absent earlier.
Respondents complained that collecting resources from the wetland had become a painful task due to leech attacks. People also claimed of getting skin rashes and lesions due to daily exposure to effluent mixed water of the wetland. PT (35) said, "Some factories emit yellow coloured liquid while some emit blue coloured liquid that does not let even an insect to survive in the swamp. Even a cow cannot go into the swamp. If the cow or goat enters the swamp, it develops skin rashes in the legs. The water in the swamp is that poisonous!"

Evolution of alternative livelihood
As the majority of people of Jhakari were uneducated, chances of getting government jobs or jobs that require skilled labour were very less. As an alternative, people had started (MGNREGA), one of the largest rural development programs in the world, which guaranteed employment for hundred days in a financial year to households whose adult members agree to do unskilled manual work to produce productive assets in the village. Despite some job security, it still did not guarantee year round income. Some youths had migrated to other metropolises of India for better remuneration.

Loss of interest over wetlands
Due to deterioration of the wetland quality, reduced economic returns and changes in lifestyle and livelihood, a number of people, mostly the younger generation were found to have a reduced interest in the wetlands. Many had stopped going to the wetland and were found to have a denuded sense of belonging to the wetland. The older generation's wisdom related to the interactions between the wetland and the society was seemingly missing from the youth's narratives.

Institutional responses to this crisis
Given the negative changes and reduced functionality of wetlands, the respondents opined that some interventions were necessary to restore the wetlands. Many respondents thought that the government was the owner of the wetland and hence government authorities and local administrative bodies should take care of the wetland. Some thought that the natural outflow could be restored through dredging the canal that joins the river. PS (30) echoing many others' opinions, said, "The government is responsible for the protection of the swamp.
If the canal is restored, all problems will be solved. People will start agriculture again. There is no initiative from the government; only verbal promises. The village authorities only look for votes. They promise many things, but nothing has been materialized yet." The negative effects on the lives of people of Jhakari in general and marginalized sections in particular have not been addressed at state or Panchayat (rural administrative body) levels. Many thought that authorities favoured factories more than the lives of people at Jhakari. UT (40) said, "The government doesn't care for us. The government only takes care of the factories! They are not bothered about the poor." So, an institutional vacuum existed that could not address the negative ecological and social changes that were happening at Jhakari.

DISCUSSION
In this study we attempted to examine the remunerative and societal linkages of local residents on wetlands amidst rapidly urbanising landscapes. We also sought to understand their perceptions of how wetlands were changing and how their lives were being consequently affected.

Interconnecting poverty and wetland dependency
Fishing and agriculture were the major material forms of attachment for the local community with the wetland that provided livelihood, food, autonomy, and prestige. More importantly, we found that vulnerable sections of the society like the older generation and especially widows were solely dependent on wetlands. Poverty has both income and nonincome dimensions and is often conceptualised as exclusion from basic needs and deprivation of capability (Sen 1992; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 2012; Alkire et al. 2015). In our case, although the local community members have significantly lower income than those in urban centres, many other dimensions of poverty have been countered through the dependency on wetland. The ecological functions of wetlands that provided food, fuel, drinking water and fodder buffered excess expenditure which is often a reality for urban residents. In the absence of wetlands, such marginalized communities are rendered vulnerable in the face of climate, social and financial crisis.

Social costs of a changing wetland
Jhakari as a part of the Dankuni wetlands, which is perhaps the largest contiguous wetland system persisting in the Lower Gangetic Floodplains outside protected areas, portrayed degradation of self-sustaining ecological systems. The changes promoted a detachment between culture and nature, pushing the vulnerable to the brink, and alienating the younger generation towards transitioning into an unstable urban casual labour force. We showed that industries that were emerging by filling up wetlands were not enhancing the lives of local residents, most of whom were unskilled and uneducated. We further highlighted the ignorance and lack of will in local administration to prevent such degradation of wetlands. A significantly altered wetland with decreased functionality could also alter the autonomy enjoyed by the local community. The residents had developed specific skills over generations which had helped them carve out life and livelihood options by intimately engaging with the wetland functions. It made them self-dependent and resilient against adversities. Such autonomy would cease to exist if irreversible changes occur in the wetland and in that case, the local community will be forced to shift from self-determined livelihood systems to complete dependency on external actors, where, their bargaining power is set to reduce to a large extent.

Policy implications for 'wise use' of wetlands
It has been estimated that the freshwater wetlands worldwide provided ecosystem services from 1997 to 2011 worth US$2.7 trillion per year (Constanza et al. 2014). In fact, values of inland and coastal wetland ecosystem functions far outweigh that of terrestrial ecosystems and therefore, underline the importance of wetlands in maintaining the most fundamental nexus between water, food and energy (Russi et al. 2013 This will also ensure that the local governance structure develops a responsibility to monitor the health and well-being of the wetlands in their surroundings. Over time, a holistic management plan might evolve with participation of local people and support from researchers and conservation practitioners, which will ultimately result in 'wise-use' of wetlands, a central tenet guiding the Ramsar Convention. Further, contradictions between national policies, for example, the status of marshlands in India as 'wetlands' (Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, 2017) and as 'wastelands' (National Remote Sensing Centre 2010), create legal loopholes that are being exploited to expedite wetland conversion. This needs to be resolved to aid wetland conservation and to secure the food-water-energy nexus, which is primal for sustaining the future of marginalized local communities. Calamities such as the Covid-19 pandemic which forced reverse migration of urban labourers to rural India is exemplary in highlighting the need to maintain resilient socio-ecological systems.

CONCLUSION
In this paper we showed that poor, marginalized people living in the vicinity of common natural resources, such as wetlands, are dependent on it for their life and livelihood.
Ecological functions of wetlands subsidize living costs for these communities by providing material and intangible support. Degradation of wetlands can harm these self-sustaining and relatively autonomous socio-ecological systems. We also showed that people's knowledge and experiences of temporal and spatial changes of wetlands can provide rapid assessment of important wetlands in the country. Engaging with such knowledge frameworks can foreground local community's voices in the response to global environmental changes.
Further, we suggest that international and national policies for wetlands be tied more intricately with local governance structures. More importantly, wetlands with ephemeral presence of water such as marshlands need to be liberated from loopholes in the legal framework and recognized as critical natural infrastructures in accordance with global wetland conventions and national wetland legislations.