While wetlands are naturally programmed to help with disaster control, and are also a source of water, food, and even medicinal plants, they are only seen as a wasteland and continue facing apathy, feel experts on World Wetlands Day.
World Wetlands Day is observed on February 2 each year to mark the day the Convention on Wetlands was adopted in the Iranian City of Ramsar in 1971.
Severely under counted and a regular victim of encroachment and rapid urbanisation, the wetlands -- marshes, swamps, bogs and large or small lakes and ponds -- according to the key United Nations finding, are being lost more rapidly than any other kind of ecosystem.
"There used to be over 400 wetlands in Delhi, there are now only a handful left. In urban areas wetlands are seen as wasteland, where garbage and sewer can be dumped. They must be recognised as an ecosystem," Faiyaz A. Khudsar, scientist in-charge of Yamuna Biodiversity, who held an awareness programme at the park on Thursday, told IANS.
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A WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) official quoting an INTACH (Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage) report told IANS that there is "no clarity on the present number of wetlands in Delhi and NCR" and that over 21 lakes and several ponds had disappeared from the map of the national capital due to encroachment, mostly by real estate.
"Wetlands situation is very bad in our country. Mostly because the upstream water is diverted for industrial purpose, the population of mammals associated with wetlands like swamp deer (Barasingha) and hog deer is dropping drastically," Shekhar Niraj, Head of TRAFFIC, a wildlife trade monitoring network in alliance with the WWF, told IANS.
Recently an expert team, including Khudsar, successfully revived Delhi's Neela Hauz Biodiversity Park's wetland and modified it into a fully functional zero-cost Sewage Treatment Plant (STP).
"Wetlands are helpful in stopping cyclones... In Odisha it was noted that cyclones had impact of only upto 50 mt around mangroves, while in general regions the impact spread over 1,500 mt... Recovery from calamities like floods, around wetlands is very fast," Khudsar said.
Citing an example, Khudsar said if Kashmir had had healthy wetlands the floods of 2014 would not have been that severe.
According to the experts, destruction of wetlands in the small towns is also depriving people of products like fish and dietary supplements (for human and cattle) like spirulina.
In Uttarakhand's Western Circle region, the Terai region of the state, over 200 people on Thursday completed an exercise to count the aquatic and wetland-associated birds across eight major wetlands of the region.
The government records identify only two wetlands in the entire Uttarakhand -- Jhilmil Tal near Haridwar and Asan near Dehradun.
"There are over 149 species of birds in these wetlands. We are updating the records and results will be out in a week... Encroachment, land use change and desiltation are some of the challenges for the conservation of wetlands," Parag Madhukar Dhakate, Conservator of Forests (Western Circle), told IANS.
He added that wetlands in the Western Circle's Nanak Sagar in Udham Singh Nagar District and Sharda Sagar near the Nepal Border are among the largest in region and the state.
Ironically, according to the records of May 2016, the Indian government under its National Wetland Conservation Programme (NWCP), only identified 115 wetlands across 24 states and two union territories.
NWCP in 2013 was merged with a lake conservation programme and called National Plan for Conservation of Aquatic Eco-systems (NPCA) that received only Rs 60 crore in the Union budget 2017-18 presented on Wednesday.
(Kushara Dixit can be reached at kushagra.d@ians.in and Asish Mishra at ashish.m@ians.in)
--IANS
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