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It takes time, patience: Meet India’s first winner of a Ramsar wetlands award
Jayshree Vencatesan has helped restore 44 wetlands in Tamil Nadu. It’s hard work, she says, but perhaps the hardest part was being a rare woman in the field.
She was 35 when she first set eyes on the Pallikarani Marsh.
About 20 km from the centre of Chennai, the wetland wasn’t much to look at. Construction debris and garbage had been dumped here; sewage was being released into the area untreated. Large parts had been encroached upon.
“At the time, the marshes didn’t even have a name,” says Jayshree Vencatesan, 59. The area was referred to as “kazhuveli”, Tamil for “a place that drains”. This was a traditional form of land classification, even in government documents.
Vencatesan, who had just completed a PhD at the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation, knew the marshes were more than that. She had just received a grant of ₹32,000 from the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board, to map the wetland’s possible boundaries and explore the biodiversity it still supported.
She was determined to use this opportunity to build a larger argument.
As she did.
Her study, conducted in 2001-02, revealed a still-rich biodiversity of birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects and plants. It showed how what was left of the marshes was still protecting the region by absorbing large volumes of floodwater.
Cleared, restored and protected, she was about to argue, it could do much more.
It would take about six years of advocacy to get the state government to see things the same way. Through those years, she filed paperwork, gathered evidence, compiled reports, and knocked on every door available for a cause of this kind.
She became known as someone who simply turned up and refused to leave, until the right person heard her out. Amid it all, she gave the marshes a name, in her filings: Pallikarani, after a neighbouring village.
A larger effort grew up around hers. Local researchers, residents and activists set up the Save Pallikarani Marsh Forum. In 2007, there was finally good news. A total of 317 hectares was declared a reserve forest. Amid continued efforts, a total of more than 700 hectares now stands protected.
Pallikarani would become the model on which Vencatesan based all her conservation work.
She has since used this method of hard fact, effective communication and unflagging advocacy to restore 44 wetlands across Tamil Nadu. Thirteen of these, including Pallikarani, have since been recognised as Ramsar sites (under the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, an international treaty ushered through by Unesco and signed in Ramsar, Iran, in 1971. Incidentally, 20 of India’s 89 Ramsar sites are in Tamil Nadu.)
For her efforts, Vencatesan recently became the first Indian to receive a Ramsar Award. She won for Wetland Wise Use, for her contributions to the sustainable management of these vital and threatened patches of land.
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Vencatesan grew up with a keener sense than most children have, of what it means to live by the water.
As a schoolgirl in the town of Rajahmundry on the banks of the Godavari River, she spent long afternoons with local fishing communities, trying to understand the dynamics of the river, its floods and whirlpools.
Her mother Indira Narasimhan, a teacher, was happy to have her and her brothers engaged outdoors and learning. Her late father, Mayur Narasimhan, a salesperson with Hindustan Unilever, actively moulded her worldview and set her on her current path.
“He was a man of very few words,” she says. “But he lived a life very close to nature, tending to all kinds of injured stray animals, including a langur and a mongoose.”
His idea of success was to be useful to society. His idea of society encompassed the animals and trees, rivers and lakes.
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Vencatesan knew early on that she wanted to be a field researcher.
She acquired a Master’s in Science in 1987, and married in 1990. She and her husband Vencatesan, a businessman, moved to Chennai. Two years later, they had their daughter, Anjana. In 1993, she joined the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation, to work on a project studying childcare and women’s welfare in the unorganised sector.
She was in her mid-20s and still hadn’t found her purpose, she says. Luckily for her, Swaminathan (the legendary agricultural scientist nicknamed the Father of the Green Revolution) spotted her skills, potential and commitment and took her under his wing.
He encouraged her to explore subjects that were more interdisciplinary.
“He also made sure I could take time off to go home to my daughter,” Vencatesan says. This allowed her to be a young researcher and a young mother at the same time. “He did that for any woman on the staff, and that made all the difference.”
At home, her husband did his share, and sometimes hers too, and so together they made it possible for two adults and a child to all have full lives.
Vencatesan’s world opened up. She met luminaries from her field such as the British environmentalist Norman Myers, professor Madhav Gadgil (author of the original report that sought to protect the Western Ghats), ecologist and professor NV Joshi, and historian Ramachandra Guha.
A research grant led to a PhD on the biodiversity of the Kolli hills in Tamil Nadu’s Eastern Ghats. She met the ecologist RJ Ranjit Daniels, who supervised her PhD and passed on to her his passionate concern and care for the wetlands.
In 2000, a year after she was granted her PhD, she and Daniels set up the research organisation Care Earth Trust. In 2001, the Trust was commissioned by the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board to study what would become the Pallikarani Marsh.
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Six years is a long time to fight a single battle. But over the years, Vencatesan says, she has learnt that time can be her ally.
“When you work in conservation, you can’t expect results overnight,” she says. So she goes in prepared for a long fight, for disappointments. Patience and perseverance were never really the hard part, she says.
The hardest part was being a rare woman in conservation, 25 years ago. She remembers the harsh judgement, even from other women. “One lady said I didn’t look like an ecologist. She said: ‘She’s wearing a sari and a bindi. She looks like a maami’… a derogatory word of sorts,” she recalls.
The questions about Daniels went on for years. “Is he your husband?” “Where is your husband?” “If you’re married, why are you doing this work?”
Today, her team of over 30 researchers at Care Earth Trust is made up predominantly of women. These include her daughter, Anjana Vencatesan, now 32, with a Master’s degree in global water risk assessment and management.
Vencatesan says it has been one of her great joys to see the system change enough to accommodate more diversity, more discourse and new science. “A lot of young ecologists and forest officers are doing outstanding, gutsy work, because the system accommodates them better,” she adds.
One thing that hasn’t changed, is how wetlands are viewed. They are as critical as forests. But they rarely get that kind of attention, she says.
“People still say to me: ‘The Pallikarani Marsh is worth hundreds of crores in real-estate’. This is one of the main issues facing wetlands. They are so easy to convert into a terrestrial system. All you have to do is dump some garbage and construction debris there.”
When you look at a marsh, don’t only see what’s left, Vencatesan says. Don’t only see what we’ve done to it. Look at it and try to see what it once was.
