Providing permanent support to the people of Tanguar Haor

 

Same spot in Tanguar Haor photographed in April (left) and August (right) 2016. Photo: Haseeb Md Irfanullah

Haseeb Md Irfanullah

I always wanted to take two photographs of the same spot of Tanguar Haor—one in the driest month of the year and one in the wettest. I was successful in doing so in 2016. It was just remarkable to see how two-thirds of a 12,655-hectare waterbody gets dried up in Chaitra (April), but again becomes so full, like a sea, in Sraban (August), year in, year out! 

To the readers of The Daily Star, Tanguar Haor is quite well-known as a wintering ground of a huge number of migratory water birds coming from the colder north, like China and Mongolia. In January 2019, Bangladesh Bird Club, Bangladesh Forest Department, and International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) counted about 150,000 migratory birds belonging to around 40 species—the highest count since 2012—in this wetland.

The migratory birds make our Tanguar Haor a "Wetland of International Importance". Recognising this fact, on July 10,2000, this freshwater ecosystem was designated as Bangladesh's second Ramsar Site (Our first Ramsar Site is, of course, the Sundarbans mangrove forest).

Despite being a significant hub of global biodiversity with mesmerising scenic beauty, Tanguar Haor has a very depressing past. Since the 1930s till the end of the last century, Tanguar Haor was captured by powerful elites through leasing system that caused rampant exploitation of its fisheries resources.

Over those seven decades, Tanguar Haor became a painful example of violating people's rights. With power, money, and muscle, the leaseholders harshly stopped the poor haor-dwellers from accessing the resources of their haor. Tanguar Haor's condition deteriorated so much that in 1999 the government had to declare it an "Ecologically Critical Area" (ECA).

2001 was a significant year for Tanguar Haor—the harmful leasing was stopped and, from the Ministry of Land, the management of the wetland was brought under the then Ministry of Environment and Forests. A couple of years later, the government put its resources, through Sunamganj district administration, to guard and to protect Tanguar Haor, which continued until the end of 2006.

The National Conservation Strategy Implementation Project in the mid-1990s was the first-ever conservation initiative in Tanguar Haor undertaken by the government. But it was the "Community Based Sustainable Management of Tanguar Haor" project (Tanguar Haor Project), which began a new era of conserving Tanguar Haor.

In December 2006, the Ministry of Environment and Forests started this three-phase project with technical support from IUCN and financial support from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). Other national and international NGOs, namely BELA, CNRS, ERA, GUS, and HELVETAS, also got involved in this initiative. That project came to an end in August 2016.

Over a decade, a number of major changes were seen in Tanguar Haor. A people-centric system was introduced to sustainably manage Tanguar Haor. There was a three-tier community organisation—at village, union and haor levels—and an inclusive supporting authority led by the district administration.

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Click here to read the original story from The Daily Star of 17th Aug 2020 published from Dhaka, Bangladesh.