Assessing Infrastructural Encroachment and Fragmentation in the East Kolkata Wetlands

Abstract

Human-induced modification of land cover and over-exploitation of natural resources results in the fragmentation of landscape and instantiates large-scale environmental degradation. From a functional viewpoint, tropical wetlands are prototypes of natural land units that accommodate a human population by assuring different socio-economic opportunities under their unique eco-sustained capacity. However, due to their close proximity to large urban centres, natural resources have generally degenerated through infrastructural encroachment. The East Kolkata Wetlands (EKW), a unique Ramsar site in South Asia, has experienced such type of land transformation in the last four decades—under the influence of rampant infrastructural development. This paper attempts to evaluate the spatio-temporal changes of the wetland’s water environment and seeks to examine—using appropriate geospatial and earth observatory platforms—the multiple and variegated practices and developmental activities that have brought such a massive change in the period between 1984 and 2017. Besides, the drastic transformation of water environments under the influence of urbanization is viewed empirically—along as through the study of both current and traditional maps. The shrinking water environment in the eastern frontier of urban Kolkata and the fast rate of conversion of non-urban land to urban have unleashed an uncontrolled fragmentation of the EKW and limited its ecological functions beyond measure.