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Photo essay | Troubled waters

1 min read . Updated: 19 Mar 2016, 01:36 AM IST Arati Kumar Rao

Pushed deep into debt, fisherfolk in South Asia are bearing the brunt of habitat degradation and trans-boundary politics

War makes headlines. But “slow violence"—which is neither graphic nor explosive—remains invisible, inflicted on communities by environmental degradation and climate change. It unfolds over temporal scales, its true implications manifesting only over several generations.

Take, for example, the triple whammy of habitat degradation, commercial overfishing and climate change threatening the survival of fishermen across the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna basin. All along the rivers of South Asia, these artisanal fishermen, who are highly marginalized, are losing out to organized fishing, commercial trawling, and state-sponsored and private aquaculture.

While some of these artisanal fishermen still try their luck in rivers devoid of fish, others are faced with desiccated rivers—the fallout of sometimes vicious trans-boundary river-sharing politics. The Teesta, for example, flows from India into Bangladesh. India built the Teesta Barrage in West Bengal and impounds water during the dry season, leaving northern Bangladesh parched.

Across South Asia, river fishermen pushed deep into debt are being forced to migrate in search of work.

These images are part of an ongoing larger body of work on the issue of trans-boundary river-sharing and the oft-overlooked river fishermen’s rights.

The photographs, taken along the Brahmaputra and its tributaries, as well as the lower reaches of the Ganga and the Sundarbans, document the changing fates of fisherfolk, their traditional fishing methods, and the effects of anthropogenic activities on the ecosystem itself.