The hub of birds getting choked with human waste

While the city of Ahmedabad is getting all decked like a bride with flowers worth crores and walls are being constructed to shield the visiting US President’s eyes from the poverty and litter that lines the poorer areas, a few hundred miles off at the Little Rann of Kutch, each village looks run down and littered with human waste. The walls bear Gandhiji’s glasses and the Swachh Bharat logo, but it looks ironically misplaced in villages with open drains and little mounds of plastic bags, bottles and broken glass.

The Little Rann of Kutch in Gujarat’s Kutch district is a famous tourist attraction. It is a vast area of some 5,950 square miles is the last habitat of the famous Indian wild ass. This beautiful creature is a cross between a horse and an ass actually and is known locally as Ghod Khar (Ghod meaning a horse and Khar meaning ass).

Each year between October and March the area also hosts thousands of migratory birds: flamingos, pelicans, Saras cranes, ducks and last but not the least, the great Indian bustard. The economy of this sparsely populated area runs mostly on salt panning that yields one of the purest varieties of sea salt. The panners, known as Agadiyas, however, remain poor.

The Kutch area, arid in landscape is rich in history. It is also an area where the Hindu and Muslim communities live inseparably intertwined lives. In 2002 during the communal riots which shook all of Gujarat, this area was a haven of calm because the twin communities did not permit the rioters to tear up their age-old communal amity. It is a poor area with a large heart. Rich in culture and biodiversity.

The Little Rann of Kutch, part of the Great Rann has been listed by the UNESCO as a world biosphere reserve. Visit to the reserve area begins at a road sporting a rusty neglected board with no guard in sight. Further in, it is easy to see that this precious area is losing its natural vegetation and becoming alarmingly full of human waste and invasive Prosopis greens.

The log drive from Ahmedabad to the Rann is flanked by villages looking choked with plastic. The water bodies are taken over at many places by water hyacinth that is making it hard for migratory birds who dive into the waters for their prey, to find food. Villagers tell you the number of flamingos and cranes is getting less due to various reasons such as this. Earlier the birds fed on millet crops and amaranth plants that have now been replaced by cash crops such as castor and cumin that the birds do not like.

There were also whispers about aggressive poachers periodically shooting the wild ass, a highly endangered species. It would be a great pity governmental apathy, human neglect, and variations in patterns of rain combine to ruin one of the last resorts of a fast depleting breed of rare asses and an area of rich and rare biodiversity.