 I'll be down in 20 minutes. I welcome back everybody. There's a carriage and horses. Thanks for coming back on time. We appreciate that. This is also a pattern for the rest of the year. People are still coming in. Maybe while everybody is still getting a little bit centered I would like to introduce to you Mr. Kami Kanshu from Pachara and he's coming to us from Edinburgh in Scotland and he's going to be talking this morning on who's water and who's knowledge. We're going to listen to this lecture and then it will be followed by another question and answer here. So please take your notes. And I think that there will be words on the screen this time. Thank you. And to this PowerPoint we'll also be available on the eCampus platform later on in the week so you want to go back and refer to it so Mr. Kami Kanshu comes to us from the University of Edinburgh but he is not only a researcher a PhD fellow he's also a writer and a journalist and he's been engaged with water management for the past 14 years so he is also a practitioner and he's not only aware of the academia what has he done? He has co-conceptualised and he's implemented a participatory approach at India's first hydro-fill and profit foundation and I hope you can say more about that later and this foundation is now the largest civil society based groundwater management network in India so my colleague was also saying about moving away from the states under the approach and how much has gone outside the state and here we have an example I'm at later work at ACFO an international non-profit organisation program manager at Asia where he worked on using smart phones to monitor the University of Edinburgh at the UK where he's finalising his PhD and doing research on how small water technologies shape urban water consumption in India so we hope that we can read your work there soon and with that introduction I'd like to give a warm welcome to Amit Kanshu and welcome to ACFO Good morning everyone and it's lovely to be at the mecca of water engineering knowledge in the world it's great to see such a very diverse audience and I've noticed that there are many of you practitioners so we are kind of part of the same family as well as you kind of heard from Michelle this introduction, is this too loud? No I really don't like the sound of my voice to be very honest it's not very in-depth for it actually the thing is that I do wear many hats and I hope for your sake I don't speak through them today so whose water and whose knowledge before we get into this I wanted to talk about a case study and this case study sounds so good it's almost like utopia and we are talking about the city a city which has a population of 4.5 million approximately let's say it generates 100 million liters of sewage and waste water per day 100 million plus interestingly there are 3 to 4 sewage footprint plants in the city but 80% of the sewage does not get treated there it gets treated in 254 constructed wetlands or as you would, oxidation ponds spread across 500 hectares of land which are also by default fish farms and it produces 10,000 metric tons of fish every year which is re-sold back to the city which is contributing and giving it the sewage as a form of nutrient recycling 50,000 people earn their livelihood by maintaining this vast water scale and approximately in Indian terms I give you the crux of the presentation by giving away the currency 100 million US dollars are saved annually by the municipality because they don't have to treat this wastewater they don't have to go through the cost of managing sewage footprint plants 60% of the carbon that this the wastewater would have ideally emitted are sequestered in this wetland system any responses where do you think this exact city is which city am I talking about has not a guess there is never a wrong answer Nairobi, Kenya good try and I appreciate the answer it's not correct but it's closing a different way and you'll come to that later any other guesses Mumbai, India you're getting very close I don't know now this is going into a bit the answer the answer is the city where I was born and raised, the city of Calcutta and I introduce you to the east Kolkata wetlands, the Ramsar site and if you were to look at any of the current discourse or current ideas around water management or sanitation management you'd find a lot of that you'd find places of that here if you'd like to understand constructed wetlands why not come inside the east Calcutta wetlands if you want to understand circular economy which is being around in the Netherlands nowadays why not look at the east Calcutta wetlands and I can go on and on and read a few more acronyms as if they have not been read enough on us already but in our practice so IWM Community Based Natural Resource Management Dewart, there we go Convigial Conservation, it's a Ramsar site why not Degroup, that's my favourite the funny thing is how many of you actually as I could figure out nobody in this class knew about the east Kolkata wetlands but you definitely hear about management of folders you definitely hear about how to create storm surge barriers how to manage and make deltas more adaptive and the crux of my presentation here today is to talk about the fact that these examples of sustainable relations that exist in our backyard are often forgotten unacknowledged because we are looking forward to something else that could come from the west that could help us solve our problems and that exactly brings me to the concept of cognitive apathy and the man who coined it and it's important that I talk about him because he needs to be remembered and talked about one part of that is the person on the screen today he passed away in 2018 to his United Nations fellow he was like many of you an engineer and that to a sanitation engineer and that to a very hard-moved one when he started off and he was working in the state panning board and he asked himself this question driven by curiosity what happens to this surge that's being generated in the city nobody seems to know where it's going so he followed the surge stream and he found this remarkable waterscape where poor people had used their ingenuity and their creativity to manage and create a waterscape which was actually producing diversity and managing the switch for the city which he would go on to call an ecological subsidy he kind of worked out that simply because of this waterscape the cost of vegetables and fish was 50% lesser than the city of Calcutta than any other metropolitan city in the country so the question of cognitive apathy is interesting here because I was 5 kilometers away from the nearest waterscape and I didn't know about it till I was 26 years old and I got into the water sector this is how it operates this is how examples which should inspire us are shielded from us we don't get to hear or engage with them because even while they're just in our backyard in my case it is really my backyard so what exactly did he mean by cognitive apathy but for that we need to know what apathy means and for those of you who are from Africa you would be aware of the term very well especially if you're from South Africa or Libya apathy which means separateness in Afrikaans, it's a political and cultural construct built on motions of white supremacy and racial superiority an authoritarian culture that legitimizes and institutionalizes and also legalized racial segregation a form of superiority based purely on the color of your skin but do you think which coin was cognitive apathy and I summarized his work here in what's on the screen a willful segregation of knowledge systems a systematic exclusion of the knowledge of the poor by the educated elite an exercise in knowledge supremacy which delegitimizes knowledge that emerges from quotidian practices involved in living creatively with nature the argument that was being made was that when poor people innovate and they show that they have remarkable intellectual potential to work with nature we don't see it as engineering knowledge the reason why these Calcutta veterans particularly bothered him was because it has existed for so many years from the 1920s but it was not acknowledged by the government it was not acknowledged by anybody else and it was going on by itself self-sustained by the community but the real estate mafia was eyeing it because it was on the outskirts of Calcutta and they were slowly creating a system where they were slowly trying to get the land for real estate development the politics of land and water are inseparable often when we look at water we forget that how intricately it is being deemed to the politics of land and I'll talk about it later in the video and the fact is that these Calcutta veterans helped him to kind of conceptualize this idea because he could see it with his own eyes what was going on because no engineer developed these Calcutta veterans then no one would actually recognize he spent his entire life's work in getting this ecosystem recognized getting it a Ramsar designation which actually kept the real estate mafia at bay at a great personal cost he was chapter of his job I really admire engineers who stick to their curiosity to their scientific endeavor and they push back the state which is driven by political economy and not by science and that is the integrity that would be worthy Ghosh reminds us of when we talk about this case study and to hear straight from him this was his definition he was quite harsh and his point was the cognitive apathai is a willful barrier to ecosystem learning and management it blocks the mind of the learner or implementer to accept lessons free from bias the victim of the disease thinks in terms of transfer of knowledge in place of exchange of knowledge these are very powerful words transfer and exchange in these words you'll see how the manifestations of power that is operating underneath these two words and a lot of many of us were from the majority world which is also known as some would call the global self we know this because a long time international aid was seen as technology transfer it was called technical aid and this kind of lays the foundations as to how knowledge will be perceived and how it will be circulated which knowledge circulates which doesn't is decided by power structures before we get into this cognitive apathai we need to understand now the impact of colonization on all forms of knowledge is quite obvious and it stretches to all kind of epistemologies and the way we understand and look at the world today but for the sake of this specific lecture the idea is to focus on water management and it has been thankfully a lot of critical work done into the history of colonial engineering and especially the management of water and the books that you see on this screen I will definitely leave a detailed list of references with Michel Marguerite which can be shared with you later so first question that I have for you is if you are in the 18th century and you are an engineer working on agricultural irrigation do you really think that there was a degree that you could get like an institution that was giving out these degrees where would you come from any guesses if you are an engineer in the 18th century and I am talking specifically here about British colonialism so any ideas no no you missed no I didn't mean that ok this is the way I feel the question what it meant is that you are going really far back in like a few hundred more years or a thousand so the thing what I want to say is that colonial engineering most of the engineers in the 18th century will come to especially arrive in Indian stock work and irrigation management came from the military there were no engineering institutions then that was handing out degrees saying this is what you do as engineers engineering is something you learnt on the job but the only institution that was producing engineers at that point of time 17th and 18th century is basically a history of military exploits and engineers was part of the establishment so the wars have been won colonies have been built now people have been conquered the landscape and nature so and interestingly and this is a fascinating book if you get a chance to read it I started reading it and it's just amazing how you know engaging it is Jennifer Durr's book The Live Night and she meets a very interesting point she said it is not just the mastery of people landscape but also time when you work on a river where people are using the flood and its seasonality to cultivate and you make it perennial you change the notion of time in that region your cropping patterns change your agriculture calendar changes your way of understanding the landscape changes and this was a very clear colonial project that was happening as well that was completely restructuring the way we were understanding landscapes or engaging with it and let us be clear that the roots of water engineering was not this benign thing to save people from floods or to protect people or to for people in the colonies it was clearly driven to increase profit from land the idea was to create infrastructure that would push water back reclaim flood plains for increasing productivity which would then translate to rent for the colonial states and it's important for us to remember that because this is the genesis of water engineering and because somebody asked a question in the previous session this is not just specific to water engineering I am a geographer that is very much imperialist project by itself Geography and anthropology were equally complicit in trying to unpack the colonies you needed to know the terrain and the subjects in order to control them and so water engineering also is a part of that as well within the social sciences we are very reflexive about it I think water engineering also needs to be in the same now what it would do also to verify the authority of colonial science and engineering and if you remember the quote by Steve Beko and I am assuming that my friends from Africa would kind of know that name quite well he talked about the fact that the most potent weapon in the hand of the oppressor was the mind of the oppressed once you have control of the mind you can control any country in the world with a minimum number of people that you know which was the history of colonization to do it specifically now what it also did was to establish expertise and notions of knowledge which would slowly lead to the decay of alternate forms of flowing water and world views around it and David Moss's work kind of clearly shows how with the coming in of colonial engineering the support and patronage for disinflation in southern Indian times especially started to undergo decay and the institutional forms that sustained them also did not receive the patronage they received earlier so this was what was happening was the supremacy of one knowledge system taking place while parallelly another knowledge system which was managing these waterscapes were going under decay at the same time and I don't want to put everything at the foot of colonialism because at no point of time in the majority world where we are always in the land of milk and honey but the fact is there were of course inequities and there were many serious problems with those systems as well but interestingly somehow from what the research kind of shows it seemed to have been ecologically quite well-finding the social complexities are a different story altogether now once you kind of start establishing a particular form of knowledge and you start establishing its primacy over the others you create benchmarks of what is scientific and modern and then you create concepts of like what the local people know stops mattering people who engage with the landscape on a daily basis suddenly stop becoming experts and jubajit the coach tractor he was a he had a sense of humor and he told me once you know the funny thing about irrigation engineers most of the irrigation engineers I know this is him saying have done the irrigation just by watering the plants in their balcony and this is if you look at it of course I mean I'm not saying that it's not harsh but the fact is that a lot of us practice things we don't do we don't engage with engineering or we don't engage with managing water on a daily basis as much as a woman or a man managing a farm does and yet our knowledge is somehow so much more important than theirs and we need to reflect as to why we think like that so this basically leads to the knowledge which produces experts and experts lead to the foundations for separation and I come to one of my own heroes and I hope that if you ever get a chance you'll be his work Franz Fanon and Franz Fanon is one of the most well known postcolonial thinkers or a lot of postcolonial scholarship is based on and in his book the wretched of the earth he says the colonial world is a world divided into compartments in order to reinforce supremacy in order to tell others that you need to be managed you need to separate them you need to create townships in South Africa where people live in tremendous poverty and squalor and you'll have areas like camps where you consume huge amounts of water are extremely well managed with the resources from the same country and introduce those unique pitiful uneven landscapes to justify why settler colonialism is acceptable and should be the way it is so in this world of compartments how does it play out to lay into the world? the postcolonial world carries traces of the colonial system in the way it operates and this especially is in the case of water engineering in India so when I first when I heard are there any people any friends from Bangladesh here by any chance so my parents originally were from Bangladesh it's always good to see people from Bangladesh have been to the to Bangladesh as well and there's a term that's used in Bangladesh called moody shashron and the term moody shashron means disciplining rivers now when I first heard this time I was in after state of shock because from the school of thought I come from and I come from the Duryodhi devotion Mishra school of thought where you discipline yourself to live with the river the concept of disciplining a river was quite strange to me and I was trying to understand what was the roots of it this is not perhaps my generation but a lot of engineers who came to study in IHG Delft in the 80s who I came from where actually when back in film we believe in disciplining rivers with embankments and spurs like almost like like a military installation that is trying to prevent the water from coming in and of course thinking is changing in the Netherlands and in Bangladesh now but we live with those legacies and this one of these legacies is the story of the embankments in Bihar which I want to talk about to you today so this is a research that we did with the organization called EC-MODE which is based out of Kathmandu which works a lot on research around trans boundary in Himalayan rivers and we this is the Gandapriva in Bihar and not Bihar is a very interesting place in India it's a state east in part of India kind of east I wouldn't get the specific geography of that because this part is part north but the thing is it is a very well known Indian right on what I used to say a playground for Himalayan rivers almost 54 rivers land on the fertile plains of north Bihar and they they used to jump around and play like little children you could never predict what they were up to but people knew the rhythm of these rivers there was an agricultural system that was tuned with that rhythm and this was one of the most productive agricultural bellies in the country till the concept of embankments entered the scene and these statistics from the government are kind of the way we look at this situation now and we try to explain this but it doesn't tell us the history of how this came about and the history of this is when the embankments started rolling out the embankments were built with an explicit agenda as I kind of discussed earlier was to increase profit from land revenue and it was not the colonial engineers alone then it was actually also in cahoots with the local landlords who realized this was a good way to bring a more private property and take commons under their private control but this is the beauty of embankments I have to admit is that it is self augmenting if you build you on one side automatically a few years later somebody will build it on the other side and then you will start extending it on the left and then someone will start extending on the other side this is a zero sum game that we have been playing with rivers for a long time and especially Himalayan rivers because of the ignoring the fact the river water is not just water it is matter there is significant amount of silt in fact the posse and the brahmaput and the maximum amount of silt and as a result its course cannot be played easily it shifts continuously the river posse has shifted in the last 75 years almost 160 kilometers so when you start discipling this river with embankments you are going to create a hazard scale and this is exactly what has happened to the state of Bihar in 1952 the total length of embankments in the state of Bihar was barely 162 kilometers now it is 400 kilometers this is what happens when the how colonial engineering infrastructure that ideally should have been fatigued and engaged with differently continues and produces its own political economy and becomes self-sustaining because now money is to be made there is an Indian journalist called P. Sainath who is a brilliant book if you ever get a chance to read it called everybody loves a good drought and everybody loves the good flood too money is to be made in floods everybody makes money people suffer at the poor so the Ganga river basin we went into this and I will give a specific and why did we go there to study what we wanted to understand how people in this river basin understand floods and predict it using their local knowledge systems because this is not an area where your AI and your models and other very cool things apply so people get to know immediately that there is a flood coming their way in fact there are very few information so the question that we are asking was how do people know that there is a flood approaching and this was the reason that we were doing in the Ganga river basin and what strikes you is that if you see that embankment that line that is drawn on the map it divides the landscape and produces two kinds of outcomes people who stay on the other side of the embankments who are considered to be safe but they are not and then people who attract people who are very very vulnerable and there were different models systems based on which kind of a spatial which space you occupied and of course we went on and we did a detailed research we spoke to a large number of people there it was quite a long study we wrote a paper and perhaps what we do to do with the people if you have read the IPCC assessment this year and the SROCC report there is a section on local knowledge and local knowledge of floods and climate change that is coming and our paper was cited in there as well which was kind of the way we need to move ahead as well but the interesting thing here is that in this landscape our knowledge holders people with such intimate understanding of this leadership that would not be the case with the engineers who are actually employed by the government trained by the finance institutions to manage river slopes and I talked to you about just one example to talk about is this man called Chandrika Mahato he is what we call an embankment guard or an embankment chopper he comes from a family of fishaco he moved into farming later but he has amazing knowledge of the river which was explicitly the way he could predict when a flood was supposed to come so for example when we sat down with him he talked about how by looking at the drainage channels which were coming out of the villages and going towards the river and looking at the colour of that water he would know what was going on if the colour of the water was clear he knew there was nothing to worry about but if the colour of the water and as he jokingly said becomes the colour of my skin then he knew there was something wrong because there must have been a breach of the embankment somewhere upstream and the water carrying mud has entered he also could look at the fish species that came down in the rains a specific fish called gaiki which jumps when the water is supposed to overflow the banks and it jumps because it wants to get into fresh water and the jumping of the fish is an indication the river is definitely going to overflow its banks and if it doesn't jump it means the river water will tend to recede now the interesting thing about Chandrika Mato is he is not on the government way roads he is paid ad hoc a very nominal amount and there is no permanent job for him he does it because he is got stuck with this job at a time where there was nothing else and when we went to him he was like can you please talk to someone because I haven't been paid for the last 6 months what allows us to do this to people who actually have knowledge managing a river state like this and we need to be engaged we need to agitate about this the way we treat people in our own countries the way we kind of dehumanize them and strip them of the knowledge they possess and if you were to talk with him he would tell you stories that no engineer would tell you the sluice cave that he is supposed to manage has a whole history of its own see the sluice caves were of course part of the colonial engineering and is supposed to make it more efficient for the drainage to work but there is politics involved the farmers upstream wants the sluice caves to be down so that the water gets impounded which they could be used to irrigation later but as the water builds up the pressure builds up against the embankment and that could create a flash flood so it is his responsibility to go and raise the sluice caves and there has been several times he has been beaten up badly for doing his job and he also told us the funny thing is the sluice caves are very easy to close but very difficult to pull up and you need to lubricate them properly but there is corruption there too the lubricants use are of such bad quality that he needs four members of his family to lift up the sluice caves at a time of need and these sluice caves need to be operated quickly if the water builds up so this kind of knowledge about how it works in a landscape like this is embedded in the way he engages with it but that knowledge is not recognized so how does one address this and I go back to Dr. Kosh's writings one was his engineers and practitioners and I know this being a practitioner if there is two things we do have there is a lot of confidence but also a lot of cynicism it comes with working in the sector for a long time and also the other thing that comes is certainty and how do you overcome the temptation of certainty because engineers in the country I come from India are told that they are at the center of the universe they brought up that way doctors and engineers they are the ones they have all the answers let us go once just think that we don't have the answers and let's see if we have new answers and new problems in that process and in order to understand other knowledge systems we need to encompass humility within us it is not just about experts coming from abroad are our very own experts humble enough to engage and talk to people and try and understand what things are often that's not the case it is important that we understand lived experience and knowledge produced through labor it is through labor we work landscapes that on an everyday basis we are learning to observe things that are extremely and fine-grained observations which is not possible to get elsewhere and yet the way we conceptualize the people working on this landscape has never been positive we have a saying in Bengali and I am sure my friends from Bangladesh will get this chasharam of the bhutthi it is a very pejorative term it means as intelligent as a farmer but not in a nice way so in my school if I couldn't solve the maths problem my teacher would say amit you chasharam of the bhutthi you are the intelligence of a farmer and this is how we normalize the way we dehumanize knowledge voters in the way we use them in everyday language and the other important part here the other important part here is that we don't need to kind of ditch western engineering at all that is not what he would have asked because he was a scientist engineer he said recognize the fact that you are working at the interface of bifurcated domains be the bridge try and engage let's not dominate everything else with the way we have been taught in classrooms and that's what I think was the key message that he would have kind of wanted to give everyone the other was engaging with the social ecological history we walk in we assume that we are working on it these things have been done for hundreds of years we need to know what happened before we start interviewing but increasingly I am seeing this in international aid in the government interventions we engage as if we were the first to do it and probably the last to do it without realizing that history is actually laughing at us and to kind of break it down the most simplistic way possible is to try and understand what people do and why we do it simple words to kind of guide us into how to engage with different forms of knowledge systems I want to end with two quotes one is by Mahatma Gandhi where he writes Wisdom is no monopoly of one continent or one race by resistance to the resistance to western civilization is really a resistance to its indiscriminate limitation based on assumption that asiatics are fit only to copy everything that comes from the west and the second is from France family if you want to turn Africa into a new Europe and America into a new Europe then let us lead the destiny of our country to Europeans they will know how to do it better than with the most gifted among us but if you want humanity to advance a step further if you want to bring it up to a different level that which Europe has shown it we must invent and we must make discoveries thank you so much for being with me for this now a few minutes questions and answers so who would like to open the floor right here thank you so much for your presentation my name is Rosanna from South Africa so I'd first like to point out a few things that have triggered me and then finish off with the question I did not really know how to turn cognitive I like that you made it pretty clear what it is and how it separates from apartheid in its own standpoint and so I liked how you placed it on water because I never thought about it in that sense I never thought how power could take a resource as important as water out from one race just because of the colour of the skin and I could only place cognitive apartheid in terms of how we had a road structure right so I recently came from Cape Town right so back then in the colonial terms the main CBD within Cape Town was very structured with the road systems intersections everything was healthy but then walking or driving out from the main city into the townships like Gugule to Mufule all those only had one road going into the city one road going out of the city and you would wonder why because most of the hard lower income people came from the townships so how is it that it was more structured to have an interconnected road planning but one opposite lane type of system out into the townships where you need most of the people and I like the fact that you made it clear as to why it was such my question is with regards to the case study or the fellow that you admit in that town where he had the responsibility of maintaining the river and how he had indicators of knowing when a flood was approaching was there an outcome into let's say establishing a way how you guys could make noise to the government to make them realize that they are knowledge bound people and in those areas that know what they are doing within these areas of responsibilities and giving them a placement in terms of a salary low role more knowledge onto them or just giving them recognition and just wiping out that cognitive effect for them and other villages that have the similar problem so the answer I think just one way thank you so much and I know you're from South Africa I just returned from Cape Town a few weeks ago and that's why it was refreshing my mind as well that's a very important question so how do you kind of go about making this work this is definitely hard work and especially when there's two things happening one is of course the cognitive appetite people really don't, people in power people who make decisions on landscapes make knowledge that there is different forms of knowledge existing there the other issue is who do you talk to because the problem is the reverse keep is fractured by different forms of governance different people making different decisions and this has been going on for the last 200-300 years we still haven't managed to solve it and as a result it's also difficult to figure out where to place this knowledge system so we need new structures which kind of work to establish towards establishing alternate knowledge within the decision-making landscape so what we did specifically to this research was we wrote about this in different newspapers and we targeted the local Hindi newspapers in the dailies because that is what actually makes a difference actually the problem in India currently is that we assume that a very small minority of people who read English make all the decisions but that's not the case, the maximum number of people who read newspapers in that part of the country is in Hindi so that reached Patna the state capital and the local NGO partners which is called Mekh Payana which is a consortium of NGOs trying to work on managing floods and rivers they are following it up but this is going to be a really long struggle thank you sir for the investment session I am Thomas from India about the first case study that you told about in Kolkata I have also come from a similar place called Kwichan down south I think so there also we are dumping all the sewage waste into the wetlands but the problem we are experiencing is that we have wetlands within the city so it gets utrophicated and there are weeds going like growing in these wetlands and it's actually very black in colour and the smell is also changing as it goes by so how effective was that in Kolkata like where the wetlands actually got polluted or we have a solution for the pollution that was actually arising because there are actually sewage water and soap water and everything is going into these wetlands so how does the fish breeding and with these locals how do they use it for their purposes domestic purpose like cleaning and drinking water and all I just want to know because I want to implement this thing as active as possible because similar kind of solution problem we are facing so yeah thank you so much for the question and there you asked it because this has been a question that has brought these sculptor wetlands and that's one of the biggest reason why people ask this question is because of the conventional way you look at sewage as a pollutant and it kind of so when we look at sewage and this is what Dr. Moshe used to say the fact that you could use sewage as resource and a theme to a lot of people who came from the pathogenic angle in terms of you know pollution and other things and the fact that you are eating the fish that is growing in that water so what kind of contaminants are they carrying back to the city you'll be amazed to know there were several studies done by the State Pollution Control Board and Jamuklu University which shows that there was no trace of any pollutant especially chemical in the fish that was being consumed so that's what one and this was something that Dr. Moshe realized his point was these oxidation ponds he said he used to say give me sunshine and look at how poor people can convert an ecosystem into a healthy one and the fact is that he in order to prove that there were no fecal coliform in water on the top layer which has been exposed to sunlight for a long period of time took the chief minister to this area that time the man named Jyothi Basu took him there and he took a glass and he took up water from one of the ponds and he drank it in front of him so what I'm saying is this is an extreme example but the fact is we also need to recalibrate how we understand deutrification pollution other things for example the water hyacinth which is seen as a major problem in our part of the world in the east side of the wetlands does a phenomenal job of recycling nutrients so it's also we need to kind of start questioning the way we are looking at these veterans from if you are looking at from a conventional perspective of pollutants pathogens and other notions then we might find it difficult but I would really want you to come to Calcutta there are some really remarkable people working there spend some time and see how these people manage this on a day to day basis and that will give you amazing things to take back to course as well but Amit I I disagree partly because if industrial pollution I want to just put a pause on that for a second we are going to follow the theme of multiplying voices is someone who has not asked a question yet who wishes to to give a comment here we are going to follow your studies from North and Kenya where politics of drought and floods we have a lot of NGOs so people they get money with these floods and with these droughts there so potentially like solutions and the funny part is they play a lot of politics the biggest issue when they come up with ideas they start from the top so if the governor and the president get to sign it there is nothing we can do about it down here so a lot of times we have people have ideas because I speak to you my town is flooding 9 9 boholes are down so there is no water in the town as we speak a lot of things have been damaged but people will get excited for a while Red Cross will come in, Oxfam will come in UNICEF will come in and they will get money but I have sat in meetings with high level people you do try and give solutions people look at you like you're crazy so I'd love to follow up on your studies maybe there is a way we can those politics as I tell you for me South Africa plays a very future it paramises almost everything so that's a good study I hope we get to learn something from that ok I'm going to go to that side actually I just want to ask about the name of the man that can predict about the flags of UNICEF because I want to read about him his name is Chandrita Mahato I'll send out the paper we wrote across to you he is mentioning the paper you had a slide of references at the end right is it in there the paper that you wrote no the paper is not here this is the other literature that I wrote any more questions in here comments ok I'm going back over ok ok I'm Shikish from NABAC and thank you for this very insightful presentation so you're talking about the Gundag patient there so I was involved in one of the projects in Gundag Basin by the WWF we were assessing the ecological flow there in the Gundag Basin within the NEPA and I would like to add to your thing that the local knowledge that's a very important thing in the high mountains we don't have really such great problems with flirting with Basin but in the lowlands in the Tarai we have the rivers are such braided that there are many channels so it's very difficult to train the river the government has been working the government of Nepal it's working for training the river it's doing the river training but each year they build embankment and the next it's washed out again so that's the major problem there but the local people they build some embankments they are still sustaining the sustainable years rather than the new technologies so they use some the technologies like wooden such type of technologies so that was a great I would like to say that's very different than what we expect so as you said giving credit to the local people that's very important thank you a quick point on that was you also need to start thinking away from using those terms training rivers because in those words that's the problem because when you start seeing discipline in training then you know a lot of our problems today are solutions of the past we need to recognize this for example the water quality problem in Bangladesh today was a solution to water quality problem in the 1960s and 70s the deep tube came in because the water from the surface water bodies was said to be so contaminated with bacteria and other forms of that this was going to give people from Bangladesh of course the rest of the world Africa as well, India as well safe drinking water that tube well is now spewing arsenic in Bangladesh where millions of lives are affected fluoride in India you should see what's happening in some villages in south India it's unbelievable a solution to a problem actually then becomes a problem later this is something that we as water sector profession need to reflect on I think I speak for us all in saying that we wish you had more time questions and answers and comments and I can see this for example you provoked a lot of curiosity and a lot of people want to continue the debate so please take this into the next sessions that we go into we're now going to take another short break so if you could all be back into the room here let's say by 11 o'clock it's about 10 minutes to go to the bathroom and we're going to watch a documentary movie and then more time for questions