 Good morning to everyone joining from the Netherlands. And good afternoon or evening to everybody else. I'm overwhelmed to see how many of you have joined the seminar today already, and I think we're expecting some more people. I hope that you will find the story I'm about to tell you interesting, intriguing, and perhaps even inspiring. This is the story of Chennai's coastal wetlands and the amazing women that sustain these through everyday care. Honoring the feminist values that have guided this research, I would like to begin with introducing myself and my position. My name is Kottetalayan Kontrakto. I'm an architect from the city of Mumbai and have been engaged with grassroots community organizations in India over the last five years, working on programs ranging from microfinance, women's social enterprise development, non-suicide sanitation, water conservation and agriculture, and the right to water movement. I have a lot of respect for India's rich tradition of people's lives, social and environment justice movements that have historically played inspiring roles in demanding accountability, shaping legal reform, and public discourse. The idea of this research came from an unusual letter. I came across this invitation drafted by women from Fisher communities addressed to the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu State in South India, inviting him to a feast. Apart from the familiarity with which they addressed and ease with which these women wrote to their Chief Minister, displaying trust, what struck me was the way that they highlighted their own roles in running the fishing economy. We don't just cook fish, they said. We are the backbone of the economy. They also showed off their knowledge of Bethlehem ecology along with their cultural roots in it. And finally, they chose to speak with the Chief Minister, not with anger, but with a firm faith in his ability to see the correctness of his promise to defend them. This letter was part of a campaign called the Stop Adani Save Polikat Campaign. But what is that? In 2018, the Adani Port and Special Economic Zone Limited proposed the expansion of the Kartapalli Port to the north of Chennai to increase its cargo handling capacity by 13 times, making it the largest port in the country. This campaign met with severe opposition from fishers who fear flooding, displacement, loss of livelihood, but also from environment activists who are worried about the fragile coastal habitat of Chennai and the protected Polikat Lake Sanctuary. To understand this campaign, it's worthwhile to review the history of Chennai's coastal development in relation to expanding ports. So those of you who are unfamiliar with India, this is Chennai, located on the northern border almost of Tamil Nadu state. It is the capital of Tamil Nadu and is known as the Detroit of India. And Chennai is home to three major ports, including the first port ever built by the British in India. In orange, we can see the expansion of port-related industries in Chennai around the ports, all encroaching on the wetland area and causing erosion and coastal erosion and accretion issues. But seeing these encroachments documented through maps did not prepare me for actually visiting the place. On my arrival in Chennai, I attended a toxic tour of not Chennai. And then environmental negligence was plain to see. Disposal of untreated sewage into the river, heavy infrastructure, degraded river banks, ash ponds, and still persisting through this were small scale artisanal fishers who was comically juxtaposed against this heavy machinery. These fishers have a long history of resisting development pressures by using counter mapping strategies to document customary uses and traditional rights of the wetland. In fact, this work, what they are doing of documenting these customary uses, this is supposed to be done by the state of Tamil Nadu as per the coastal zone regulations. But the state fails to do this, showing a clear preference for industry over indigenous fishers. And the question is, why does it fail to do it? To understand that, we must be able to see the historical context of deep rooted social, political, and economic disparities that continue to affect governance mechanisms. Women fishers, on the other hand, point out the lack of recognition given to their crucial contributions to the fishing economy, both by the state, as well as their own communities, where patriarchal structures remain quite strong. And valuing these everyday caring practices could serve to power knowledge claims made by the counter maps produced by the communities. With this proposition, I asked the question, how do women of indigenous wetland communities from Enno Polikat show wetland care through fishing related practices and participating in wetland protection campaigns? And then came the question, what does it mean to care? This actually is a very ripe debate. And the concept of care has received critique that the word is too ambiguous to define. But through my research, I found this particular description of care by a scholar called Joan Tronpo to best fit my observation of everyday practices in Polikat. Viewing care as a species activity, Tronpo suggests that care includes everything done to maintain, continue, and repair the world into women in a complex, life-sustaining way. And because my research was inspired by collective action in wetland governance, I thought that perhaps the lens of care could also show more about how collectives are formed, how they collaborate with each other over shared concerns, and overlaps in their visions of a protected wetland. So here, you can see my initial conceptualization of my framework, where I was trying to see how different actors, including the campaign organizers and the women fishers, how their lenses of care overlap to create what they understand collectively as a protected wetland. And here are some images of my fieldwork. This is the office of the Vetevec Collective, the Coastal Resource Center and the Chennai Climate Action Group. These are citizen groups that are at the forefront of climate action in Chennai. They work with youth in the city and with each other, of course, they have a very vibrant office, and they supported me a lot to do this research. This is my first ethnographic study. And these are some images of my journey there, the people who helped me set up shop, this is my room where I stayed for two months on being on field. This is the view from my window. And after being in the Netherlands to study water management governance for a few months, when I went back home, I was rediscovering rural Indian realities and the kind of disparities that are seen in everyday life there. Some images of tribal families. And of course, the beautiful Pulikkar fish market, almost entirely run by the women of the communities. And just a short walk in the market can show you all this diversity in not just fish varieties and prawn varieties, but also diversity in women who run the market. They dry fish, they clean fish. This is the historical Pulikkar town, which initially hosted actually a Dutch port. This was my translator and some of the images we captured while traveling through the fishing villages around Pulikkar. So because I was investigating the concept of care, I initially identified two activities that in my view, initially, represented care. And these two activities were the seafood festival that I already introduced, but also wetland restoration programs that I discovered while being there that women from Fisher communities were participating in. And I saw these two activities as potential acts of care. And I wanted to document perspectives of women who were participating in these programs. And so I chose these nine different villages and I took care to make sure that I would choose villages of different caste identities to see the differences in the way they see the wetland. So the villages which are marked in blue or which are shown in blue are of scheduled caste and scheduled tribe villages. Three methods of data collection were used. Instructed interviews, participant observations, and because now I'm also making a film about this project along with a Chennai-based filmmaker, Bhargav. Photos and videos became also a strong method of data collection, either some images of us collecting information. And this brings me to my first point of discussion. The first point of discussion is to see women's everyday tasks as practices of care. As I mentioned, initially I went into this research to document wetland care practices. But being there and talking to these women, I quickly understood that women's everyday tasks were guided by care for their families, for their communities, and not necessarily for protecting the wetlands, so to say. But because their lives are so deeply intertwined with wetland ecology and the health is so dependent on it, all family and community care can actually be seen as wetland care and also conversely, all wetland care could be seen as family care or community care. And I wanted to show a few of the images of how this their daily life looks. Although most of the women that I spoke to reported an improvement in water access, this is the state of their water access continues to be like this. So every day they collect water for their families so that their children can bathe and be clean. They do all these different activities to supplement the family income. They cook, they clean fish, they salt fish, they take care of other animals on the wetland as well. They make salt, they pick crabs, they pick prawns with their bare hands without using any tools. And valuing this work that women are doing as the backbone of the fishing economy, valuing this work actually aids the valuing of the wetland because of these tasks that they're doing, they are adding value to the wetland ecology. My second point of discussion is to care as groups. As women who are facing, who have a shared reality of facing these patriarchal structures, they had begun already for the last 20 years to form collectives with each other and to make several groups. And these groups actually now form the basis of the resistance movement that exists in Pulikath today through the seafood festivals. And they also as groups participate in rehabilitation and protection of manual ecosystems. And both of these activities can only be done as collectives. So I argue that the formation of the collective itself is an act of care. And this act of care increases the agency of women to participate in wetland governance. And then further, these groups that have been formed by women are able to create alliances with other solidarity organizations in Chennai. And these alliances go beyond social identities. They cut across social identities. And then there's interaction across social identities, socioeconomic identities. There is a discovery of diversity which develops creative wetland protection strategies. For example, the idea of the food festival itself came by the meeting of these women with solidarity organizations. And so these unlikely alliances are creating in Chennai, an expanding network of carers who are collaborating with each other to bring out what is the value of the wetland. And these activities, they blur the lines between what is solidarity, what is care. They blur the line between the care for environment and caring for each other and environmental and social justice. While I was working with these groups, there was so much of interaction across cast lines that it was impossible to be able to see wetland protection as separate from social justice issues. And so finally, as I populated my initial conceptual framework to create this graphic, which was also made collectively during the time of the field work, what I noticed was that what I initially thought that the lengths of the campaign organizers who are from the city, from urban Chennai, their ideas would be overlapping with those of the women. But in fact, the work of these organizations is to shift their perspective from that of South Chennai to the other side of the wetland. And so the presence of the solidarity organizations is strong yet hidden because they are behind the camera. So the pictures that I've used to populate this graphic was taken by young photographers from North Chennai who did a six month workshop to document all these different activities that are taking place on the wetland. And their job actually was to bring forward the perspective of the communities. So as we improve our evaluation of these wetlands by seeing the perspectives of Fisher communities, we will be able to make more nuanced decisions about the development of wetlands, the future development of wetlands. And I also wanted to share with you guys if I have some time, Abhishek, do I still have some time? Yes, absolutely, please. I wanted to share a video which is like a preview of the film that we are making. Hopefully it will be released in the next two months. But I wanted everybody to be able to see the experience of these women and what we saw while we were there. I hope that the sound works. We now invite Mr. Karan Adani, Chief Executive Officer of Adani Ports Limited to address the gathering. Even while the NO terminal was being constructed, we quickly realized that Tamil Nadu was growing so rapidly that we would need a larger, we would need a greater port capacity in place. Therefore, we acquired Katupalli Port and today we are proud to state that since the acquisition of the port three years ago, it has seen an increase in cargo volume of over 200%. We expect to be able to make this port one of the largest in the country with a capacity to handle over 300 million metric tons of cargo and make this a key enabler to support the growth ambition of Tamil Nadu. We are not able to do anything and we are not able to do anything right. We are afraid. Our children are afraid and they are doing this as if they are a beggar. Why did you do this? I bought the land from Adani. We should not be in the land where we bought the land. We should be able to do it later. We are not able to live and raise our children. We are always in the main toilet. We are always in the toilet, where we can catch fish. We are always in the main toilet. Whenever we come here, we think that we have to stay here only. Today at 8 in the morning, we have to clean the fish at 9.30 in the morning. We have to cook it for 1.30 in the morning. We have to cook it for 100 people. In the morning, I have to go to the hotel. I have to wash my hands. I have to go to work. I have to go to work. I have to go to school at 8.30 in the morning. We have to wash our hands and eat. We go to the hotel. After that, we take care of ourselves. We take care of ourselves. We take care of ourselves. We are going to sell the fish. We sell the fish. We sell the tomato, bottle gourd and tamarind. We pay the price. We start farming. We go to Tarlavel market. We go to Minjur market. The biggest threats are the government and the government's vision for development. The government's vision for development is to see open space, open earth, open land as worthless, to see economies, cultures that are dependent and arise from open land as also worthless, and that in order for open land to become worthy, it would have to be injected with private capital in the form of large industries, and other people who are working with the land would need to be working for the private industry. This is the vision of development that kind of infects not just Tamil Nadu but the world over. That is the end of the presentation, and I leave you with this question, and I'm open to answering more questions. Fantastic. Thanks a lot, Ayn. Thanks for the presentation and this very thought-provoking question. I suppose in due course we will get a sense of what you think about this, what your implied response to this would be. In the meantime, we have some questions that have already come in. I see some people are typing furiously. So let me share my screen so we can go to the questions that have come in. We have a couple of questions regarding gender roles. Shukru asks, do you think women are exclusively burdened with the responsibility of care that their care of ecosystems or wetlands is forced upon them to a certain degree? And Molin asks, how many in the area support the caring of the wetlands if they do? Yeah. Well, Shukru, that's an interesting question. I wouldn't say that women are exclusively burdened with the responsibility of care. In some of the other way, everybody does care, everybody has care practices. And this also depends on how do you understand what care means. So there are many ways to do this. I will try to share with you how my journey of understanding care, which is still ongoing, but some of the examples that initially influenced how I understand this concept. So care is a concept that is being adopted from the field of health. So health care. And in health, you have care practices or like traditionally there used to be a division between care practices and curing practices. So curing practices. For example, if you go for surgery, cure practice is what the surgeon does. They will work on you for an hour or so. They do something very technical. They cut you. They do something that nobody that requires a very specific skill, right? And then that's it. That's the intervention. But for you to survive the surgery, there are a myriad other things that need to be done. Like cleaning, cooking, whatever, like feeding you, taking care of you, giving you medicine, all these other paraphernalia activities, all these are called care practices. And they are, these are activities that are not valued as highly as the cure practice is valued. So it means that the person who gives care is often paid lesser, has a lower social status as well. So now, depending on the context that you're studying, this could be not only women. For example, in my case, there's also a lot of cast angles that affect who is offering care or whose work is called care and whose work is called cure. Who is called the Fisher and who is not really given an identity card saying that they are a Fisher. So that brings me to Moline's question. The, the schedule tribe communities, the earlar communities that are living in the political region, who are hand pickers. These are not only women. Also the men do this because access to technology access to tools is a question of economic status but also social status. And so even men are hand pickers. Even men work on the fields. But the, I chose to say women because they would be like the women from the schedule tribe communities would be at an even lower social status, let's say, or treated as such. And so that would really bring out the nuance but I would not say that it's only women who offer care. But the burden of care, yes, tends to fall on those who are more socially vulnerable in a context. Thanks. The next question is from see mom, who says, did you have the opportunity or did you make important to discuss with bureaucrats and administrators the concept of care, and how to incorporate it in day to day administration or spatial planning. Simom in this for this research, I was not interviewing anybody who was a bureaucrat or administrator. The purpose of my study I knew already from the onset was to document the perspective of the community. However, I think your question is a very interesting one and could be a next step to see how are they understanding the concept of care and they probably do as well. And I'm sure there are studies like that, but I was not really concentrating on this aspect in my study. The next question is from long who asks, were these rural areas or, or like peri urban areas and do you know or reckon whether the concept and practice of care is valued higher than a gradient situations or a gradient economies. This is so the end of political wetlands stretch all the way from North Chennai to the border of Tamil Nadu. And I would say that the southern part of an or political wetlands are much closer to the city and I almost like they're the margin of the city, and then political is a bit more remote, but takes about three hours on public transport to get there. And the market is definitely connected. So fish from political is being sold in Chennai. These kinds of connections exist. Is the practice of care valued higher in a gradient economies. Cannot conclusively say this. I don't know. If you look at the case if you just look at this case, the work that is done by the women of the community is most of it is unpaid. Even though this is a rural, we could say rural context or at least petty urban context. So in what way also do we value it is another question is economic is payment in terms of money the only way to value it is another question. So I don't know, but it's a it's a provoking question. In your interaction with people some of these women did you get a sense of. So yeah, this is just my question. Did you get a sense of dissatisfaction or an aspiration to be paid for some of these things. Some of the services being provided. So a lot of the women who work on the market who are cleaners fish cleaners or our second degree sellers. These are women who are often single women or the only earning members in the family either their husbands have passed away or have abandoned them, or they don't have any sons in the family. So these women they and most of the times are involved with this kind of work like cleaning fish for example as a customer you go to buy fish and then there's somebody else who cleans it and you pay them a bit. But this work is not regularized and so the prices are not fixed. And so a lot of these women complain that they were not being fairly compensated. Or that they were not paid the wages that they wanted, but the customers would just bargain with them because of this hierarchy and social status they didn't really have the power to argue with them. So in that sense, yes. But I think the overall aspiration was so much more about realizing their own potential to be to have a voice in this community to protect the Bethlehem. You know, so they see, like especially the women whose husbands are fishers are from traditional fishing communities. They really saw that sounds as family units or as village. Yeah, I hope that answers the question. Thanks. Thanks for that. Sat Rupa asks, what has been your perception of the awareness among the people of mainstream urban Chennai of the existence of these communities, their activities of Bethlehem's care and the implications not just for themselves but for the city as a whole. And how to grow such awareness so they have more solidarity for groups from groups beyond their own communities. Right, big question. Yeah, Sat Rupa, I think you might be from Chennai. So while I was doing this fieldwork, one of the activities that I participated in, along with the Solidarity Organizations, namely the Chennai Climate Action Group and the Vettavec Collective. They were organizing already this photography workshop for six months with young photographers of North Chennai who had been documenting life in North Chennai. And while I was there, we held a photo exhibition in a very elite cafe in South Chennai. And I was quite amazed to see, I'm not from Chennai, I'm from Bombay, but I was really amazed to see the number of people and the diversity of people that came for this event. It was a three-day event displaying these photographs of the kind of different local economies in North Chennai, the women's fissures, the handpickers, children, they also, because the photographers were residents of North Chennai, they had also been able to document the floods of the city. And so this became really a platform for different groups to interact with each other, build ties, and also understand what is the role of this wetland for the city as a whole, particularly for flood mitigation. Because this is a shared interest, but wetlands offer many other services as well, if you would like to call them services, it's a loaded term. But apart from flood mitigation, also very importantly food security. So this became really a platform to discuss what is a bigger value for us? What do we need as a city? What is our collective aspiration? And I think these kind of activities are really powerful to build that conversation and public discourse. And it is ongoing in Chennai, as it's good to see. Thank you. The next question is from Gopakumar, who asks, who says conflict among the different stakeholders is an issue faced in the conversation about any wetland. Solution with a balance on the needs of different interest groups, fishermen, farmers, industries and environmentalists needs to evolve in the form of wetland policy of the government. It's not exactly a question, but I would say, yeah, but this is something that we need to look a little bit, and there has to be a bit more nuance to it to say that this is a conflict among different stakeholders. Almost it raises the power differences between these different stakeholders. You see, it's not just a conflict between different stakeholders. It's the question of whose interests, of course, there are different stakeholders, but some of the interests, the interests of certain stakeholders are given more priority than interests of other stakeholders. And this is something that we need to look at. So how does like, when it is the state, which is not able to or is unwilling to follow its own laws, which require it to protect indigenous Fisher communities. It's a bit paradoxical to expect that the policy of the government will then regulate itself. I mean, I'm not sure what is the answer to this, but that conflict will always remain because the power equations are never going to become equal. So then how does one engage in this governance? This is the question of creative wetland governance. The next question is from Romir, who finds it really interesting that forming collectives can be an act of care and at the same time an act of protest. How was this made apparent in your case study? Yeah, so I said this and in some part of my presentation that I saw the act of connectivization as an act of care itself. I say that because a collectivization is not achieved in a day, not a solidarity, but collectivization for these women required at least two decades of work where they require to have daily engagement with each other with NGOs. And so I see this as a practice of care because care also requires regularity. Time is a big factor in developing a care practice. So that act of care now enables an act of protest because as a collective, they're able to have a louder voice. So this is how I connected it. The next question is from Poulos, who asks what were some of the difficulties you faced in your field work? Well, the biggest challenge for me was language because I'm not a Tamil speaker. So but I had a really amazing translator who was almost like my mouthpiece. She was translating everything I was saying, even when it was not required to be translated. But this was my biggest challenge. However, I have lived in Tamil Nadu for four years before. So I could understand a bit at least. But language was definitely probably the biggest challenge. But as such, I had a really amazing time, but the cut is a beautiful place. So I felt quite privileged to be there for two months. Thank you. Sunny asks, who's from Philippines that India is considered to be extremely highly baseline water stress to be under extremely highly baseline, extremely high baseline water stress. What is the current situation of the regulating and supporting services, that is climate and water regulation, waste treatment, natural hazards, soil formation, nutrient cycling in the wetlands of India? So all of that, you have 30 seconds. I wouldn't be able to answer this question to be honest. What is the current situation of the regulating supporting services of veterans? I think the coast of India, the coastal development of India is heavily affected by increasing coastal infrastructure. And there is quite an ongoing battle between industrial development along the coast, facilitated by ports and indigenous coastal communities, not just in Chennai, but in all big coastal port cities and increasing ports. But this kind of study is not what I was doing. So I wouldn't be able to say, but yeah, that's my comment. Yes, Sinter. Just Sinter, sorry if I'm not pronouncing your name properly. Do the women have organizations such as water resource users associations that can help them in conversation and probably help with storage facilities for fish preservation? Also, do they sell fish abroad or outside their villages? So yeah, while I was there, I did not discover any water resource user associations. There were groups of women who were involved in packaging fish as groups and going to sell them together. That is some level of organization, but it is not at a state level. That's their own organizations. There are also efforts to build labor unions for particularly for women fishers in Tamil Nadu. And this is something that you could read about. So yes, building storage facilities. At the moment, what I saw in Polikat, there was no cold storage. There's only thermocol boxes with ice and fishes packed in this. And on a daily basis, like every night, fishes sent to different markets in Chennai. Yes, fish is also exported. But that is done by a bigger company. So the women that I was working with, these are women who will take fish like in baskets to interior villages around Polikat. And so that also goes to show how much the food security of this entire region is dependent on these fishing villages of Polikat. A question from Anhar is, do you think that the concept of care matches more rather than community based management to understand the relation between? Yes. Yes. I do think so. Okay. Just kind of an example of Chennai women's contributions. Yes, I do think that the concept of care is more useful to understand these relations between so called beneficiaries and so called services, because this framework of ecosystem services valuation, which categorizes users as beneficiaries. And ecosystems as offering services really comes from an idea that humans are separate from nature. That society is separate from nature. And then this also kind of creates this idea that we can outsource care work by paying for it through ecosystem service compensation or payment for ecosystem services. And that completely erases the interpersonal relationships that are required to inspire care practices because as I said, a lot of the work that the women are doing, they're doing it because they are caring for their children, they're caring for their families, they care for their village, and that is not something that you can feed them to do. It's not, that is not strong enough motivation. So I completely agree with you that the concept of care helps you to understand that much more than this framework of ecosystem service valuation. A question from Ahmed Mushtaq is he asked, he's asking about one thing that you missed the most from your stay when you were over there. You mean apart from the fresh fish and the fresh pasta. I really miss being around and speaking with with the people over there. They, especially the women, they were always so funny, always in such a good mood, always so forgiving of not me not being able to speak their language but always welcoming. And this I really miss a lot that feeling of being taken in. Thank you for sharing that. A question from Romer again is, can you say that forming collectives or joining the movement could probably be driven more by a collective sense of place, rather than it being an act of care. It can be but I don't see why those are contradictory to each other. Because to develop a sense of place requires also to engage with space physically emotionally over a period of time. And that would require you to have practices that I would then call carry practices, because without that, how would you have a collective sense of place to begin. So I don't see them as very different unless there's a very specific definition of collective sense of place for me that I'm not aware of. Fantastic thanks a lot, I think those are the questions we have at the moment perhaps some people are still typing but they're not in yet. So maybe this is a good time to wrap up. Thanks a lot for your presentation and for very patiently answering all the questions. Yeah, thanks to the audience for turning up and for your questions and comments and a recording of the session will be available soon on the water channel website. So that's the water channel dot TV slash webinars, the it website and the it YouTube page very shortly you will receive notification when that's done by email. I think, and you can also follow us on various social media things the it and the water channel Twitter Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and all that.