Environmental Conservation Lab

🌊 Voices of Teesta
- Anglers and the Living Pulse of the Teesta

Anglers hold a unique and often under-recognised position in the conservation of the Teesta River and the Golden Mahseer. Through years of being on the river, they develop an intimate understanding of its changing currents, seasonal rhythms, fish movements, water levels, and ecological shifts. They know the pulse of the river not only through scientific observation, but through lived experience and sustained relationship.

Their role extends beyond fishing. Many anglers have become important voices for conservation, advocating for the protection of the Golden Mahseer or any kind of fish found in the riverine ecosystems on which it depends. Through their knowledge, conversations, and networks, anglers draw attention to the changing condition of the Teesta and create spaces for dialogue about its future. For them, the political boundaries between Bengal and Sikkim become fluid as they follow the movement of fish and the currents of the river. Like the Golden Mahseer itself, the river does not recognise the borders imposed upon it.

Yet the voices of these anglers are often overlooked, their knowledge and experiences obscured by the geopolitics and competing state narratives that frame the Teesta. Their relationship with the river offers another way of understanding it; one that moves beyond political boundaries and recognises the river as a connected, living system whose currents, species, and communities cannot be contained by territorial divisions.

In this sense, anglers contribute not only to conservation, but also to conversation. They help bring the river into public discourse, connecting ecological knowledge with lived experience and creating a broader narrative around the need to protect the Teesta. Their relationship with the river offers an important reminder that conservation is also built through attentiveness, long-term engagement, and the ability to listen to the changing pulse of a living river.

🎥Watch the full film here: https://youtu.be/8F39Naq4shU?si=ewiEAnHemG8wSMgs

🌊 Voices of Teesta
- The Boatman Knows the River: Memory, Currents, and the Changing Teesta

The oral histories of boatmen who once navigated the Teesta, particularly around SAMCO Ropeway and Sep Khola in the Bengal region of River Teesta, offer an important way of understanding the river’s past. Their stories are not merely accounts of travel or livelihood; they speak of an intimate knowledge of the river’s currents, depths, seasons, crossings, and changing moods. To navigate the Teesta was to read the river and to understand its movement, anticipate its force, and recognise the subtle changes that shaped its flow.

These narratives remind us that the Teesta has always been a living and changing river. Its currents have shifted, its banks have transformed, and the ways in which communities relate to it have continually adapted. The stories of the boatmen therefore offer more than a record of the past; they provide a way of understanding the river through lived experience and memory.

Listening to these narratives is especially significant at a time when the Teesta is increasingly transformed by dams, quarrying, roads, and other infrastructure. The river’s history cannot be understood as a fixed or singular story. It is continually being rewritten through changing waters, landscapes, species, communities, and relationships.

To listen to the boatmen is, therefore, to listen to the river itself and to its older currents and the knowledge carried within them. Their stories remind us that the Teesta has never been static. It is a river that is constantly changing, adapting, and carrying its past into the present. To understand its future, we must listen to the many narratives through which the river continues to speak.

🎥Watch the full film here: https://youtu.be/8F39Naq4shU?si=ewiEAnHemG8wSMgs

🌊 Voices of Teesta series
- Quarrying and Displacement Along the Teesta

Along the Teesta River, quarrying and large-scale infrastructure development have transformed riverbanks and landscapes that have long sustained local communities. The extraction of stone and construction materials, often linked to roads, dams, railway lines and other development projects like pharmaceutical companies, alters river ecosystems and weakens the ecological foundations on which communities depend.

The construction of dams further intensifies these pressures. Communities are displaced from ancestral lands, while those who remain often experience the loss of agricultural land, forests, access to the river, and traditional livelihoods. Compensation and rehabilitation processes can also become deeply politicised, dividing communities and creating unequal relationships between affected people, political actors, corporations, and the state. In such situations, communities may be reduced to the category of “project-affected people,” while the deeper cultural, spiritual, and relational connections they have with the landscape remain largely unrecognised.

For communities along the Teesta, the river is not merely a source of water or an economic resource. It sustains agriculture, fishing, cultural practices, memories, and relationships with the land. When quarrying, dam construction, and associated infrastructure disrupt the river, they also jeopardise the social and ecological systems that sustain community life.

Displacement, therefore, is not only the physical removal of people from their homes. It can also occur through the gradual loss of access, livelihood, autonomy, and relationship with the river. The Teesta’s story is consequently not simply one of development and energy production, but also of communities negotiating and often helplessly resisting the political and economic forces that threaten their ability to remain connected to the landscapes that have sustained them.

🎥Watch the full film here: https://youtu.be/8F39Naq4shU?si=ewiEAnHemG8wSMgs