Mote Majra: Making a Case for an Unkempt Swamp

As we speed through the wide highways of Mohali, flanked by glass buildings and hoardings that promise “world-class” infrastructure, I can’t help but notice how similar the landscape is to other swanky satellite cities in the country: Gurgaon, Noida, or Bangalore’s tech-suburb Whitefield. I spot headlines proudly declaring that Mohali is no longer Chandigarh’s country cousin. The new city hosts a 17,000-sq-ft IT park and has the ambition to become a centre of excellence in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) sector. But when you veer off the highway, turn a sharp corner from Pappu Sweets (a local sweet shop) and drive through a narrow lane flanked by fields, you are far from any IT dreams, at a place called Mote Majra.

Mote Majra, in Mohali’s Kharar tehsil, is a sharp departure from the landscape along the highway. It has the markers of a much older settlement — a gurudwara replete with local legends, looming trees that provide ample shade, and a sathh (or khatt), an informal meeting area found in most Punjabi villages. At this sathh — a concrete bench that circles an old neem tree overlooking an expansive 25-acre wetland — I meet four village elders. Swarn Singh, 84, fondly called bapuji, spots binoculars around my neck and offers to show me birds in the wetland lake.

 

It is December 2023, wildlife photographer Dhritiman Mukherjee and I are travelling through Punjab in search of its wild spaces and residents. It is a lazy winter afternoon. “Assi veley aa (we are jobless and free),” says Singh, a former truck driver who has travelled across the length and breadth of India in his younger days. These days, he prefers driving to the lake in his rickety Maruti 800 each afternoon to spend time with his retired friends. “During the winter, the sun is the toastiest at this spot. This is where you will find us all day. Join us,” says another village elder, Harbhajan Singh, 78, a former employee of the Punjab Electricity Board.

The shade under the neem tree is calming, but the lake is a riot. A quick walk around the wetland and I spot bar-headed geese, common coots, grey herons, great crested grebes, and red pochards cackling, screeching, honking, and chattering. Punjab lies on the Central Asian Flyway, one of nine migratory routes birds take to fly from their breeding grounds in Siberia, Mongolia, and China to the warmer climates of India. Every winter, hundreds of migratory birds travel from Central Asia to join several other hundred avian residents here. About 420 species — resident and migratory — are found in Chandigarh and its surrounding areas. A paper published in 2021 documented at least 160 species of birds in this small waterbody in front of us.

Every corner of the lake twitches with drama. At one end, amidst lotus leaves, white-breasted swamphens are in a raucous battle. At the other end, perfectly camouflaged against the marshy floor and still as a rock, I spot a common snipe. While I zoom in with my binoculars to gape at its exceptionally straight, long bill, Mukherjee taps on my shoulder, “Zoom out,” he says. At least 40 snipes surround us — sneaky masters of disguise.

Despite the fantastic avian drama, Mote Majra wetland is not conventionally appealing. It is unkempt, swampy and squelchy. For years, the local panchayat has leased the wetland to commercial fisheries and farmers that grow chestnut and lotus in its waters. The road that curves around it is stacked with soggy, smelly heaps of waste from the harvest. There’s garbage accumulating on one end, and on the other, a swanky new engineering college with glass walls purges its sewage into the waters. But amidst reeds, grass, and garbage, birds live. And during the migratory season from November to early March, migratory birds arrive, and birders come to see them.

Occasionally, the wetland throws up a surprise. In March 2024, Chandigarh birder Lalit Mohan Bansal photographed three barnacle geese swimming in the lake. This was the first official record of the bird from South Asia. Several birders flocked to see the bird, but the trio disappeared after that sighting.

  

Mote Majra’s more glamourous neighbour in Chandigarh, Sukhna Lake, often steals the limelight. Sukhna, a man-made lake conceptualised by French architect Le Corbusier, who also designed the master plan of Chandigarh, has had an uneasy relationship with the city. Several administrations have tried to tame it by concreting its edges to “beautify” it. At one point, when the lake turned shallow in the summer, the authorities pumped it with water. Over the years, Sukhna’s catchment areas have been drained and taken over for development, and excessive siltation from the Shivalik Hills has choked the habitat.

“When I was a child, Sukhna Lake would be packed with thousands of migratory birds every migratory season”, says Narbir Singh Kahlon, Chandigarh birder, member of the Punjab Wildlife Board and vice-president of Avian Habitat and Wetland Society, a Chandigarh-based nonprofit. Today, he sees a fraction of that number. “Mote Majra hosts more birds than Sukhna,” he says. Kahlon is one of the many birders who makes a beeline for the wetland every migratory season. He loves the wetland for its birds and for the people he meets along its edges. “What is most heartening to see is that the villagers welcome the birds.” In several villages across Punjab, farmers who depend on an increasingly unstable yield for their livelihoods have been known to shoot bar-headed geese and other migratory birds that feed on their crops. In Mote Majra, however, the birds find a safe haven.

It isn’t easy to make a case for wetlands like Mote Majra, especially to those who sit on the edge of ambitious up-and-coming cities like Mohali. Large tracts of Punjab lie in the floodplains of three major rivers — Sutlej, Beas and Ravi — that cut through the landscape. A landscape that was once marked by wetlands. Thousands of years ago, the land on which modern-day Chandigarh exists was a massive lake ringed by a marsh. “I remember flying from Punjab to Delhi once in a very low-flying plane, and the entire landscape was dotted with wetlands. Every village must have had a couple,” says Asad Rahmani, former governing council member of Wetlands International, South Asia. “Several are disappearing. Many are drained to make way for farms or development, especially around areas seeing a wave of urbanisation. The wetlands that survive are often concreted and turned into recreational parks with boating and ferry rides. Sometimes, the best way to conserve a wetland is to leave it alone.”

Urban wetlands are not pristine wildernesses. They coexist uneasily with humans — jostling, fighting for space. But when left alone, they nurture and nourish everything around them. During floods, they soak excess water, keeping settlements and farms from being swept away. They also have unparalleled abilities to filter out waste and pollutants from the waters they receive and, in turn, recharge groundwater. They function as carbon sinks, sucking up CO2 and stabilising the climate. And yet, very few wetlands are protected, and even fewer are celebrated.

 

The scale at which wetlands are vanishing across India reflects the apathy of those empowered to protect them. A Wetlands International South Asia report released in 2021 claims that nearly 30 per cent of the natural wetlands in India have been lost in the last three decades.

For Punjab, where 85 per cent of the state’s area is under agriculture, groundwater is essential. With the changing climate and unpredictable rains, 72 per cent of Punjab’s land currently relies on tubewells for irrigation. For an agrarian landscape increasingly starved of water, wetlands like Mote Majra are unsung heroes. “These village wetlands have only survived because local residents have safeguarded them. Otherwise, the law treats them as wastelands,” says Rahmani.

Fortunately, the residents of Mote Majra cherish the lake. Over a year later, I return to the lake on a summer afternoon in 2024. The migratory avian guests have left for colder regions, and the lake is quieter. An Asian koel leads the chorus with an incessant “kooo-koooooo”. From a distance, I spot Swarn Singh on the sathh — the same long, silver beard, crisp white kurta, and a bright, turmeric-coloured turban. “During the summers, the breeze skims over the lake’s surface and turns cooler before it reaches us. The lake is the village’s air conditioner. Settle down. This is the best spot,” he says warmly.

A sunbird flits on the neem tree above us as conversations flow seamlessly from politics and religion to childhood memories. Singh informs me that the village has banned chestnut farming this year. “The contractor was using heavy pesticides, the earnings weren’t great, and the lake was getting ruined,” he says. “We may not drink water straight from the lake, but the tubewells around it are fed by this water,” he points out. “It waters our farms; our cattle bathe in it. We have to protect it.” The migratory guests this time, I note, might have a comfortable stay, too. “When I was a child, the whole village used to wake up to the songs of sarus cranes. There were two here that would sing in unison at the crack of dawn,” he says casually. I sit up, my interest piqued. The sarus crane is an vulnerable bird rapidly losing its habitat across the state. Our team has travelled across the length and breadth of Punjab in search of it to spot only a single pair at a distance. “One day, a rich brat with a gun shot one of them. Soon, its partner stopped calling. Then it disappeared too. We were deeply hurt for several days,” he says. The conversation moves on. The sathh, I realise, is an informal vantage point to watch and guard the lake. “As long as we sit by this lake, we will let nothing happen to it,” he says.

Sitting by the sathh, I realise that heroes come in all shapes and sizes. Often, they don’t wear capes or fight battles. Sometimes, they simply sit by a lake, cherishing everything they see, and gently invite others to do so.