Mapping Water Care Practices The case of Ennore-Pulicat wetlands in Chennai, India

This case study uses an ethnographic approach to explore everyday caring practices of women from the Indigenous coastal wetland communities of Ennore-Pulicat in Chennai, India. It documents their participation in wetland governance through voicing their concerns on wetland protection from increasing encroachments by large-scale industrial infrastructures such as ports and thermal power plants. Through organizing seafood festivals, fisherwomen highlight their cultural roots in and livelihood dependencies on the wetland ecosystem. Participant observations and semi-structured interviews further elucidate diverse caring practices employed by Indigenous fisherwomen to support life on the wetland. Caring practices intended to protect the ecological integrity of the wetland were found to overlap with caring for their families and communities and were facilitated through alliances formed between women’s self-help groups, NGOs and environment activists. These unlikely alliances, formed across multiple identity differences, present a growing “network of carers” for the wetland. They collaborate to showcase socio-nature relations facilitated by ecological knowledges of Indigenous fisherwomen which are crucial to sustain wetland ecologies and economies. Wetland-care practices of fisherwomen present an alternative to dominant narratives of development, driven by industrial economic interests, that result in threats to wetland ecology.