March 23, 2022
Agartala, 23rd March 2022: CUTS International organised a “Media Briefing” on 23rd March 2022 at the Agartala Press Club. The purpose of the event was to brief the local media in Agartala about the CUTS’ interventions under the TROSA project and to screen the documentary “Flowing with the Tide” and a Digital Story “Voice of Women from the Meghna Basin”.
The event was organised under a regional program “Transboundary Rivers of South Asia (TROSA)”, managed by Oxfam Novib and supported by the Swedish government. TROSA aims to reduce poverty in marginal and vulnerable river basin communities through increased access and control over water resources in the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna (GBM) basin of Bangladesh, Nepal and India, and in the Salween basin of Myanmar.
To capture the concerns of the river communities along the Transboundary Rivers of Tripura, CUTS International organised “Nadi Baithak” (River meetings) at various places in the Meghna Basin.
Nadi Baithak is a platform that enables and equips communities to learn more about their rights, identify issues they need to be concerned about, and raise their collective voices to stand up for themselves and protect their livelihoods.
The documentary captures the glimpses of livelihoods of the riverine communities along the banks of Feni, Gumti, Khowai, Manu and Muhuri rivers in Tripura that fall in the Meghna basin. While highlighting some of the challenges faced by the communities the documentary also throws light on the emerging opportunities for them, particularly in cross-border trade and tourism. It also emphasises the need for community consultations to diffuse the misperceptions among upstream and downstream communities.
The digital story was meant to highlight the challenges faced by women with respect to water governance. It also proposes measures like bank stabilisation through nature-based solutions, a citizen science approach to build capacity of communities, particularly women and youth and to promote microenterprises among women as alternate livelihoods.
For more information, please contact:
Dr. Veena Vidyadharan, Fellow, CUTS International (09829999986)
Sumanta Biswas, Senior Programme Officer, CUTS International (09735621680)