Context: The Kamrup (Metropolitan) district administration has prohibited community fishing at Deepor Beel, a wetland on the south-western edge of Guwahati and Assam’s only Ramsar site.
Issue

• According to hydrological experts, the area of the wetland was about 6,000 hectares in the late 1980s. Satellite imagery has revealed that its area has shrunk by at least 35% since 1991.
• Assam had 3,513 wetlands and a majority of them had water with low turbidity.

About Deepor Beel 

• Deepor Beel, a wetland on the south-western edge of Guwahati and Assam’s only Ramsar site.
• Deepor Beel was designated a Ramsar site in 2002 for sustaining a range of aquatic life forms besides 219 species of birds. 
• A Ramsar site is a wetland designated to be of international importance under the Convention on Wetlands on February 2, 1971, in the Iranian city of Ramsar on the Caspian Sea shore.

Factor Behind this Shrinking

• The wetland is in a precarious state is that it is losing connectivity with small rivers like Kalmoni, Khonajan and Basistha that used to flow via the Mora Bharalu channel through Guwahati.
• Expansion of the city
• Encroachment upon the natural channels through Guwahati and from the hills around
• A municipal waste dump at Boragaon almost on the edge of the wetland were the other factor