Place · cultural landscape · India
Apatani cultural landscape, Ziro
The Apatani wet-rice-fish cultural landscape in the Ziro valley of Lower Subansiri district, Arunachal Pradesh, at 1,500m, surrounded by Himalayan ridges. The Apatani community has sustainably farmed about 1,000 hectares of this valley for over 400 years using a unique integrated rice-fish paddy system: rice terraces are flooded with 10 cm of water in which carp are raised, so one plot produces both. The system has no mechanical pumps, no chemical inputs, and recycles community waste as compost. The Myoko festival each March celebrates the agricultural cycle. UNESCO tentative list since 2014. The 2023 recognition as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System (GIAHS) by the FAO is one of only two in India.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 27.630, 93.830
Connections (2)
- AnalogueLiving root bridges, Meghalaya
The Meghalaya root bridges and the Apatani rice terraces at Ziro are the two Northeast nominations for landscapes that are cultivated rather than built: bridges grown from fig roots over decades, and wet rice and fish raised in the same plots without ploughs or draught animals. Both depend on the communities continuing to do the work, which is exactly what a monument-based list handles worst.
- Site adjacencyNamdapha National Park
Namdapha National Park in Changlang district and the Apatani cultural landscape at Ziro in Lower Subansiri district are the two largest protected cultural-ecological zones of Arunachal Pradesh — Namdapha for its four big cats, red panda and hoolock gibbon, Ziro for the Apatani wet-rice paddy and bamboo-grove agroforestry system that UNESCO added to the Tentative List in 2014. Both are governed under the Inner Line Permit regime and are managed in collaboration with the Lisu, Chakma, Singpho and Apatani community councils of their respective districts.
On these journeys
Sources
List of World Heritage Sites in India — Wikipedia
Open Apatani cultural landscape, Ziro in the repository →