Buffalo, Water and Green Fields: Livelihood, Climate and a Missing Chain of Record in Sylhet's Haor

Half past five in the morning. A thin blanket of mist still sits over the canal running through the Gurukchi Haor of Gowainghat. Then the surface of the water shivers — one, two, three. One after another, buffaloes step down into the cold water, heavy bodies breaking the quiet. The first light of the sun catches their wet black hides, and their reflection on the water dissolves into the real animal. Beside them, the green paddy fields have not yet lost their dew. One of the herdsmen sitting along the ridge of the field rises, staff in hand. He scans the herd — how many are in the water, how many still stand on the bank, which one may be a little weak today.

I did not see this scene with my own eyes. But after hearing descriptions from local journalists who work on Sylhet's haor, a field officer of the livestock department, and two herdsmen — and then matching a dozen photographs and video frames against those descriptions — I became convinced that a quiet truth hides inside this calm scene. The truth is not about buffalo. The truth is about accounting. A livelihood that happens in plain sight every day, yet finds no proper place in any government register, insurance office, or lender's ledger.

Every livelihood is, in the end, a chain of information — who owns what, how many animals, which disease, what income, what risk. When the chain breaks, the story becomes false; and when the story becomes false, policy walks down the wrong road.

The word haor often brings a vast expanse of water to mind. But a haor is not only water. A haor is a rhythm — for part of the year it is simply paddy field and grazing ground, and for the rest it is open water. These wetlands, spread across Sylhet, Sunamganj, Habiganj, Netrokona, Kishoreganj, and Moulvibazar in north-eastern Bangladesh, are shallow basins formed in the uneven beds of rivers. In the monsoon, hill torrents and rain fill them; in winter the water drains and fertile silt rises. Farmers use this single cropping window to grow boro rice, and that is the backbone of the haor economy.

This is where the accounting becomes complicated. On land that holds paddy in one season and water in another, livestock rearing is not a separate trade — it is a natural strategy for living with water. Gowainghat upazila in Sylhet district, particularly the Radhanagar area and its Gurukchi Haor, stands apart for exactly this reason. Water, green fields and buffalo herds exist together here — you cannot understand one without the others.

Gowainghat lies roughly two hours by road from Sylhet city, close to the Indian border with Meghalaya. This region records some of the highest rainfall in the country — and not just in quantity, but in character. Sudden intense downpours, hill torrents descending from upstream: these set the rhythm of haor life. For the people who live off paddy and livestock here, every daily decision is really a small act of risk management.

When we talk about buffalo, we must first correct a mistake. Many of us assume the buffalo is somehow a less important backup animal to the cow. In reality, in the haor region the buffalo is one of the primary means of survival — at once the power to plough heavy land, a source of milk, a source of manure, and a large one-time asset at the moment of sale. Official figures put the national buffalo population at close to one and a half million, and a large share of it lives in these wetland-dependent communities.

Buffalo milk has a quality that shows up in both price and nutrition. Compared with cow's milk, buffalo milk generally carries far more fat — often in the range of six to seven per cent. That is why it commands special value when making sweets, yoghurt, and ghee. A household that keeps one buffalo uses part of the milk at home and sells part in the market. Market prices rise and fall, but milk never becomes entirely worthless — which makes the buffalo a somewhat safer asset for a marginal family than a cow.

But the buffalo's real worth is not only in milk. In the mud-soaked fields of the haor, where a tractor cannot enter or cannot move even if it does, there is almost no substitute for a buffalo at the plough. Each season — before and after the harvest, before and after the flood — carries a deadline, and meeting it requires strong animals used to water and mud. The buffalo does exactly that work. That is why, for a haor farming household, the buffalo is not a milk machine but an essential instrument of seasonal production — an instrument that lives, breathes, and asks for food.

From this, an important conclusion follows. The crop economy and the livestock economy of the haor are not two separate lines but two ends of the same line. Anyone who looks at one without the other sees only half the picture of the haor. This is why the buffalo herd, the herdsman, and the green paddy field must be understood together if we want to grasp the reality of Gowainghat in Sylhet.

It is worth understanding what a herdsman's day looks like. In the morning the animals are taken down to the canal or the haor water; at midday they graze in the green fields; in the afternoon it is water again, then rest along the ridge of the field. Some of the herdsmen are young, some middle-aged — many are adolescents or young men from the families, who learned this work as they grew up. There is no grand announcement in this daily rhythm, no single hero. There is patience, and there are small micro-decisions: which field to graze today, how safe the water's edge is, which animal needs attention first.

Within this daily rhythm lies its greatest resource: familiarity. The herdsman knows which buffalo belongs to whom, which gives how much milk in how many days, which prefers what feed, and where to search if one wanders off. This familiarity is a kind of internal database — but the database lives in people's heads, not in any register. That is the haor livelihood's greatest strength, and at the same time its greatest weakness.

To understand where the weakness lies, imagine a scene. Suppose a flood suddenly sweeps away an animal. Or it falls ill, and a loan is needed to cover treatment. Or someone claims the buffalo is actually theirs. In each case, the person making the claim holds only memory and the testimony of neighbours. No paper, no registration, no account. In the absence of proof, a person stands alone — and this is precisely where the gap in the chain of information strikes.

Official livestock management faces a major challenge here. The country runs animal censuses, vaccination drives, and disease surveillance, especially for cattle; but in scattered, seasonal, wetland-dependent communities like the haor, giving every animal a permanent identity is not easy. Animals move from field to field, from owner to owner, and in the monsoon the byre itself shifts. Capturing this movement would change a great deal: vaccination campaigns, insurance, credit, market prices — all depend on that identity.

In the language of modern technology, what is needed is a verifiable, tamper-resistant chain of information — a ledger in which an animal's birth, vaccinations, ownership, sales, and illness history accumulate step by step, and which no single party can unilaterally erase. This is the core idea behind blockchain thinking. Blockchain is not magic; blockchain means shared accounting — distributed among many, verifiable, and hard to alter unilaterally.

How well does that idea fit a buffalo in the haor? More important than writing a thousand names in a register is giving each animal an identity, and keeping it in a way that the herdsman, the owner, the field officer, and the lender can all examine together. Imagine a tag or chip on a buffalo carrying a verifiable ID. A field officer vaccinates it — the record is stored. The animal goes to market — the transfer of ownership is stored. It falls ill — the treatment record is stored. Some time later, that same record becomes proof for an insurance claim, the basis for a loan, even the paper for government support.

Here lies the real revolution that many overlook: for a marginal livestock owner, the value of technology is not entertainment — the value of technology is proof, without which they cannot stand in a market, an insurance office, a court, or even a government department.

Technology, however, demands caution. Simply attaching a chip does not create a chain of information. It requires trained field staff, regular internet or connectivity, explanation in the local language, and above all the trust of herdsmen and owners. If marginal people feel that this record is only for the government or an institution and not for them, the system will not last. The people of the haor have been deceived many times; for a new system to reach them, old suspicions must be dismantled, not at once but step by step.

The climate crisis makes this picture more complicated still. The haor's rhythm is changing. Where flood timing could once be roughly predicted, that prediction is now less reliable. Sudden floods destroy paddy fields, and that shock travels down to livestock too — a shortage of feed, a shortage of grazing land, the pressure to move the byre. At the same time, intense cold, irregular rain, and drought-prone spells mean the haor herdsman must be more careful than before.

An important question arises here. Climate resilience does not mean only higher embankments or paved roads. Climate resilience also means that when a family faces loss, it can quickly access support, insurance, or credit. And to access that, an account is needed first — how many animals, what loss, who the owner is. In other words, the first step of climate adaptation is actually an informational step. Those without records remain invisible in the government's paperwork.

Invisibility does not happen by itself; it is a process. Where there is no register, there is invisibility; where there is invisibility, exclusion from policy-making; and where there is exclusion, delay in reaching support. In this way an entire community is knocked out of a whole season's planning, even as it quietly builds a foundation of the nation's food security.

I have heard one thing repeatedly from the people of the haor — the water comes, the water goes, our work does not stop. This patience has a price, and that price ought to be counted by the state. But as long as there is no chain of information, that price never appears in any table. This is why I see the story of Sylhet's haor as something bigger than a story of Sylhet. It is a model that holds equally true in Kishoreganj, Netrokona, or Sunamganj.

What I have said so far has a counter-side, and it would be wrong to skip it. The first counter-point: the romantic image and the hard reality are not the same. The picture of a buffalo herd and green paddy field is beautiful, but if that picture is the only picture, the hardship is hidden. A haor herdsman's day is not only dawn beauty; it contains sunburnt days, rain-soaked nights, haggling over prices in the market, the weight of debt, and the dread of a sudden flood.

The second counter-point is sharper. Creating a chain of information does not automatically mean life improves. Technology sometimes strengthens the powerful party further and makes the weak more visible, increasing their exposure to surveillance. So the question of caution arises: whose record is this? If the record is built only for the convenience of an insurance company or a lender and changes nothing for the owner, then the system is not really better than the earlier invisibility — it is far sharper.

The third and most suppressed counter-point comes from the nature of my own work. We who make news, we who analyse — how often do we file a story in the wrong folder? If a report about buffalo rearing in the haor falls into the wrong category in some automated system, what becomes of it? It may end up on the sports page, where it has no place, and the reader looking for haor news will never find it. The story is not lost, but the story reaches the wrong address — and that, too, is a broken chain of information.

I had seen this scene inside a photograph long before it had a name of its own — only that name was wrong. And when you call a thing by the wrong name, the hardship of marginal people never settles into its rightful place.

This brings us to the final question. How far are we willing to keep accounts? If a society cannot count its marginal herders, then neither the price of their milk, nor their risk, nor their loss can be measured properly. And without measurement, how would a policymaker think of that person? Keeping accounts is not surveillance; keeping accounts is recognition — and that truth sounds clearer when you stand between the water and the green fields of the haor.

So the next domino is not technology; the question is larger. From Gowainghat in Sylhet to every haor in the north-east, the next step depends on a single decision: will we keep the buffalo herd, the herdsman and the green paddy field as merely a beautiful scene, or will we count them as a recognised economy? The window in the mind of the haor never closes, just like the water — the question is only whether we can see the person standing in front of that window.