Thursday, April 30, 2015
Monday, April 27, 2015
NEWS : Rooftop revolution
Raja Murthy
| 26 April, 2015
KOLKATA-BASED bio-tech expert Arun Ram, and some creative botany, has turned a residential building into potential seed to feed India’s 1.2 billion people. Part of a non-governmental organisation called Uthnau, Ram has transformed 5,000 square feet of an apartment terrace in Rajarhat, beyond Kolkata’s New Town, into an urban farmland that can produce 1.2 tonnes of vegetables and fruits a year. This is eastern India’s first, and perhaps the country’s largest such urban organic food project. With it, India joins the global “rooftop revolution”.
Multiply 12,000 kg of vegetables and fruits into millions of such building rooftops across India and the mind boggles at the food-growing potential of this entirely organic (natural, chemical-free) process. Homegrown organic produce means we eat tastier food with no cancer-causing fertilisers, no poisonous chemicals, no environmentally treacherous genetically modified seeds. No paying fancy prices for organic produce in shops, nor groaning over grocery bills, courtesy ruthlessly greedy middlemen and wholesalers.
The big picture shows such projects being literally a homegrown local solution to a worldwide challenge of food security for increasing populations with decreasing resources. The UN’s “State of Food Insecurity in the World, 2014” report says India is home to a quarter of the world’s undernourished population, that 190.7 million people in India, Asia’s third largest economy, are undernourished and go hungry daily.
At the modest least, like manna from heaven, 22 families in an apartment building in Kolkata daily eat healthy vegetables and fruits grown from a rooftop above their heads. “Food Visionary” is a term yet to be housed in dictionaries, but Ram and his Uthnau colleagues may be pushing it there. Ram combined innovation with university-acquired botanical knowledge and experience in the agricultural backlands of Birbhum district in northern Bengal. The fruitful output was what he calls “beautility” — beauty with utility.
“Beautility” was brightly on show, on a sunny April morning, from greenhouses on the terrace of the Siddha housing complex in the sprawling, sleek new eco-friendly township near Kolkata’s Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose Airport. Inside the small, neat greenhouses, I saw portable, lightweight, sturdy bamboo baskets that seasonally produce more than 35 types of vegetables, from pesticide-free carrots, cabbages and cauliflowers to rare berry-shaped black coloured chillis. I chomped a black chilli — and it stung as much as a long green one.
This rooftop organic garden offers 30 types of brinjals and 12 varieties of luscious red tomatoes. Biting into one was like sinking one’s teeth into a juicy pear. The bountiful greenhouses still leave room on the terrace for more conventional uses, as for children to play and residents to host moonlight dinners. No muck and mud about the terrace either. The vegetable produce grows out of containers with specially prepared soil substitutes. The plant-holder could be a bamboo basket or a discarded Pepsi Cola bottle. The team fills each with four carefully prepared layers that include compost, plant nutrients, natural manure and a special core layer made of coconut coir sourced from Tamil Nadu.
The entire process is called hydroponics, from Latin meaning “working water”, or techniques of growing plants without soil. Special by-products of rooftop hydroponics include a natural cooling process for the entire building to reduce temperatures by as much as seven degrees Celsius.
Other multiple benefits include easy access to fresh produce (India has a 1,500 km long “food mile”, or the average distance from food producer to consumer), creating green jobs, better air quality, less healthcare costs. As consultants and facilitators, Uthnau provides expertise and training. After initial investment and preparatory work, growing organic vegetables and fruits at home, I was assured, was as easy and inexpensive as maintaining flower pots in the balcony. A bit of watering, once in the morning and again in the evening, and even this could be replaced with a simple automated drip irrigation system. The returns are about 25 kg of vegetables per basket per year.
When Uthnau co-founder and old friend Ajoy John told me about this urban rooftop vegetable project, hours after I reached Kolkata, it struck me instantly as one of those happy “why-are-not-more-people-doing-this” ideas. Urban rooftop farming is not new in India, thanks to pioneering efforts of the Organic Farming Association of India. In the past three years, a few thousand individual homes in cities like Jaipur and Bangalore are growing organic vegetables and fruits for daily use.
The 5,000-square foot project in Kolkata, though, is a first of its kind in scope and size. Uthnau last week received enquires and offers to dedicate 15,000-50,000 square feet-sized organic farming projects within and outside West Bengal.
With such largescale urban homegrown organic food produce, India successful joins urban organic farming countries such as Cuba and the USA. For instance, “Sky Vegetables” from Newton, Massachussets, celebrates itself as an “an innovative, urban agriculture company dedicated to building sustainable, commercial-scale hydroponic farms on urban rooftops across America”.
Dire necessity became the mother of city farming in Cuba. Since 1994, Cubans faced acute food shortages from economic embargoes after the Soviet Union fell. Havana, the capital, fought back with residents growing vegetables and fruits from rooftops, empty parking lots, on roofs of abandoned cars. The Cuban government contributed by passing laws to boost urban organic farming. Within five years, Havana’s 8,000 urban food gardens were producing over 50 per cent of the country’s vegetables and fruits. The British Architechtural Review magazine called it “Cuban urban farming revolution: how to create self-sufficient cities”.
India made a promising step towards “self-sufficient cities”, with West Bengal agriculture minister Purnendu Basu visiting the project in Kolkata on his own initiative. The Central government, which last year declared plans to turn India’s eastern states into an organic farming hub, may do well learn from Cuba and promote organic farming widely across this country’s cities and towns.
Arun Ram, Ajoy John, a former assistant editor of The Statesman, and Kunal Deb, a social activist working with tribals, started their urban organic farming project as part of the larger aim to provide environmentally-friendly living alternatives for city dwellers. Evolving plans, already planted and tested, includes growing rice on rooftops! Yes, rice. Nobody has yet harvested paddy atop a building, but the Uthnau trio are ready for it. They plan to resurrect forgotten varieties like the super-fragrant black rice.
The safe food word is spreading. Only the other day a cold-storage operating businessman from Assam flew to Kolkata to know more. Individual homes, large hotels particularly ecotels, educational institutions, major government and private housing complexes, the Indian Railways and even the Army — I cannot think of anyone who would reject rooftop- or balcony-grown vegetables and fruits that are safe and delicious to eat and easy to grow.
The urgency to promote urban food farming is starkly clear. About 3,000 children die every day in India from poor diet-related illness, says the Food Security Foundation of India. India is home to the world’s largest undernourished and hungry population. One-sixth of the country’s 1.2 billion population is undernourished; one in four children are malnourished. And here is a way to locally increase food production.
If India’s government and corporate leaders wake up to the urban rooftop organic farming potential, millions of families, particularly children, will immediately benefit — and many lives will be saved.
SOURCE: http://www.thestatesman.com/news/supplements/rooftop-revolution/59487.html#GX7jIj7Qh5QRZpcT.99
Tuesday, April 14, 2015
PETITION : Dear CM, Please cancel NOCs to GM crop open air trials and destroy trials underway
Check Link & sign the Petition .. "CM of Maharashtra: request you to please cancel the NOCs for GM crops and destroy any field trials that have started.."
Online petition: Activists ask CM Fadnavis to cancel NOCs for GM crops
- HT Correspondent, Hindustan Times, Mumbai |
- Updated: Apr 13, 2015 21:07 IST
Four months after the Maharashtra government approved field trials of genetically modified (GM) food crops, civil society organisations and activists have launched an online petition asking CM Devendra Fadnavis to cancel the No Objection Certificates (NOCs) issued for field trials in the state. The petition also asks the government to destroy ongoing trials conducted at state agricultural universities.
Lauding the state government on its keenness to ban tobacco, the online petition states, "Tobacco is taken by choice. Food consumers will have no choice, as GM and non GM foods cannot be distinguished visually. Contamination from field trials has been found even when the crops have been destroyed after trial. The flow of pollen and the mixture or regeneration of GM seeds can cause contamination, even in university conditions."
In January, the Maharashtra government had approved confined field trials for GM rice, chickpea, maize, brinjal and cotton. At present, only GM cotton is grown in India.
The go-ahead, based on the recommendations of a state-level committee chaired by nuclear scientist Anil Kakodkar, has allowed seed companies to conduct trials on hectare or less within state agriculture universities.
"The state must stop field trials until recommendations by Supreme Court's TEC (Technical Expert Committee) are implemented in toto," said environmental activist Dilnavaz Variava of the Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture.
In 2013, TEC had recommended a moratorium on Bt (GM) in food crops until long-term safety is established, and a ban on herbicide tolerant GM crops. According to the petition, the World Health Organisation has now classified the herbicide used with the Herbicide Tolerant (HT) crops, namely glyphosate, as 'probably carcinogenic' to humans.
Stating that the NOC for field trials in Maharashtra are in complete violation of the TEC recommendations, the petition read, "Despite the BJP manifesto's assurance of biosafety, no long term independent lab tests have been done before field trials to establish biosafety as per recommendations of the TEC, and also the unanimous recommendations of the multi-party Parliamentary Standing Committee on Agriculture, on which BJP had members."
"Citizens need to be aware about GM food. There is already GM food available in the market such as soya-based products which people are not even aware of," said Father Savio Silveira, director of Greenline. "In the absence of labelling, consumers have the right to know, choose and reject."
* Around 99% GM in crops is either to insert a toxin producing gene or a herbicide tolerating gene into seeds, and thereby into every cell of the plant.
* Only USA, Brazil, Argentina, India and Canada account for 90% of area under GM. Europe, Japan, Russia, Korea have rejected or severely regulate GM crops. China plants less GM area than India.
SOURCE: http://www.hindustantimes.com/
Wednesday, April 8, 2015
WATCH : GM seeds are harmful for our crops - Natural farming expert MR Choughule
Published on Apr 6, 2015
Watch GM seeds are harmful for our crops says Natural farming expert MR Choughule.
Watch GM seeds are harmful for our crops says Natural farming expert MR Choughule.
Monday, April 6, 2015
“Water Man of India” makes rivers flow again
April 6, 2015, by Pramila Krishnan
Rajendra Singh believes conservation is vital to combat future “water wars” and climate change. Image: Deccan Chronicle
Revival of traditional rainwater harvesting has transformed the driest state in India, and could be used to combat the effects of climate change across the world. Chennai, 6 April, 2015 − School textbooks in India have been telling children for generations that Rajasthan is an inhospitable state in the northwest of the country, constrained by the hot, hostile sands of the Thar Desert. But the driest state in India has a softer, humane face as well – that of Rajendra Singh, known as the “Water Man of India”, whose untiring efforts in water conservation in arid Rajasthan have led to him being awarded the Stockholm Water Prize, commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize for Water. Singh did not attempt to design a new technology to address Rajasthan’s water problems. He began simply by de-silting several traditional surface level rainwater storage facilities – called “johads” in the local Hindi language − that fell out of use during British colonial rule. And, in doing so, he has quenched the thirst of villages that were dying. Thousands of villages followed his example, and so much water was captured and soaked into aquifers that dry rivers have begun to flow again.
Water wars
Singh believes that water conservation is vital to combat the effects of climate change and to avoid “water wars” in the future. And such is his reputation on water issues that he received a call from Prince Charles, heir to the UK throne, seeking advice on how to handle the devastating summer floods in England in 2007. In an interview with Climate News Network, Singh recalled how he began making water flow again in perennially dry Rajasthan by inculcating do-it-yourself initiatives in the villagers. He explained: “I imbibed Gandhian ideals during my school days that emphasised working for empowerment of villages. “As an Ayurvedic (traditional medicine system in India) doctor, I went to the Alwar district of Rajasthan early in 1982 to start a clinic and spread awareness among youth about health and hygiene. “I was perturbed because the majority of young men had already left the village, and the rest were about to leave for green pastures in the cities as they were unable to battle the water scarcity. Besides, they also wanted to earn good money. “Women, old people and children were left behind in the village. I reworked my doctor plans to address the water scarcity, as that would actually save people from several diseases.
A village johad in arid Rajasthan. Image: LRBurdak via Wikimedia Commons
“Community-based water management yields long-lasting results and is the only solution for water shortages”
But Singh explained: “After the advent of bore wells and pipelines connecting every hamlet in India, we forgot the traditional water conservation facility used by our ancestors.” Having won the Stockholm prize, what does the future hold for the Water Man? “My immediate plans are to take up a global-level campaign on water conservation and peace,” he said. “As predicted by several experts, the next world war will be for water. Unless every one of us starts at least now to save water and protect the water bodies, we face severe conflicts − apart from suffering climate change impacts. I will be leading the global water walk in the UK in August 2015. “During his two visits (2004 and 2006), Prince Charles told me that he was impressed by the johad model of conservation. He then called me in 2007 to be part of his team of water engineers to work out all possibilities to address the crisis during the floods in England. They listened to my suggestions on creating the johad model on hilltops and downhill to arrest water in the hills and prevent floods in the future.” In India, however, he is not confident that the government has the right ideas. “Our government is pushing a different idea of inter-linking of rivers, which will only politicise the water crisis. I was part of the national-level body to clean up the holy Ganga River from 2010 to 2012, but I quit as there was lack of accountability and it ended up as a toothless organisation. “Inter-linking of rivers is not a solution for flood and drought. As far as India is concerned, it will result only in inter-linking of corruption and politics.
Hearts and brains
“What we need is inter-linking of the hearts and brains of people to take up water conservation in their homes and community. If exploitation of river water and polluting the river are stopped, every river will flow. Water engineering should be focused on conservation of each drop, and not on changing the course of rivers, which are designed by Mother Nature.” Singh is also against the idea of privatising water supplies, and does not believe it would result in people using water more judiciously. “Water is not a commodity,” he said. “In my own example, johads are de-silted by the people and used by people. Community-based water management yields long-lasting results and is the only solution for water shortages. “When people realise their need and de-silt lakes and ponds as a group, they can use the water without having to pay for it. Right to water is every man’s right, and monetising water will increase conflicts in the society. “Helping a community to have access to clean and safe water means helping the community to have a dignified life.” – Climate News Network
- Pramila Krishnan is special correspondent for the News 7 Tamil TV channel in Chennai, India. http://www.pramilakrishnan.blogspot.in/
SOURCE : http://climatenewsnetwork.net/water-man-of-india-makes-rivers-flow-again/
Saturday, April 4, 2015
BOOK: Reviving Vegetable Diversity a seed saver's guide
REVIVING VEGETABLE DIVERSITY
a seed savers’ guide
a seed savers’ guide
Rs.150.00 (Including courier charges)
A booklet for organic farmers and gardeners who are eager to work with traditional vegetable varieties. In simple language, it presents the principles and practices needed for the production of pure seeds of excellent quality.
Deepika Kundaji, organic gardener and seed saver, has worked since 1994 with non commercial vegetable varieties ideal for home gardens. This work is part of the Pebble Garden initiative in Auroville, Tamilnadu, where she and Bernard Declercq have regenerated 7 acres of severely eroded land into a vibrant forest and a productive garden.
Send Money to : Sahaja Samrudha l Vijaya Bank l : Ganganagar Branch, Bangalore l Account No: 106501011000203 IFSC: VIJB0001065
EVENT : Screening of 'The Seed War' on 4th April 2015 @ Pune
The screening of an interesting documentary film :
“The Seed War”
organized by the Alliance Française Pune
on Saturday, 4 April 2015 at 7:00 pm.
Venue: Open Amphitheatre, Kalachhaya Campus, Patrakarnagar Road, Pune
Mr. Clement Montfort, the French Director of the movie will be there for a debate at the end.
This event is free and open for all.
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