April 2007 Edition
In Meerut, Janhit finds the right path
for the small farmer with an organic
store, certification and marketing
Civil Society News
Meerut
KANTI Tyagi, a middle-aged farmer at Khandrawali village in Meerut district, is saying a tearful good bye to his beloved mango trees. They have been rendered useless by a combination of pests and chemicals. But even as Tyagi mourns their demise, he prepares to celebrate a newfound freedom from the Green Revolution type of intensive farming. Along with 100 small farmers from 25 villages in Meerut district, he has turned to organic agriculture with the assistance of the Janhit Foundation, an NGO that works from Meerut.
For the first time farmers like Tyagi are seeing natural methods of agriculture succeed. More significantly, they are realising that there is money in going organic. They spend less on inputs because they don’t have to buy a range of chemicals that only keep getting costlier as the soil loses its nutrients and pests become immune. Tyagi, for instance, says he saves Rs 22,050 per acre every year and he gets 25 per cent more for his organic produce.
Civil Society News
New Delhi
WHY are poor farmers refusing big money for their land? Why are they rejecting projects that come with promises of jobs and urbani-sation? Why are women and children laying down their lives in Nandigram in West Bengal? There is a single answer to these questions:
People don’t trust government and industry. No one any longer buys the argument that they should give up their land for the national good. Six decades of big projects have seen the government take land and not fulfil promises of compen-sation. The projects have done little to improve the lot of people they have displaced. When people have actually received money for their land from real estate developers, it has been quickly blown up. The experience of people in villages is that when their land goes out of their hands they end up on the streets of cities. The benefits of development, as they see it, are shared between industry and politicians. People now don’t want to give up their land, no matter how small, far flung or unproductive it may be. Their land is all they have in a hugely unequal world and they won’t part with it – certainly not to governments that can’t run schools or hospitals or provide justice.
Shankar Venkateswaran
I find I have a love-hate relationship with opinion polls. They are absolutely essential to engage your stakeholders and find out what they think of you or want you to do. But the results can often be so confusing and contradictory! In the poll commissioned by Civil Society, 89 per cent of Delhi respondents felt that NGOs were important and 76 per cent felt they were effective in influencing government policies. But only 31 per cent said they were important to protect people’s interests and as many as 78 per cent felt that they took up per-sonal agendas. The similar percentages from Mumbai were 82 per cent, 69 percent, 39 per cent and 33 per cent! Now, how does one tie up these figures? That said, what I have chosen to do in this piece is to consider these incon-sistencies as part of human nature and look at the bigger picture. And juxta-pose this picture with a few of the thoughts and responses I got from some members of my dream NGO leadership team and other thoughtful people I had the privilege of crossing paths with. seriously engaged the public at large, especially the growing middle-class. I think it is important to know that the microfinance movement, watershed related work in India’s drylands, bridge programmes to get out-of-school children back to school, the increasing role of the village health worker and the centrality of the traditional birth attendant are but a few NGO innovations that have become national practice.
|
|
Jauymini Barkataky
Delhi
ONE morning I joined a heritage walk through the streets of Old Delhi’s Walled City. The walk was organised by Katha and Intach. The idea was to explore the Chandi Chowk of the 1920s, lucidly described in Krishna Sobti’s novel, ‘The Heart has its Reasons.’ The book is about disparities in the lives of the rich and poor during that period. So at 8:30 am I found myself trudging through the haunts of a forgotten era. The walk took us to places of historical interest mentioned in Sobti’s book. The Walled City used to be called Shahjahanabad or the city of emperors a long time ago. As I took each step I felt I was reliving history.
Vidya Viswanathan
New Delhi
SATIN Creditcare is a financial institution on the fifth floor of a grey, unfashionable commercial complex in a rundown area of Delhi called Azadpur. Arickety lift clanks up to the company’s office. The table in the conference room has deep scratches and the upholstery on the chairs has not been changed in a while. Clearly, not signs of a fast growing energetic business, you think. Yet this was the company in which the Bellwether Fund, whose charter is to invest in urban microfinance companies, has invested in recently. chartered account who lives in an up-market colony in nearby Model Town. “We have grown three times in the last two years. Our loans disbursed increased from Rs 13 to 37 crore in the period,” says Jugal Kataria, the company’s chief financial officer.
Read More...
Manisha Sobhrajani
London
SURPRISINGLY, the school history curriculum in Britain for 11-14 year olds does not give much weightage to Britain’s imperial conquests in the 18th and 19th century. It is not compulsory to teach the Empire’s history! The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) of Britain assesses the school syllabus every few years, and it was only in November 2006 that they realised that the Empire’s history has been ignored in British schools for decades. British education watchdog Ofsted found that schools in England spent insufficient time teaching the Empire. This was picked by Eastern Eye, the largest selling weekly Asian newspaper produced in London, which also claims to be “the voice of British Asians”.
Amit Sengupta
New Delhi
THE genre of documentary cinema or the short film is often the thin line which separates the tenuous threshold of reality and fiction. In that sense, when third rate reality shows of failed actresses dominate the living con-sciousness of mainstream media and urban drawing rooms, the Asian Women's Documentary Film Festival held in Delhi celebrating Women's Day on March 8 was a brilliant moment of creative revelation amidst all round mediocrity. Because this was a festival of the finest filmmakers in India who are not celebrities on or off entertainment-news television. Filmmakers who enter reality was a 'terrorist' who was escaping. Escaping? A tortured young woman in a sarong? From a band of armed men? The protests which erupted in Manipur shook the nation's conscience. Joshi's film recaptures the 'naked protest' by the Mothers of Manipur, where scores of women stripped themselves naked outside the Assam Rifles head-quarters with banners saying: Indian Army Come Rape Us. This was a peaceful protest led by women, who had earlier done extraordinary campaigns
Read More...