My City My Responsibility - Thought for Food

Dear All, 

Myron Mendes and Ajita Tiwari - organizers of the workshop

Last Saturday I got an opportunity to participate in a workshop on Food Sustainability. The best part of this workshop was the engagement of people from varied fields, right from foodies, food bloggers, doctors, dietitians, nutritionists, media people, academicians, entrepreneurs to ground level experts working with fisher folks, farmers and tribal communities.

Laya resource centre in coordination with The Indian Network of Ethics and Climate Change (INECC) came up with the  concept of Building people's agenda towards resilient food choices. The whole idea of this workshop focused on looking at food choices that we should be making in this age of changing climate in order to sustain ourselves. The impact climate change is having on our food, its availability and demand for feeding around 10 billion people in this century is going to be one of the biggest challenges especially for India since it will be the most populous country and most vulnerable to climate risks. 

Dr. Priyadarshini Karve opened the session with her expertise on the science of climate change and its impacts in the light of food availability followed by a game on understanding food resource and its sustainability and a TED talk on global food crisis. Her session indeed was an eye opening and delivered a straight forward message that sensitized everyone about the gravity of the upcoming challenges of food availability.

Session by Ganesh Nakhwa who is closely working with the fisher folk stressed on grave realities of climate change and its impacts faced by the fishing community due to sea surface temperature rises that is in turn affecting seafood availability. He recommended diversification in sea food choices instead of obsession with prawns and pomfret. Many other fish varieties are preferable in terms of availability, cost and nutritional value.

Session by Manoj Dawale along with a local farmer Rajendra of Vikas Sahyog Pratisthan from Buldana district shared with us an indigenous poem of a prosperous farmer for whom his yield is his gold. They stressed on the hardships the farmer is undergoing today due to lack of support and acknowledgement that disregards his hard work. Rather than monetary support, his efforts need recognition and value. Responding to the game on sustainability, Rajendra mentioned how a farmer believes in taking only that much what is required and believes in reserving for the future and his fellow humans. Lessons on food security can be learnt from our own farmers! Listening to a farmer who actually toils for the food that we get on our plate, was an emotional moment for all of us.

Session by an entrepreneur Cassandra Nazareth, empowering the tribal adivasi communities of Aarey colony in Mumbai gave us a shock when she said that some villages there still have no electricity. A metropolitan city and commercial capital of India, having hidden villages without electricity......seriously, where are we heading!!! She introduced us to a tribal women who was a bit shy but still conversed quite well and invited us to have a tribal lunch which is one of the key initiatives taken by Cassandra, where people get to visit the tribal community, taste their food and can buy artistic stuff made by them. A short session by Deepti Jhangiani involved in Mumbai farm project introduced us to urban agriculture happening in Mumbai. It was good to know that a few citizens and experts are volunteering for such initiatives even in a congested and polluted city like Mumbai.

It was indeed a great feeling listening to all of them. Later on, there were two short sessions one on nutritional value of food by Dr. Subhadra Mandalika who stressed on the importance of balanced diet having appropriate intake of proteins, vitamins, micro nutrients, fats and carbohydrates both through vegetarian as well as non-vegetarian diet was a good take away. Lastly, Simona Terron introduced us to podcasting as a good media for communication on any issues of social concern, including food. 

Guest speakers from left Dr. Priyadarshini K, top Cassandra N and tribal women, bottom Myron M and Ganesh N, right Manoj D with Rajendra 

In this age of sustainability, changing individual consumption patterns, shifting to local and diversified food options, having balanced diet, minimizing food wastage are some of the local solutions towards food sustainability. I am grateful to Myron Mendes for inviting me to this workshop and glad it has made me reflect more on my food habits.

All Puneites - if anyone is interested to have similar workshop in Pune, kindly comment or email me! 

Pournima Agarkar.

www.samuchit.com

SUSTAINABLY SMART PUNE STUDY - Survey Analysis VII

This is the last post on the Socio-Economic survey data for Ghole Road ward in Pune. The survey was conducted as part of Sustainably Smart Pune study project to understand how the various city services are accessed by people of different income groups. Today’s survey data for discussion is a)Electricity b)Internet and Phone Connectivity and c) Service Ratings. 

Lets jump in…………………………………………………….

a) ELECTRICITY 

Electricity connection is almost 100% in the surveyed area with only 1 LIG HH and 3 slum HH  without  connection( on inquiry, these 4 HH reported that they did not wish to have a connection). Two percentage HHs (household) responded claimed to have illegal connection. 

When we analyze the electricity consumption rate, a large percentage of HIG HHs consume 200-300 units per month. The same is 100-200 units for MIG and LIG HHs. Slum HHs consumes 50-100 units per month on an average. 

Almost all households had more than 3 electricity powered appliances.  More than 90% of the surveyed HH had a TV, Fan and Mixi.  Look at the whopping number of appliances!

     b) INTERNET & PHONE CONNECTIVITY

63% HHs have some form of internet connection as Wifi, Broadband or Mobile internet. 37% HHs still don’t have any form of internet connection. These are mainly Slum and LIG HHs and retired couples.

For phone connection, except 3% HHs, rest all had landline and/or mobile phone connection. There is 95.5% mobile phone connectivity across income groups. Most of the HIG HHs have both landline and mobile phone connectivity. Slum and LIG HHs have more than 94% mobile phone connectivity. 

  c)  SERVICE RATINGS

Residents were asked to rate the various services in the city. Transportation was rated the lowest followed by sanitation, water supply and safety. 

In this 7 blog series of data analysis, main topics of the survey were presented. We have more related data and if any of you would like to access it, feel free to email us. We would be happy to share it. 

Inviting your comments and suggestions. For previous blogs, visit the link.

Anu Kuncheria

MUSINGS FROM PRIYADARSHINI KARVE: Nuclear Vs Renewable

I have often come across this argument: India's energy need is growing exponentially. How can we possibly meet this requirement of energy, just through renewable energy? We have no option but to focus on nuclear power. The person raising this point often quotes Dr. Kalam or Dr. Kakodkar, and the general attitude is that if such great people are saying so, then it must be so. 

With due respect to both these eminent persons, I would like to humbly point out that both of them are human beings, and human beings do make mistakes and errors of judgement. Therefore 'some xyz person says such and such.. ' is no argument to accept any opinion. Obviously, it also means that whatever I am going to say here may also be totally wrong! I invite all the readers to think over the logic, and reach their own conclusions, without prejudice to who is saying what. 

Let's first understand the reasoning behind the above argument. 

This argument is first and foremost based on accepting without question the idea that if we are 'developing' we must consume more and more energy. But do we really need energy, or do we need the end product or service that is created using the energy? 

Let me give you an example. When the night falls, we want some illumination in our house. Would you really care, if the illumination comes through use of electricity, or by any other means, as long as you get light when you turn on a switch? What you really care about is the 'service' and not what technology or energy carrier is used for delivering that service. People were getting illumination in their homes even before electricity was discovered, and some of those technologies, if revived and advanced, can provide the same quality of service as electricity does. In modern times very good quality solar powered lights are available, that can provide adequate illumination without using a single unit of grid power. Even when you are using electricity, the quantity required to achieve the same level of illumination will vary depending on what type of light bulb is being used - incandescent lamp, tube light, CFL, or LED. 

Under these circumstances if someone made an assumption that all the homes in India are going to use only grid electricity for illumination, and then came up with a number as our electricity 'demand' for home lighting in say 2025, isn't that estimate open to debate? Depending on what combination of technologies I consider for illumination, I can come up with different estimates! Even if I am not considering any non-electric technologies, I will come up with different answers if I assume that 0 or 50 or 100 percent households will use LED lights, for example.  And all these estimates will be equally valid! 

Let's say that we do not want to assume development of any newer and/or more efficient technologies than those that are in existence now. Therefore, electricity is the only clean and user friendly option for illumination. In that case, obviously, the country's energy demand is going to be the least if by 2025 everyone shifts to LED lighting, which is the most efficient option that is already available in the market. The barriers to getting 100% families in India to use LED lighting are cost and availability. In that case, should not the energy policy focus on making LED lighting accessible to everyone? We may not even need to increase our existing electricity generation capacity allotted for home lighting, even though we may have lighted each and every house in the country, if we use LEDs, which are fantastically more efficient than any other type of light bulbs. (Here is one comparison for anyone who is interested in actual quantitative data.)
However, if we are not going to focus on putting in place the most efficient technology already available, and are going to base our requirement in future on the basis of inefficient technologies, we are bound to come up with a higher number for electricity requirement. This is like continuing to use leaky buckets in the house, and then estimating the daily water requirement! Which approach makes more sense? First, get good quality buckets, and then monitor the water meter to make future projections, or ignore the buckets, just see the current water meter reading and calculate on that basis?

The point I am trying to make here is that first and foremost, I would like to question these so-called energy demand projections which are being thrown about without giving any explanation as to the assumptions behind them. 

Another 'pillar' of the 'we cannot do without nuclear' argument is the blind faith in electricity. 

Taking the same example of illumination - if we have different options like gaslights, solar powered LEDs, etc., why are we so obsessed with 'electric' lighting? A common presumption is that energy means electricity, and that too grid power. You may be astonished to know that out of the total energy consumed in developed countries only about 40-45% is in the form of electricity. Even in our daily lives, do we use only electricity? We need thermal energy for cooking, we need fuels to produce mechanical energy to help us travel from one place to another. 

When people compare nuclear energy and renewable energy, they are only comparing the respective potentials for electricity generation - because with nuclear power plants that is the only form of energy you get. This is an unfair comparison, because renewable energy sources can give us electricity, heat, or motive power. This argument is like comparing only the bowling statistics of a specialist bowler and an all rounder player to conclude that the specialist bowler is a superior cricketer. 

I certainly have more to say on this topic, but will stop here for now. Please feel free to share your opinions! 

Priyadarshini Karve

Director, Samuchit Enviro Tech

#BeModernBeResponsibleBeRespectful

    Samuchit Enviro Tech.     samuchit@samuchit.com     www.samuchit.com