My City My Responsibility - Linking and networking!

Dear All, 

Seed art created by the tribal farmers

You all must have heard about INECC many a times in my blogs, here I will introduce you to the network, since we at Samuchit and LAYA Resource Centre are members of the Indian Network of Ethics and Climate Change (INECC). 

INECC is a network of not-for-profit organizations, businesses and individuals from different parts of India, coming together to link their work on climate change and sustainable development at the grassroots level to the larger policy dialogues and discourses that happen at the Local, State, National and International level. This network aims to highlight those voices from the ground that are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and link them to the various policy dialogues to make their communities sustainable and climate resilient. The network meetings happen once or twice in a year, this year I could attend this meeting and it was in Kabini a serene place near Mysore. I would like to share my experience from this meeting. 

One would wonder why Kabini! Well this is a place where one of the INECC members Siddharta and his team from Pipal Tree are involved in working with the tribal communities around on climate change education and sustainable development.  It was an opportunity for us to see their work as well as have a meetup! 

Prosperous tribal farmer

The tribal communities around Kabini were displaced from their homes and lands due to the construction of a large dam on the Kabini river. They were even denied access to the Nagarhole forest area from where they used to make their living and were forced to migrate for work. Stressed due to the social and political pressures, their survival was at stake. A team from Pipal Tree undertook to work as facilitators with these communities to help them in their rehabilitation. Being an environmental scientist I had learned about the concept of participatory rural appraisal (PRA) technique and I was glad to see its application in a rural setting. Its time we realize that we are no one to teach the villagers living in the wild about food security and sustainability...but all we can do is to observe them, learn from them and intervene only when required for giving information on changing weather patterns since they lack access to the latest news. I am sure with all the indigenous knowledge that they have, they do come up with better adaptation and mitigation strategies as they are "THE experts" quoted by Dominic D'souza one of the members of INECC. There is a need to innovate or use technologies that can enable the farmers to get LIVE weather information so that they can accordingly plan their cropping patterns. I feel such technologies are available but still in experimentation phase. 

Village kitchen garden

On interacting with some of the farmers in this village we found something similar was happening in this village, with the help of Pipal Tree. The farmers here grew only cotton and other cash crops earlier, now they have shifted to growing more of millets (require less water comparatively) and other food crops through Pipal Tree's intervention. They also have their own kitchen gardens where they grow their daily veggies. In a way they are going towards food security and sustainability already. However they are still struggling with other political pressures and lack of irrigation facilities.  

Tribal village school kids

We also got a chance to visit the Children's College another initiative of Pipal Tree a facility where the tribal children from government schools can stay and learn life skills, and also get help as they struggle with school education. The best part of this Children's College is, it is located near the village so that the children don't feel lonely or out of place, they can meet their parents once in a month or so. We met such a group of young girls, the ones who stayed for two years were quite confident and aspired to go for higher studies instead of marriage. Some of them were really good with artistic skills like singing, dancing and making paper quill jewelry etc. We all felt that entrepreneur skills should be promoted among these students as alternative livelihood options, since many of them will not get an opportunity to go for a regular job due to social pressure. These students were fascinated by us and the places we come from and really wanted to know us, unfortunately we were running out of time so couldn't interact much with them. However it was good to meet these budding future generation!

Apart from this, it was good to visit a tribal school and see how the young generation in the villages is being groomed for the future. More needs to be done here in terms of training of the teachers, however this work is in process so it will be good to visit the schools after a year or so.

I would like to conclude saying that this meeting gave all the members good time to interact and know each other's work areas and has definitely opened new avenues for collaboration. Indeed its a great networking initiative and I am grateful for being a part of this network. Credits for overall coordination and efficient management of the workshop goes to Ajita and Myron!

INECC members group photo

Pournima Agarkar.

www.samuchit.com

  

My City My Responsibility - Towards River Revival

Dear All, 

Our city is full of role models because of which I feel fortunate to be a Puneite. These people not only motivate you but also create an awakening within you to do something for the city.  

One such personality is Mr. Vinod Bodhankar. He began with a citizens movement with the One hour per week for the city - an initiative to clean the garbage that other people throw around the nalas/streams or rivers. He believes that River is our mother and to ensure that our rivers are clean we need to understand that the waste we throw 'away', goes nowhere but right into our rivers polluting them.  

Later on, he initiated the SagarMitra Abhiyan in 2011 with the help of 150 students where each student had to collect plastic from his household for a month and get it to the school where it was then purchased by the Plastic Manufacturers and Recyclers for recycling. This initiative spread rapidly in the city through various schools and in six years i.e by Jan 2017 almost 4.8 lakh citizens of Pune city adopted the waste plastic segregation at source. Around 50 tons of plastic was fetched and given for recycling at zero cost of recollection and transport. 

From his work, it is very clear that awakening among mind and heart is required in order to awaken the hand for action. For the same, this Abhiyan focused on understanding a basic ideology that land slopes into stream, stream slopes into a river and a river slopes into an ocean. Hence when you throw plastic waste on land it ultimately goes into our oceans where the life below water suffers. We do see images where plastic is found in the stomach of the fishes and turtles by killing them. Sometimes resulting in even extinction of some species of fishes and destruction of some ocean ecosystems.

Awakening among the school going children with the help of this basic concept has impacted in segregation and collection of huge volumes of plastic waste from their homes to recycling. The sense of responsibility, understanding, involvement and service that the children have shown through this act can be easily replicated by all of us. 

If each of us decide to segregate only plastic from our household (which can be easily done) and send it to recycling. We will be contributing towards river revival and can save our rivers and the life below water for sure. Lets act upon it. 

Pournima Agarkar.

My City My Responsibility - Our attitude matters!!!

Dear All,

While learning Sustainability and working with different people on executing Sustainability, I came across something that is very basic to humans, its our own behaviour, attitude or way of looking at resources. People's behaviour and their approach towards resources is one of the reasons that led to consumerism and hence unsustainable production.

I realized this, while conducting an activity for undergraduate students on using resources sustainably. The students were divided into two groups of three each. Each group was given a set of 12 coins and each one from the group was instructed to pick up as many coins as they wish from the set. The rule was to pick at least one coin from the set in order to survive in the game. They were not supposed to communicate with each other while playing the game. Once all the students were done with picking the coins, whatever coins remained in their set, exactly same number of coins were provided to the group for playing the next round. We played four such rounds. 

Note that, here the coins represent a renewable resource available to us. At the end of the game, the group that had at least 6 coins remaining in their set was using their resources sustainably.

One of the two groups ended up exhausting all the coins by the third round, so that effectively none of them survived in the fourth round. The other group managed to have a few coins left over at the end of round 4.

We asked the students what did they feel while playing the game. Their answers reflected on the various human behaviours we see in society. While the rule was to have only one coin for survival, only one student had figured out that having leftover coins at the end of each round was necessary for survival, and that the best strategy was to pick up only one or two coins in each turn. One of the students in a group having left with no coins at the end of the game simply mentioned that she was thinking only for herself and didn't want her colleagues to have any coins at all. 

It is noteworthy that in the instructions we had never mentioned what would be the 'win' state. Most of the students worked towards amassing as many coins in their own hands as possible. Some tried to figure out a strategy that would maximise own benefit while leaving a balance on the table in order to get additional coins for the next round, but other members of the group did not quite catch on to the strategy, as no communication was allowed among the group members.

I feel that in every situation having an attitude of considering our fellow beings is crucial, because if all the coins in a set would be over the entire group would be out of the game. Having a greedy attitude will lead us nowhere, inspite of having resources that are renewable. And now that we are going towards the use of renewable sources of energy, its important to use them wisely as well.  

Pournima Agarkar.