Sachcast

20 days back, I set a goal to write an article a day and share it with readers. It was with the thought that sharing would also confirm the commitment from my side. It helped. Next day till noon while I had not been able to write a single word, some people pinged saying that they were waiting for the article. It was enough to trigger the process. After completing the write up it occurred to me that I could do more. I could have more goals which I could share and turn it into a larger social experiment. The additional goals were removing excessive sugar intake, doing 100 suryanamaskars at one time and meditation. The response from the readers and people around was beyond all my expectations. The writing was done on mixed subjects. Some of the subjects were based on my own field of work i.e. agriculture and farming, but in this interlinked world, I think these subjects are of concern to everybody. Before doing this as a challenge, most of the subjects were in my head and I had not deal...

One advantage of hopping from one job to the other is that it allows you to learn from different organisations and the bosses they have for you. I have worked with one organisation which was more focused on processes. They had a firm belief that you just set up processes and systems and follow them thoroughly, results take care of themselves. The other organisation I worked at believed in achieving results in whatever way possible. There were very few established processes when it came to working towards those results. The employees of both the organisations used to take stress either from processes or from expected results. In the first organisations where focus was on processes there was always a chance to lose the vision of results. Engulfed in working as per the rules, people could do very little when result expectations changed. The organisation offered little flexibility and sometimes one had to work dumbly by following the orders. The other organisation which focused on result...

While remaining at home in the current time, the families who have enough financial security are busy cooking. The WhatApp statuses are recently full with food photos. Kids are learning to make Chapatis. Mothers are baking cakes to cheer up everyone in the family. People have been complaining about lack of stocks of bread, biscuits, noodles and pasta in the grocery shops. Imagine while doing all that you come across an article on the internet saying that if agriculture in this world stops, the food stocks are going to last only 57 days. You get panicked. You will think of preparing for the doomsday because you have been dependent on one single grain called wheat. In fact there is one study and the article is actually there on the internet. After reading it I did not panic since my stomach was full with jackfruit. The article deals with how lands are being diverted to grow crops for making bio-fuels, meat etc. which cannot be denied but while calculating these numbers they have must h...

This is a loud thinking. Amar’s mother tongue is Kannada. He is very well versed English, Marathi, Hindi, and his ancestral language called Chitpavani. That means he can not only speak in those five languages but can also read and to some extent write in them. In the age where people from different states of India have created a rift over the languages, he is a good example how languages can be a bridge for conversations. It was interesting to learn from him how he chooses which language to use and where. He says that the choice differs from one context to the other. As part of the 21 Day Challenge, I have been writing same article in two languages. It is basically a translation but with some fine tuning so the writing suits cultural context the readers are having. English of course has a wider cultural context than Marathi. Until now I have been writing in both the languages separately and had two different broadcast lists for sharing them. Between English and Marathi readers ther...

Yields of Alphonso mangoes in Ratnagiri have been exceptionally low this year. For us it is only 10% of the average of the last few years. The mango based economy in the region is in its worst time as the farmers and traders are facing difficulty in marketing that meager production in the face of current lockdown situation. Not just farmers but uncertainty looms over the lives of labourers, pesticide dealers and transporters. With very little income received in hand, it is not sure whether there will be any money left with the farmers to meet the costs for the next year. Alphonso or Hapus mangoes from Konkan coast have enjoyed a privilege at the level of consumers for some last 60 plus years due to its unique flavor, smell and the taste. It is just different from all the other mangoes grown in India. This uniqueness can largely be attributed to its location. The red lateritic soils, even temperatures, heavy monsoonal rainfall and most importantly the humid salty air makes what is kno...

First it started with a social network called Orkut. He used his creative 20% of his time in Google to develop this social network and it was launched in 2004. They were increasing the popularity of it through real world contacts of the people as they started allowing people to join the network through invites sent by the people who had earlier joined it. It was around year 2007-8 and people like me with new access to computers were super excited to find their old times buddies and in some cases sweethearts as well. Just a year after joining Orkut, a friend, who had settled in US, suggested everybody in her network on Orkut to connect with her on facebook. I refrained from joining facebook since it was going to be too much of effort to handle two social networks since mobile phone in my hand was still dumb then and I was accessing internet from office and the cyber cafes. In 2010 I went to Ghana for a year. After seeing my new colleagues, mostly from UK, US and Netherlands, actively ...

This question could have been why farmers continue to farm in the first place but the issue is complex enough and I have restricted to the humble crop of rice. Rice is a major crop in India and grown in almost all the states in the country. As far as my observations and studies go, most of the crop of rice, is theoretically at a loss when value of family labour is taken into consideration and it is highly labour intensive. This situation has not changed at least for last 25 years. While proportion of population dependent on farming in general and grain farming in particular has reduced considerably there is huge number of farmers who are still continuing with the crop. Then why do people compulsorily cultivate rice? Here is a rural reality check. Rice has been proactively purchased by the government with a minimum support price (MSP). Farmers in Punjab and Haryana with their large landholdings can grow rice in a mechanised way with a reduced cost. They also get huge government sub...

While we attribute all sorts of problems in India to the huge population the country has, it is also important to consider what will be happening with the people for whom population is declining. The effects of the decline are already visible in the educated class and I think it is high time one remains aware of them. Looking at my own family history gives enough micro-level data. At my great grandfather’s time, an average couple was producing about 8 children. My grandfather had 4 children. These children had an average 1.5 children per couple. For my generation this number has come to 0.66. As education levels are going up and comparative economic advantages of having few children are realised, couples are giving birth to fewer children.   China has forcefully implemented One Child Policy while Indian government was just doing advertisements appealing people to restricting to only two children per family. The population burden in China has come down and at the same time they ha...

Innovation is a creative new idea in the form of a device or method that can serve as a better solution for a need. In our market economy we have been flooded with lots of innovations so much so that we are not even able to make out whether a particular innovation is relevant to us or not. Majority of mobile phone companies are bringing newer versions and models almost every few months. As customers we are confused what we really want to get out of the phones we are buying. I actually don’t know much about how these companies strategise their innovations and marketing but I can relate this spread of innovations to some of my observations in my own field of agriculture and social development. I was working on a project promoting a new technique of rice cultivation called System of Rice Intensification, which required farmers to change the way rice was planted. As a result of its adoption, they would have reduced the inputs required for cultivating rice and they would have got very hig...

Recently I was engaged in the study of Agriculture in one block of Nashik and one small question in our study was related to how youth are engaged in agriculture? Do they want to continue with the farming or do they want to choose non farming occupations. I talked mostly to men given the patriarchal nature of our society. Women, doing anything in agriculture independently, were exceptions and proved the rule. The discussions gave many interesting insights. In the areas where agriculture was more advanced and people had been gaining good incomes, farmers were able to give good education to their children and most of them were able to get secure well paying jobs in the cities. Those who were not faring well in farming were not able to support their children with higher education and these youths were opting to remain in agriculture instead of going to the cities. The reason these youths gave was highly interesting. They said it made more sense to remain in the village and be your own b...

First let’s understand what a kitchen garden is. Kitchen garden is a small area around your house or in your farm to cultivate especially fruits and vegetables that you need for your own consumption. Sometimes like the large homesteads there is not strict separation of spaces but crops for home consumption and the commercial agriculture share the same resources. Personally I have dabbled with these kitchen gardens in two ways, first while working on our own kitchen garden and second while promoting kitchen gardens through social projects. You can develop your own kitchen gardens if you have enough interest and physical capacity in growing your own food. There are three critical things, lack of which can stop you from developing a kitchen garden. First is space. In a country like India, where one does not have space sometimes even in rural habitations, it becomes difficult. Second is water. There are many parts of the country where even drinking water gets scarce for some months, p...

Time and again, we are being made aware about the climate change through media. The adverse effects of climate change are being faced by us in different ways. The Corona epidemic which we are currently facing is also being linked to the climate change by some experts. The most prominent factor that affects our daily lives and we commonly attribute to climate change is increasing Carbon Di-oxide levels and depleting oxygen levels in the air. It is true that increased levels of smoke and pollutants in the air have made our lives miserable and causing health problems. However another major contributor to the increased level of Carbon di-oxide is destruction of soil organic carbon. As per the estimates done by one group of scientists, there is 2700 Giga tons of carbon stored in the soil and it is 3 times the carbon that is present in the atmosphere. There is a cyclical movement of carbon in the environment. Plants do photosynthesis and utilise atmospheric carbon to make their food. As th...

My work has always taken me to the hinterlands. One question that is almost always asked to me is how I manage with the food. With scarcely found good restaurants and compromised hygiene many of the times, it is really difficult to manage. It is especially painful when you like to savour your food as much as possible. Fortunately I have never been picky and choosy about taste of food and my acceptance of the unknown things has given me chance to taste some local gems. Here is a pick of five such foods that I have liked and have been perfected by the generations of locals from various hinterlands. 1. Manipuri Thali –At a town called Kakching in Manipur, we had visited a small eatery run by local women. The thali they served had diverse dishes. The locally grown bold sticky rice had its own pleasant taste. The dal, vegetables and chicken all had their unique blend of local herbs and vegetables. I remember use of really fragrant chives and local variety of mustard leaves. It also had i...

I remember how the vegetable market in Vileparle used to look like 30 years back and can compare it with how it looks now. The current day vegetable market is known for the diverse and beautiful looking produce it offers. You can get all sorts of fruits and vegetables ranging from local varieties which are still grown in neighbouring Vasai to exotic Kiwi fruits imported from the New Zealand. Over the years there is a definite shift in what you can find there more commonly. E.g. in the month of August there used to be lot of amaranth leaves which has been replaced majorly by cabbages. Of course there is a change in the consumers as well. The women clad in nine yard sarees in the past have been completely replaced my modern moms wearing jeans these days. These women do not prefer amaranth leaves but cabbages and they get them in the market in the month of August. Isn’t it as simple as that? It becomes more interesting after knowing that these modern moms get worried about the future of...

Farmer suicides in India and particularly in Maharashtra is now a so commonly discussed issue that few people bother about it these days. The official reports of the government show that average of about 13,500 farmers die every year because of suicide in India (out of total 134 million souls). Just to put it in comparative perspective, during the Uttarakhand landslides, the worst disaster since 2004, the death toll was over 4000 people. Due to my work with the non profits engaged in agriculture based livelihoods in Vidarbha region, I could get an opportunity to understand this issue first hand. Many of the times there is a psychological distress prior to the suicidal action. During my discussions with farmers this pattern did come up in fact. Farmers reported being entirely dependent on rain-fed agriculture and their rainy season crops were giving one time lump sum income. There was no other income source for the rest of the year. The expenditures were higher than incomes and th...

I used to work with a large sized organisation which funded social causes. I handled some agriculture based poverty reduction projects in Bundelkhand. It is a region in north central part of India and is spread across 10 districts along the boundaries of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. The region does not have any large city, gets frequent droughts, has hunger problems and the resultant abject poverty. Add to it, extreme social inequalities and corrupt governance and it creates an ideal recipe for total hopelessness. One of the activities we supported was erecting bunds in the fields and retaining as much rain water as possible. The intervention had a unique problem. For saving their black gram crop, in the event of excess rainfall, farmers were breaking the bunds, since the crop could not withstand water stagnation. Now all this work had a larger purpose, a technical design, required efforts and money. All of that was in danger. An idea sprung up in my mind. It could save the fi...

I remember my great grandfather, my grandmother’s father, who used to visit us sometime when we were kids. He was a very strict person and we were always scared of him though he did not talk with us much. But we always used to like his visits as after entering, he used to call each of us and give a small packet of candies. The candies afterwards went in the custody of our grandmother and she used to give 2 candies every day till the stocks lasted and we used to remain contented. In our joint family, all the sweets were prepared only on the festive occasions and some few Sundays. Sugar consumption was very low in spite of the fact that I used to like it a lot. After finishing education and doing several job stints in other small sized places, I returned back to Mumbai. The culture developed there was very conducive to satisfy my sugar cravings. In our office, the ever enthusiastic assistant named Minubhai provided us with tea and coffee ad libitum and reminded us to take some if we we...

As far as I remember for last 14 years I have been getting migraine attacks. This health issue has had its various bad consequences. I remember one time when I was in Ghana. Before setting foot on the aeroplane to Ghana, I had mentally tried to give a diktat to myself that I won’t get any migraine attack for that entire year I was going to be there. The eight months went very well and the season changed in February with sudden rise in the temperatures by about 100Celcius. While I was basking about my success of not getting any migraine, at an odd moment when I was typing something on a computer amidst a workshop, it just came. It was like a tremendous burst in the brain. After hurriedly handing over everything I was working on to my friend Joshua, I found myself lying on a bed in the guest room; fortunately there was a one there. The only thing at that moment I could do was to just pay attention to the extreme pain sensations in the head, the nausea and helplessness. Meditation is main...

Yes, these are commitments and not commandments so I choose to make them to myself. My work requires me to travel frequently. For quite some years I have been struggling to inculcate some few good habits in myself. I travel for work and that means I don’t completely decide when I would be going away from home and when I am going to come back. I start with some good habits and there they get broken once my travel dates get fixed and I start thinking that anyway these habits are going to get a break then why to care so seriously about them. That’s when these habits go away and I start facing the same troubles again. The 21 day period of lock down is an opportunity to re-look at your troubling problems and get habituated to the good habits that you always wished for. I am going to remain stable at one place for next few days and I have made 3 commitments which relate to the health improvement. The first one is to do exercise regularly, second is to do meditation regularly and third one ...

Day before yesterday our dear Prime Minister of India announced a 21 Day lockdown of the country. Everybody is at home except some chosen few. If you are not one of these chosen few, I am sure what I am writing will be more relevant to you on this day. Today you might have laughed on jokes that are being circulated on WhatsApp. You might have tried your best to make sure that your neighbour is not able to see the type of grocery items you were able to bring home. You might have started passing your time with binge watching videos on Netflix etc. At its worst, you are now fed up of constant existence of the family members around you and quarrels have started. We in India are still some days behind the world when it comes to the imposed stay at home conditions. The negative things which I mentioned are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the worst condition of the people who have to live behind the closed door for prolonged periods. Currently there are reports from other ...