Vanam: a unison of Passion and Perseverance

The team on its regular  Bird-watching outing 

Vanam Foundation is a trust working in the fringe of Bandipura Tiger Reserve whose objective is to promote socially just and ecologically sustainable development. It strives for the harmony between Man and Nature with strictly local emphasis. It operates from a tiny village called Lokkere and primly focuses upon the education and well-being of children in the locality. For more than a decade now they have invested their time and energy into one govt. school in Mangala, a revenue village that must be approached through Bandipura National Park. Most of the students in the school are from agrarian background and about a third belongs to the native tribes of Kaadu Kuruba, Betta Kuruba and Soliga communities. Even the non tribal villagers around the park are predominantly dependent on the forest for their livelihood or are marginal farmers cultivating on dry land.

A painting on the School wall

The Mangala Gram Panchayat consists of 6 revenue villages divided into 15 hamlets. Of them 8 are exclusively made up of tribal populations, 1 is of exclusively dalit and 6 are of mixed populations. The Gram Panchayat has six schools. The resources in these schools were very limited and seldom the teachers moved out towards bigger towns as fast as they came. This used to be the scenario till as recent as 2005, when wildlife enthusiast Nithila Baskaran first visited this area. The Govt. Higher Primary school at Mangala had a dilapidated building with holes in the ceilings. The furniture were rickety absolutely unusable.  Nithila was then working with ACTIONAID doing community-based rehabilitation and post disaster rehabilitation when she chance visited the Mangala Government School. Her humanitarian conciderations for the needy got evoked.

This file picture depicts the wonderful surrounding of the school

And then on it was not easy for her to sidestep the ‘people’s issues’ that were weighing down the conservation efforts in the National Park.  On further visits it was clear to her that the high attrition rate of teachers and children from these schools reinforced the vicious cycle of high illiteracy in the locality. Also, Chamarajnagar district had a low literacy rate of 50.87% and was doused in severe poverty. After meeting the teachers and the students in the school, Nithila realized that there was tremendous need to work with the community and believed that she has to start her work with the children first.

Some Nature Games in the wilderness

Nithila was born in a place called Dharapuram, close to the city of Coimbatore in Tamilnadu.  However she moved every couple of years due to her father’s career and lived all over India. She grew up spending a lot of time in the forests of South India especially Bandipur. Her father is a multi faceted person who attained highest order in civil service. Along with his strict schedules he was an avid traveler, writer and a conservationist.

Children given an opportunity to explore a stream bed 

His writings on travel, art, archeology, Natural history and Plant sciences are familiar to the readers of The Hindu and Front line. Both of her parents being birders the family has spent all their holidays in the wild, every where their carrier took them to. Naturally her love and passion for wilderness and especially this area became an important part of her life. It continually brought her back to the region to photograph wildlife and enjoy the beauty of the forests. She was now back to the same place with a couple of degrees and several years of work experience-field work, research, writing and so on….so it was time for her to decided to do something.

Celebrating World Environment Day through learning to Reuse.. 

She began talking with the local people who were struck by the many challenges faced by the community in regards to their children’s education. The student/teacher ratio was extraordinarily high, good teachers did not want to teach in such a remote place. It was difficult for the children to get to school where they had no desks or teaching aids nor toys. And there was no access to any alternative schooling systems.

Ravi demonstrates Bird-box making

To further complicate the matters, there was an enormous disconnect between the children and the forests around them despite the fact that almost half of the children came from tribal communities, who traditionally lived off the forests. They rarely entered the park since they were relocated outside the forests.  Efforts or concerns to conserve the land and wildlife around them were low.

Nithila realized she had landed on an opportunity to do something different that would change their life. Although she loved the work she did with Actionaid, she wanted to do more hands-on work and be in the field. It was her chance encounter with the community and Mangala Government School that inspired her to found Vanam.

By working with the government and other non-profit organizations, Vanam has helped increase student attendance and achievement, gender equality, wildlife and environmental conservation, and overall improvement of life for the communities that live around Bandipur National Park.

Children having a hands on experience....

Apart from providing infrastructural support to the school it has given immense support through providing for voluntary assistant teachers for years together. As a sort of goodwill gesture the trustees provide festive lunch on many occasions in the school. To Anthoniamma, a crusading force in drawing children from all the tribal settlements to the school, Vanam is a sort of the ‘go to people’ on any emergency in the school. Also they give a lot of emphasis to nature education in the schools and have entrusted a person to exclusively look after Nature related activities in the school. He promotes science, wildlife and environmental conservation in the school by coordinating workshops and enrichment programs for the children to learn about the forest around them.

A file grab of an Outdoor Class 2008

Vanam provides scholarships to students in order to encourage them continue their education beyond high school. The addition of a school bus to this govt. school has made one of the biggest differences in the turnout of the children as they now have a safe way to get to school. The school bus picks up 75 children traveling distance of 60 km every day. Before the school bus, children had to walk miles in the forest and sometimes risking wild elephants. The school bus, though not donated by Vanam, is successfully run by Vanam. The fuel costs, the ware and tare of the tiers and all unforeseen costs are met by Vanam. These indirect interventions in the school could go a long way in curbing the dropout rates in the schools of Mangala Gram Panchayat. And the enrichment of the curriculum with exposure visits and extra curricular activities will definitely tilt equations in the community. 

The Happy and cheerful team at the Interpretation Center at Mudumalai. 

-Manu K

Exploring Local initiatives to spread the Organic Kitchen Garden movement-Part 2

A boy looks astonished at the diversity in ragi

After a journey of three long hours the children were given some rest and then taken around the campus. The children went through the cattle shed with some native breeds, seed bank, and vermin-composting and Organic pesticide preparation shelters. They were also taken to the seed production plots that literally captivated them all. In spite of the scorching sun they kept up with the guided tour. Over fifty varieties of ragi and associated millets, several varieties of ladies finger, eggplant and various gourds were all in full fruiting condition. Some varieties of ragi were already harvested as they were varieties of short duration.

A guided tour through Anisha campus
 for the little delegates of Vanam

In the post lunch session they were taken for a field visit to two schools and a few home gardens that the students had established. We first took the children to St. Charles Rural School. This school was our favorite in this project as the headmaster and the staffs were always welcoming. They had allowed their children to thoroughly involve in the project which had kept the hard work of the students in a presentable condition. Being right on the main road it was convenient for us to bump in any time. The school had several aspects of gardening to showcase; the most attractive was the curtain garden put up along the corridor of the school. Children had pooled in polythene sack which were filled with a nice mixture of soil and manure and used for sowing vegetables and creepers in them. The constant care and protection they got had started to show upon the coir mesh that had been meticulously laid between the pillars along the corridor. The administrator of the school and the Headmaster were personally present and proudly showed them to the little delegates.

Understanding the bare necessities of an
Organic Kitchen Garden  (OKG)

Then the convoy proceeded to the school garden at Godest Nagara and Kadabur. The school garden at Godest nagar was the largest of all the school kitchen gardens in the cluster. The school was a bit isolated from the settlement and the teachers were from far off places. As we were settling in the school garden little custodians of the garden arrived in astonishment to see what was happening in their school. The innovative children had managed to set up a simple yet functional drip irrigation system that watered the plants even in their absence. They had managed to procure a dozen used intravenous injection sets from a local nurse and had placed them in strategic locations to keep the garden well watered.

Children of Vanam admiring Jeswin's hard work  

Before it got dark the vegetable gardens of Princy-Priyanka sisters and that of Jeswin were also visited. Of the hundreds of students who were gardening in the vicinity these three were the most sincere, innovative and hard working ones. In fact they had no water connection to their house hold and had to carry water from a long distance for every day use. Once they took up gardening, each of the families had a demand of an extra fifteen to twenty pots of water. When asked about their experience they were thankful to the public tap and their parents who allowed them to take up gardening! The visiting students from Bandipura were speechless to see the efforts put in by students of their own age while the gardening families felt proud of their children’s remarkable fete.

Children at Work

On returning back to the base, the children were shown a few documentaries before dinner. A film about the Impact of Chemical Pesticides on humans and Environment were shown.  It gave a sad account of how Indian consumers are bombarded with a daily dose of pesticides unknowingly.  To reveal the harsh realities of pesticides the film used two case studies namely the use of endosulfon in Cashew plantations in Kerala in the eighties and the over use of pesticides by the Cotton growers of Punjab.

Preparing a bed for sowing

In southern state of Kerala where endosulfon was sprayed using choppers the deadly chemicals enters the food chain through numerous streams in the water shed. Even the ground water gets contaminated and the livestock as well as humans gets affected. The worst toll will be among the children and infants. The visuals of many children of one single school in the area who suffered a wide range of physical and mental mutilations were sad and appealing to the young minds.

The following day some time was spared for some hands on activities. The participants were divided into three teams and were assigned to prepare a plot for vegetable garden in Permaculture method. Using raised bed technique, dry and wet biomass were sandwiched and seeded with micro organisms in the slurry of cow dung. This was a sort of work experience class for them. They had to imitate some of the plots they were taken through in the morning where there was practically no soil.

Sowing seeds a new way

When the work started the students became busy like a colony of ants. They started sourcing materials; soil, stones, green leaves, dry twigs, hay and cow dung. They moved in small fistfuls to head loads. In about two hours all the three teams under the guidance of teachers had created vegetable beds of different kinds.  The beds differed not in their content but in the method adapted to hold the substratum together to support the plant growth. While one of the teams used solid rocks to hold the soil the others used dry twigs. One of the teams also used empty water cans to fill in a biomass mixture for planting. All the beds were planted with saplings of eggplant and tomato with required spacing. Seeds of cluster beans, ladies finger and a couple of cucurbits were also sown in-between.

The visiting team at a GHP School at Godest Nagar

There was a small experience sharing session after the lunch. And it was time for these little ambassadors of the far western corner of the district to embark upon a journey back home- a journey very important to them as well as us. We wished a happy and safe journey to them as their school bus rolled out of Anisha.

-Manu K 

-Photographs by Chaitanya Sharma  

Exploring Local initiatives to spread the Organic Kitchen Garden Movement- Part 1

The vibrant biodiversity in an Organic Garden

While inaugurating our Kitchen gardening project in schools at a govt. school in rural Chamarajanagara, Ms. Hepsiba Rani, CEO Zillapanchayath heralded a larger dream into our minds. In her key note address she had expressed her desire to see a day when the whole of the district embraces the project. She even thought aloud and said if all the fifty thousand students studying between sixth and tenth grade in the district take to kitchen gardening in the district that would be a befitting answer to whoever calls this district backward. For an instant the idea seemed like a shear slogan usually made by politicians. But on casually letting my mind ruminate over a dozen issues that the district is plagued with, I realized the importance of Organic Kitchen Gardening (OKG) for sustainable growth of the society. In fact that is the need of the hour.

I went through a lot of literature about the rebirth of organic lifestyles in the west and the ways it found an entry into India. I also collected some documentaries about the OKG movement in Cuba, and the manner in which the country survived the stringent embargo since the late eighties. I shared these resources with Rajan and Valli and we furthered to expand our data base. We also read about the different agencies conducting courses in Organic farming and Permaculture within India.

The booming sale of Organic products

Unknowingly we were preparing for something what we didn’t know…..are we heading to launch a movement? Yes a very, very slow and steady one that will take shape within the schools. In these days of comfort it is not easy to ask people to sweat it out, if it is not for any fancy reason. Some sixteen years ago in Mysore, a small initiative called Nesara was made by a group of nature lovers to promote organic farming and to market organic products. Even though people laughed at them that day, there are at least fifty shops more mushrooming all over the city. Each of them are organized enough to be the first to put up a stall in any public gathering. With increasing awareness, sellers have an exponentially growing market at their feet. With nobody scrutinizing the produce their sales are endless and can be unfathomable.  I am sure we cannot have such a stride in making people produce organic food; especially if it is not meant for sale.  Any how we have made a humble beginning here and we can only daydream upon it.

All we have are two honest organic farming practitioners on hand and a few jugglers like me in Hasiru hejje who go from school to school. But how do we reach out far and wide across the district? Sitting in this remote corner, three hours of marauding drive from the headquarters how can we even think of reaching out to this single district with five circles? Chamarajanagara, Kollegala, Hanur, Yelandur and Gundalpet; all of them have their schools so widely dispersed. Of the five circles I have contacts with teachers and students of Gundalpet for a long time. For years I have been meeting them at the camps in Bandipura organized by the CPR Center for Environment education. It would not be difficult to barge in into that circle and speak about the issue. But for this season we neither had time nor manpower to venture out of our target area. So our option was to focus all our efforts in this region and show good results so that someone may replicate the job in other areas. For such a thing to happen, good results and rewarding experiences of the project had to be showcased. But how do you mobilize children to come over to this remote corner of Chamarajanagara?

Venturing out to propagate OKG 

The CEO might have also been eager to see the response of the schools and the community to this OKG initiative. In fact we were ambitious to call her back for one of the valedictory functions so that she sees a few gardens first hand. Unfortunately she was transferred out of the district a month ago.

 

Soon after finishing the first round of visits in the school we took an opportunity to visit the far end of the district. We set out to Bandipur and visited to the school at Mangala in the fringe of the National Park. With the long association I had with this school it was easy to ask for a day’s interaction with the higher secondary students. With the enthusiastic head mistress here who was not new to the works of NGOs readily welcomed us.  Her school was frequented by many NGOs althrough the year. Among a host of conservation NGOs pouring in goodies to this school VANAM foundation stands different. It is different in its approach and looks for the long term gains. So apart from providing hard ware support to the school it is providing additional teachers to this school and a coordinator to look after the Nature club activities in the school. As the result the students reciprocate to our kind of activities much better then many schools. In spite of being cut off from the main stream their exposure to a variety of resource persons has made them different.

Children taking an  oath to go organic and
propagate the same in their community

Given a full day we improvised a concise version to the three chapters we were dealing on three different occasions. By the end of the day two dozen polythene bags were sown with vegetable seeds. The children and the school were given the same varieties of seeds and the same competition was announced for the best kitchen garden.

Three months later, there comes a day when a student delegation from Mangala village school in gundalpet taluk   has a chance to visit Anisha to study about OKG. Thanks to Vanam Foundation, for the good gesture of supporting this two days event. There were twenty eight children and four staff members who were benefited out of the outing. Such is the small beginning of every big tree.

-Manu K

A Harvest of Rich Experience

Children developed focus in academics as their  retention time went up 

The academic year that we spent in the schools of Marthally region supporting the schools to develop an organic kitchen garden has left us with rich experiences in working with the  community and school authorities. Since we had an Eco-club approach, we were able to continuously engage the children of varied age group. Though the initial aim of the project was to address only the seventh to ninth graders the popularity of the program in the schools prompted the teachers to request us to include other classes. Though we were a bit firm about not pulling in the tenth grade students who would be taking up their Board examinations the teachers themselves would ask us to include them for at least the lessons on Terrace gardening.

Overcoming fear of creepy creatures...... 

The syllabus of the tenth standard had a solid lesson on terrace gardening and its benefit. Secondly, the teachers felt that the seventh and the sixth graders would any how be distracted with any thing happening in the school without their involvement. Hence the teachers insisted the admittance of the little ones into most of the activities. For a while it was a bit irritating as their retention was low yet we knew it was  a wonderful opportunity for enhancing our tribe of vegetable growers. If we look forward to work with the same schools in the next year these “under aged” would be a great asset for the project.

Boys looking for pests on a plant

At the end of this year’s project we had a brainstorming session between Anisha and Hasiru Hejje. Valli who was keeping the minutes, listed our learning in reams. We contemplated about what should have happened and how it should have happened. Based on the setbacks we had this season, a convincing list of things to be done before the beginning of the next academic year was also charted. At the top of the list of learning was the priority to be given in setting up the garden. And to do so one had to adhere to the sowing season. That would in tern call for the distribution of seeds beforehand. Secondly, the teachers had to be oriented well before the commencing of the program. When we went with a quiver of education capsules that linked the syllabus with kitchen garden a lot of teachers appreciated it.

Preparations for sowing develops a community feeling

Some science teachers asked if we could part with any education material so that they follow and try out in their teaching. This fact undoubtedly suggests the necessity of a resource book that enables the teachers to use their kitchen garden as an out door classroom.

For a creative mind there is infinitesimal example to pick up from nature to explain many simple scientific principals. Somebody had to try out and compile a few of the possibilities and make it available to the needy. Along with a teacher’s manual, children must also have something to carry back home which is more than a mere memorabilia.  Probably it should be a ‘How to do it?’ manual which also has certain identification keys to plant varieties, their pests and other essential, friendly insects upon them. Also there is a dearth of resource materials in the local language of any sort and that could be bridged through some consolidated efforts of artists and logistical supporters.

She loves watering the plants and never parts with the pot 

In a meeting held at Bandipur for teachers involved in the project, a vast majority of them expressed their willingness for the continuation of the project in their schools pointing out the sole benefit of enhancing the interest of the children in schooling itself. It is such an important gesture when the education department and the governments are fighting a difficult battle to keep the school drop outs in check across rural India. And as far as the kitchen gardening is concerned there is an extra two folds of individuals in our reach. Children have impressed their neighbors with their dedication and harvest of healthy vegetables for the house hold. In every school we worked there was a constant flow of housewives approaching for seeds. Valli had to distribute seeds even to them out of obligation; but not without some lessons on the need to preserve native seeds. She would also coax them into a verbal agreement of returning back ten times the seeds they received, once they harvest.

The innovative spaces children find for themselves

To an outsider the ingenuity and the sincere attempts that the children have put in may not be visible. But when our teams toured through the villages to check up their backyards the hard work and desperate attempts put up by the children unravels. With absolutely no or little support from their families, they had established gardens, collaborated with one another and even shared spaces. They had maintained the plants with untiring resilience against the worst drought in the region.

A solid fence to hold the cattle out

Children of Godest Nagar School carried a bottle of water every day and shared half of it with the plants designated into their custody. During Dasara holidays they had improvised a sort of drip irrigation using disposed intravenous injection sets procured through a village nurse. Some had explored every sort of containers and spaces they could put their hands at. 

An intricate fence to keep off chicken 

One boy had made use of the spare bricks to make a raised bed upon a septic tank of their toilet and made the place look aesthetically appealing. Another girl in Ponnachi had planted radish in broken plastic pots and buried it in her father’s maize plot. She very well knew that in the drought what ever good happened to her father’s plants happened to hers. But any bit of extra care for her plants never slipped into the larger field. Her father proudly showed the selfish pranks of his admirable daughter.

The project took us to some of the most beautiful landscapes 

Likewise the innovations shown in fencing their crops against a host of nuisances was incredible. The problems were peculiarly unique in every set up. 

They varied from pigs and cattle to monkeys and humans. In some places it was neighbor’s envy and owner’s bane. To overcome them all they had scouted for old saris, bushy branches of bamboo thicket and many things unimaginable for fencing a garden. Some had pole-planted drumstick along the edge of their garden so that it can be improvised as a live fences at a later date.

All the clouds than didn't bring any rain

At the end, the district authorities comprising of the Education Department and the Pollution Control Board along with KRVP had meticulously went through 300 schools and identified a ‘Green School’ for hefty cash award for the performance of the previous year in keeping the school campus green. Of course none of the schools in Marthally region was even in the list. But as far as the selection of the next year’s Green School is concerned a set of forty schools are short listed as “Yellow- Schools”.  The Govt. Higher Primary Schools at Anthoniar Kovil and Sulavadi have been selected yellow. The headmasters have already become restless in their pursuit of the Green School award and become very industrious in and outside the class room.

-Manu.K

All the custodians of Native Seeds for tomorrow 

Sowing Native seeds in the young minds: Part Five

Looking for the Harvests

Chaithanya at some serious work.........

Days were becoming hectic as the sequence of visits to the schools was getting overlapped. While some school gardens had to undergo re-sowing, some had already had juvenile plants asking for supplements to bloom and protection from unknown pests. Organic soil supplements and pest-repellent had be carried and administered. The two dozen schools that we addressed in this project were all so sparsely distributed and we could cover fewer gardens per day. Lecturing, demonstrations of various kinds and photo-documenting needed extra hands in the team. Dozens of millet were in full bloom and ripe on their stalks and were to be photographed before they were harvested. We had Chaithanya, a seventh standard student from Mysore who had come to stay on the campus for a few days. We asked him to do some photography for us. Slinging the camera to his neck allowed us to be in our job while he explored his potentials happily with his camera. Some of the photographs used in this this article are taken by him.

The assessing team visiting a Kitchen Garden

Visiting some of the schools of MM Hills and Ponnachi Panchayath involved phenomenal drives. The meandering road through the scrubby forest while going up Mahadeshwara hills was enthralling. In less than a few kilometers the scorching weather would surprisingly get transformed into a pleasant setting. At mid way to the top, a deviation to the left would take you through less inhabited road to Ponnachi. As you cross over a couple of deep valleys you feel like travelling across time. The area is also known for its high incidence of elephant movement. This used to be a mining capital for black granite until the eighties, when the government of Karnataka imposed a total ban on all quarrying activities in the district. You have to pass through a few defaced-faced hillocks to get a flatter and undulating landscape housing the villages of Ponachi.

Oh! Whats wrong with this garden?

The road to Tholasikere was notoriously adventurous. The approach roads were not attended in half a century! The population thrive a kind of detachment from the mainstream due to lack of roads, electric power and water supply even today. Since the declaration of these forests as critical Tiger habitat the Forest department is looking forward to relocate the villages to the MM Hills complex or else where. As a strategic stand they  wouldn't permit any form of developmental works like putting up a building or a road. The local population shattered by uncertainty grossly depended on the shanty vehicles that shuttled between MMHills and Nagalmalai,

A boy showing a healthy soft gourd

a shrine within the protected area. The ride was worse than any dirt-track event and strangely was undertaken by only one single brand of a pickup truck called Force plying between the destinations. There were about forty of them, all looking they were returning from the war front. Some didn't even have a number plate and nobody knew their ownership  but the drivers were all strictly below eighteen years of age! Just like the tourists and the luggage of the locals that ranged from a gas cylinder to monthly rations even we had to travel in the only available transport with no guarantee or insurance. Except for such exceptional cases most schools were motorable but the individual gardens in the backyards required climbing and trekking skills to reach.

Neelakanta of Kumbudaki village proud of his performance

 Children all over had tried out their best and the plants in best soils had rewarded. The household gardens on the mountains were more rewarding while the school Gardens in Marthally valley fared better harvest. Ingenuity of children seemed unfathomable and they had shown a wide ranging variety of improvisation in containing the soil. Their dedicated care of the plants had yielded tasty vegetables to their families and neighborhoods. The school gardens too provided ample vegetables to the mid-day meals.

The size of the radish was astounding

In a small hamlet called Kumbudki where the headmaster visited the school even during the Dasara holiday to water the plant had so many vegetables that the cook boiled the vegetables and the lentils in different consignments in the pressure cooker every day. On an average there was an addition of at least fifty kilos of vegetables to the mid day meals of every school. Out of the a thousand two hundred students addressed our staffs were able to visit some seven hundred and fifty house holds that had established a garden at home. The sum of all the harvests made from these households amounted to approximately six tones.  Two dozen children were able to grow more that 25 kilos of vegetables. The vegetables grown in the backyard included radish, bottle gourd, ridge gourd, pumpkin, ladies finger, cluster bean, drumstick and variety of lettuces. Where ever the germination had failed saplings of eggplants and tomato were distributed along with the seeds.

The cook in a school shows her
 pot full of vegetables 

 Those who were not able to take up kitchen gardening either had no space at home at or they stayed away from home. Some even complained about non availability of water and pests like monkeys, pigs and goats. In case of schools also the reasons were no different. As a traditional farmer does every little gardener had a collection of seeds from each crop. They had all kept up their promise of leaving one vegetable plant of each variety for the sake of seed collection. For us this was a greater harvest than all the vegetables grown by the community involved against all odds. The area has not seen proper rains in the past four years. During the current year the farmers never had an opportunity to undertake sowing upon the beds they had promptly ploughed in anticipation of the rains. While the parents had a miserable denial for agricultural this year their children had successfully harvested something for the pot for a few days in the year.

reusing 25 kg rice bags to grow vegetables

 -Manu K

Sowing Native seeds in the young minds : Part four

The Demonstration

'The success of every plant lies in its germination'....... and old saying in Kannada 

Seed germination is such a mysterious creation that those who had an opportunity to observe it very closely would undergo a different feeling altogether. Many school children in their higher primary class have a chance of conduct the various germination experiments. And in the process of waiting to unravel a mystery are filled with limitless joy all through the day.  The fascinating aspect of life emanating out of a “life-less” looking object induce many questions in the young minds. Scientific interpretation of the process consolidates all the puzzling imaginations rushing through the child’s mind and fixes them into sequential frameworks. Observing the same phenomenon under a number of ‘real’ situations would more successfully give more clarity to the many riddles in the child’s mind. Exposing a child repeatedly to such a pattern of guided learning, logical thinking gradually sets root in its mind. Aspects such as awe, beauty and creativity- should form part of the education of children today and are more likely to happen through such practical approaches. They would offer a great challenge for all the people involved in education, especially teachers.

Gardening demo for the rural-agriculturalist's children

Another benefit of such science education is its contribution to developing ways of thinking. Many scientific ideas are counter-intuitive as we know from many investigations. Studies have shown in a variety of contexts that thinking scientifically helps develop new ways of thinking; it widens and deepens our capacities to think. Thinking about and with scientific ideas means we have to think in new ways that offer powerful possibilities for the future, and are not often spontaneously available without teaching.

Brewing the recepie for a fruitful soil

We started with a three minute clipping of Epigeal Seed germination shot on time lapse mode. The seed of a climbing bean starts to swell, imbibing water and the cotyledons crack open to send out a Hypocotyle (shoot) and a Radicle (root). Like a living creature it adjusts its position so that the two appendages are set in the right direction. The Radicle, grow into the soil digging through the soil particles and sets out many minute root hairs to increase the surface area of the root. This enhances the surface area coming in contact with the soil to absorb water. The Hypocotyle grows up against gravity towards the sky making use of all the stored nutrition in the seed. This stored nutrition is what fuels the process of germination in every seed. Life is dormant in a seed for many years and can suddenly be triggered by exposure to moisture. Scientists have found that corns offered to the kings some two thousand years ago found in their tombs successfully germinated showing the long shelf life of the species.

Alternating a seed bed with a trench of mulch

The hour long discussion about the germinating seed in every school had a tremendous response from the   children. The prolonged stay upon the topic enabled us to get into the smallest of details of the phenomenon. Across the classes from sixth to tenth we were cautious not to use unnecessary jargons for their age.  Some kids were so engrossed in the subject and we felt that they were able to perceive the hardships of a germinating seed. They were

Digging a trench three feet deep

confident of telling about the requirements of a seed to successfully germinate. Based on the thickness of the seed coat they could gauge how long would it take to sprout? How loose, coarse and damp should the soil be? How deep should the seed be sown and more essential information required in the field?

Filling the trench with dry waste to increase the carbon content

Filling with green foliage to augment the nitrogen content

Now it was time for us to move on to the outdoors. After knowing the essentials of the germinating seed what is the type of soil we are starting our garden.  We gathered in a large circle exactly where the kitchen garden had to be raised. In the center stage was Rajan who performed with all his persuasive skills. He began with how to identify good soil? He showed simple ways to look for soil properties. Some soil samples were full of life and some were ‘dead’ and not fit for gardening. He explained about the texture, moisture holding capacity, chemical nature, it’s PH and so on. If these components are missing how do you supplement or correct it? Every thing went on in a demonstration mode. 

Some schools had literally compressed dust particles and had no organic content in it. Practically they were all like a play grounds. We made use of the opportunity to impart more essential information about preparing the soil.  Thanks to the mid day meal scheme in the schools, food is cooked every day and help a corner of the school remain wet all through. This gave us different soils for examination. With simple equipment like a bucket and a mug and a water bottle we demonstrated many experiments with soil that tell its properties.

Inspecting the sowing in waste pet bottles 

Based on the availability of material and space in the schools suitable methods were demonstrated. These plots were approximately of 20 to 30 sq. feet and physically quite demanding upon us to tame the land for gardening. The idea of this practical demonstration session was to anchor the verbal orientation session with practical training. We instructed on organic gardening techniques, including composting, bio-pesticide preparation and use, planting, watering techniques.

In some schools where there was lack of space and water we demonstrated planting in various types of containers like empty bottles and polythene bags. This demonstration garden are encouraged to be used as an out door environment laboratory and the vegetables be used for the mid day meals.

 -Manu.K