Sowing Native seeds in the young minds : Part Three

The Orientation

Many sessions had a very informal beginning.........

We were eagerly waiting for this round of education program in the schools for long time, as we had spent many nights in deciding the content and designing the activities. The power point presentations were made with lots of graphics and the documentary films meticulously hand picked to communicate to the children with poor background in science.  Our target audiences were children with very critical family back ground. Their parents either had small holdings or nothing at all and most of them came from women-led families; the fathers were out in unknown destinations doing odd jobs to eak out a living for their families.

The Orientation session was designed to last half a day in the schools. The beginning was made with a five minute graphical video about the anxiety of an Indian farmer’s girl child to instill seriousness about the issue.  Set in the drought-prone village of the cotton growing region in the neighboring state of Maharashtra, the girl is constantly watchful of her father’s moves.

An engrossing session

With no rains for many years the community has lost hope in agriculture and the mounting pressure by the bankers for repayment of their long standing debts has driven over a million farmers to take extreme steps. But for Duniya, the girl child in the film has a father with a zillion hopes and withstands all odds of life to be her prospect- source joy and confidence. The child has a sneaking suspicion that a rope in her houses may become a sinister tool for her father to commit suicide but the father illustrates his intentions are to tie a swing with it for her!

Children in an audio Visual Session

Every child we showed the video was filled with tears and for a while experienced the wrath of nature and financial swindle that Duniya’s family was subjected to. Failing rains, rising costs of seeds, chemical fertilizers and pesticides make no child in this country want to take up agriculture for a living. In all my interactions with the children across Karnataka I some how grab an opportunity to take a pool of children who would like to become farmers. Unfortunately a vast majority of them would not consider it as their choice of carrier. It was no different in this part of rural Chamarajanagara, so we decided to have a class room discussion with regards to their reservations about being a farmer. For most children it was fear and not just their personal choice.  There was a pressing need for us to establish that agriculture involves a lot of planning in terms of choice of crop, labor management and other sound practices of agriculture as well as economics. Secondly, the relation between high input chemical intensive food production and health had to be revealed.  And in turn tell them that impoverished environment will only give rise to ill-health and poverty. At the same time the benefits of organic methods had to be made known to re-assert hope about agriculture in their families.

Flip charts came handy where there was no Electricity

In order to make the discussion a bit more personal we brought in the subject of hunger. We wanted to inspire children, to come out of malnutrition while many didn't know they themselves were malnourished. For the first time these children were hearing about people suffering from hunger in other countries too. In fact there is a whole continent that sleeps without a square meal every single day. And that hungry population is spread out across many countries including developed nations like USA, UK, Germany and Australia.

Using the studies of several International agencies regarding wholesome food we compared the components in local context. We explained what people eat across the world and how civilizations have evolved upon local biodiversity to fight malnutrition and diseases. 

Valli distributing seeds

Who in the world consumes locally grown food and who will not? In developed nations food arrives from far off places packed and shipped by process industries and loaded with chemical preservatives. Where as in less developed nations food find its way to the plate directly from the farmland. At best it may go through a local market as in Bhutan, Cuba and many other smaller economies.  With this basic understanding the children were told about the size of the food industry and how it commands agriculture. When the products are made for a global market, the processing, packing and storing expenses add on to the cost of food. In addition the whooping increase in the volume of chemical fertilizer and pesticide produced across the globe was narrated showing further increase in the cost of food production. Increasing costs in agriculture are due to the inflation of economies and vagaries in Nature. But what has made the scene a point of no return is the unending fight against pests and plant diseases with chemical war-games that proved effective in a lab. We are madly following this model at the cost of the lives of millions and the good environment.

Children went to individual backyards to inspect seed germination

With a module that we thought to be so wholesome and complete and palatable to children we intensively went through school after school. Every session was so satisfying to us and gave us a better understanding of the subject we dealt.  At the end of each session we ceremoniously distributed seeds of seven varieties of vegetables and asked the children to sow them at home; a separate ration of seeds was provided for the school garden as well. In about two week’s time, when we were through most of the schools, our field staffs were visiting the same schools to follow up the progress of gardens. They visited schools and the backyards of students. When we met each other at the base, they narrated a gloomy picture of all the self proclaimed ‘successful round’ of education programs we were just about to finish. Day after day they came back with reports of no germination from across the project area. Every time we heard those words we felt more and more inferior. We went through a bag of mixed emotions as we struggled figuring out reasons for the failure in germination of seeds. We cross checked the sources and batch numbers of the seeds. We went back to schools inquiring about the debutante kitchen gardener’s procedures.

Analysing the failure in germination of seeds

To our surprise the children had no idea about how deep the seeds had to be sown. When asked about how deep they had sown the seeds, children showed a measure in their figure and palm suggesting a few inches to a feet deeper in the ground. No doubt the kitchen garden beds turned into  burial grounds for native seeds.

 -Manu K