The Barefoot Conservator

http://www.ruralindiaonline.org/articles/the-barefoot-conservator-debal-deb/

By Chitrangada Choudhury 

Debal Deb’s 1000-and-growing in-situ rice conservation bank is a strong pitch for ending our dash towards genetic erosion 

The Sunday morning in July marked the fifth straight day of rain in the fecund foothills of the Niyamgiri range in western Orissa’s Rayagada district. The delayed showers kicked off the year’s busiest period for ecologist Debal Deb, and his right-hand man Dulal, as they prepared Basudha—a 2-acre farm unlike any other in India—for an intricately planned growing season.

Wrap your mind around this: over the coming days, the farm would see the planting of 1020 indigenous varieties of rice - part of a remarkable effort underway since 1996 towards rescuing a sliver of India’s genetic diversity from extinction.

This wouldn’t just mean planting 1000 varieties of rice saplings on a plot one-tenth the size of Mumbai’s Oval Maidan, and watching them grow. Maintaining the genetic purity of each of these heirloom varieties, year on year, necessitated an intricate sowing plan crafted by Deb and his colleagues, so that no two neighbouring varieties flower at the same time, thus guarding against cross-pollination. (Deb published his methodology in the Current Science journal in July 2006, after field-testing it for six years.) The constant addition of vanishing varieties to Deb’s growing collection – last year it numbered 960 – means the plan needs seasonal redesigning.

India’s Genetic Erosion

Rice - daily sustenance for a majority of Indians - is a grass species, believed to have been domesticated over 10,000 years ago in a broad region extending from the north-eastern Himalayan foothills to southern China and south-east Asia. Over the centuries, human hands selected thousands of different strains, evolved in response to specific ecological niches. The undulating region of western Orissa called the Jeypore tract was one of the world’s leading areas of diversification where a great number of rice varieties, also called land races, were developed by cultivators - “the un-named, unknown, and greatly talented scientists of the past”, as Deb calls them.

In the 1960s, when Deb was growing up in Kolkata, India was estimated to have over 70,000 such rice land races. According to a 1991 National Geographic essay, just 20 years later, with scientists and policy makers chasing high yields through aggressively pushed modern, input-intensive hybrids, over 75% of India’s rice production was coming from under 10 varieties.

This devastating and irreversible genetic erosion from India’s farms continues: for example, rice varieties from West Bengal, which Deb had collected just five years ago, can no longer be found cultivated. The disappearance is insidious. “It can result from something as innocuous as a farmer dying, and his son dropping the variety,” says Deb. “I witnessed this on a farm in Birbhum, with a rare two-grained variety called Jugal.”

An Indian Institute of Science alum and a former Fulbright scholar at the University of California Berkeley, Deb abandoned his job at the Worldwide Wildlife Fund in the mid-1990s after struggling to convince colleagues to fund documentation of Bengal’s vanishing rice varieties. “Conservation organisations suffer from what I call charismatic mega-fauna species syndrome,” he says acerbically. “Tigers–yes. Rhinos–yes. But if some earthworms or beetles are going extinct because of chemical pollutants on a farm, who cares?”

Deb headed out to villages in search of indigenous rice, often travelling on bus rooftops or by foot – an iconoclast by temperament, the small, wiry man still abjures institutional links, relying on teaching assignments in European and American universities and donations from friends to sustain Basudha. He particularly sought out areas that were remote, un-irrigated, and having marginal farmers, who could not afford chemical inputs and seeds from the market. “The places Indian elites like to call ‘backward’ such as tribal areas were those with the greatest chances of having retained these varieties over time,” says Deb. “When I would find such a variety, I would ask the farmer’s family for a handful, explain why I wanted it, thank them for preserving a vital part of our heritage, and urge them to not give up cultivating it.”

Using such barefoot methods, Deb has collected 1020 desi rice varieties over the past 18 years. They come from 13 states across North-Eastern, Eastern and Southern India. Kashmir with 2 indigenous varieties is the latest entrant to the seed bank, which Deb has named Vrihi, Sanskrit for rice. There are seeds that will grow in soils with high salinity, or conditions of submergence; others are drought or flood-tolerant, yet others are resistant to attacks from varying pathogens, while some are suited for dryland cultivation. There are medicinal varieties as well as 88 aromatic varieties.

These land races – embodying centuries of accumulated knowledge – and farmers who can work with them are crucial for a sustainable ecological agriculture, argues Deb. Annual seed conservation trainings and a distribution effort centred on the small farmer complement his in-situ conservation project, resulting in an informal personal network of about 3000 cultivators. Farmers who approach Basudha for seeds get them free of cost, with a plea to grow them and in turn become distributors to other farmers, to help reduce the chances of the variety going extinct.

Last December, having heard of the seed bank, 40 Malkangiri farmers travelled over 200 kms to Basudha’s doorstep, and demanded indigenous seeds for their farms. “Not one asked about yield or market price,” says Deb. “It was a very moving moment for us.” Deb is also proud that the farm stands on a common property land in Rayagada’s adivasi village of Kerandiguda – its residents invited Deb after taking seeds from his bank, and hearing that he was in search of a place to house his project.

The communitarian ethos defining Deb’s work sharply contrasts with agricultural policymaking, where the voices of the small farmer—the largest group of Indians—are often impossible to detect. Take for example, a Rice Gene Bank built in recent years by the state government. Located in a government building in suburban Bhubaneshwar, 900 varieties from across Orissa are sealed in aluminium foil packets, and preserved at zero degrees in an impressive facility. It is a laudable effort. Only, how does an average farmer access it?

Officials watching over the collection say they cannot give farmers seed samples to cultivate since these might fall into the wrong hands (read: seed companies, who might exploit the genes for developing new proprietary seed lines). Never mind that the entire collection was built with farmer contributions from across the state. Why does the state not officially release these desi varieties in the market to encourage their use, and thereby survival? The release process, admit bureaucrats, is skewed towards modern, commercial varieties developed by breeders in government labs or private seed companies.

Besides being inaccessible to the average farmer, says Deb, official gene banks like the above neglect the process of life’s co-evolution, by freezing seeds in time. “Bring out seeds of a pest-resistant variety after 30-40 years. They will have lost some major traits of defence since in the mean time the pest has evolved,” he says. “They might be useful for research but are not geared towards our farmers in the field.” Deb also counters the official argument that indigenous varieties mean inferior yields: “I have several varieties which outperform the so-called High Yielding varieties.” High yields, he reminds, do not ensure food security, pointing to India being home to record stockpiles of rice and wheat, as well as a quarter of the world’s under-nourished.

Over lunch – greens, vegetables, dal and rice combining eight different varieties from the farm – Deb asked if we could measure our heirlooms in money. “Imagine a unique painting , a saree...an ornament which has been in your family for 200 years – would you sell it off to make money?” he asked. “That’s how these indigenous rice varieties are – they are our culture.”

A version of this piece first appeared in Mint Lounge's August 2014 Independence Day Issue: http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/bmr5i8vBw06RDiNFms2swK/Debal-Deb--The-barefoot-conservator.html

Kerala loses its precious Kenis

By Shree Padre

http://www.indiatogether.org/2013/may/env-keni.htm

Keni, the miraculous mini well of adivasis of Wayanad in Kerala, is well on its way to becoming a part of history - a victim of rapid environmental decline of this once bountiful state. 

The name Wayanad comes from two words, Vayal (paddy field) and Naad (land), meaning ‘The Land of Paddy Fields'. It is set high on the Western Ghats with altitudes ranging from 700 to 2100 metres from sea-level. The district has a considerable population of tribals. Keni, an amazing water body developed using traditional wisdom and which doesn’t seem to have parallels anywhere in the whole country, is found only in this district.

Kenis are located on wetlands, on the edge or middle of paddy fields. Cylindrical in shape, they have a diameter and depth of around one metre only. The wall is of a specific type of wood. During construction, these wooden parts are driven into the soil.

A Keni is not a property of a single family. It is a community drinking water source. Being a shallow water body, it doesn’t require a rope, pulley or pump to lift the water. The water source is just enough to dip the kodam, the round utensil used to lift water from wells.

Soil in Wayanad is clayey. As such, wells in low lying areas have water that is slightly stained. But the Keni water always remains crystal clear and transparent like glass. Not only that, a water body of the size of a hundred-litre drum gives more than thousand litres of water every day, round the year!

In some places, a layer of sand is found around the outer wall of a Keni. This might have been put to filter the inflowing water. Kenis retain the same level of water both during monsoon and summer. Generally as many as 15 – 20 families take water from one Keni. Once a kodam full of water is lifted from the well, it gets refilled in just a minute or two.

Dr E.J.Joseph, Scientist, Agriculture at CWRDM (Centre for Water Resources Development and Management), Kozhikode has studied Kenis in depth. He says, “In the entire district there might be 200 to 300 Kenis. No one seems to have counted them. According to some elders, there are some which may be 500 to 600 years old. In most cases they have used the bottom portion of the toddy palm (Caryota urens) for this. Though many of them have deteriorated and are de-shaped today, they are not completely destroyed.”

Adds Dr Joseph: “A surprising thing that I have noticed is that while the colour of water in the recently constructed concrete ring Kenis is slightly different, in older Kenis you see very clear and pure water. None seems to have studied the reason for this difference.”

The toddy palm stem would usually be cut a year before construction of a Keni. It would then be kept immersed in water for a long time. As a result, except the very hard portion, the inner core portion disintegrated and got washed away. Apart from toddy palm, Anjili (Artocarpus hirsuta), Amla (Phyllanthus emblica) and another tree called ‘Kori Maram’ in Malayalam were also used. If it was the Amla tree, the bottom portion would be excavated in square shape before being introduced into the Keni. Nowadays, getting a huge toddy palm stem of the required size is itself very difficult. As such, the development of Kenis using wood from these  has ceased over the recent decades.

Kenis retain the same level of water both during monsoon and summer. Generally as many as 15 to 20 families take water from one Keni. Once a kodam full of water is lifted from the well, it gets refilled in just a minute or two.  •  Unique water tunnel of Sheni  •  A two-in-one well

A decade ago, a government scheme calledGiridhara was introduced to provide drinking water to adivasis. At that time, team leader George Mathew had located sixteen Kenis in Panamaram panchayat. “None of these are new. These must have been dug at least half a century ago,”  he pointed out.

In some of the areas wherever Kenis were situated earlier, the panchayat had deepened the dilapidated water bodies and inserted concrete rings to renovate the same. Lukose Jacob, Director, Hilda Trust, a Wayanad NGO points out that such interventions, done in the hope of development, have unfortunately led to problems in quite a few cases. Deepening has dried up a few Kenis altogether. While clean water was available from some Kenis earlier, renovation work has resulted in stained water. “Kenis collect water from the shallow soil layer. If you go deeper than five feet in these paddy fields, the water table remains deeper down. The Panchayat, without realizing this grassroot reality has deepened Kenis to 15 – 20 feet. As such, poor adivasis now neither have the old nor the new water source. These Kenis have dried up,” says Jacob.

That was the situation a decade ago. Now, as paddy fields in Wayanad are increasingly being abandoned and large scale deforestation is on, the water table is receding deeper and deeper. This year, unprecedented drought has been reported from many parts. The number of Kenis has now dwindled to only a few.

There are two Kenis still remaining about a kilometre away from the Shiva temple of Trikkaipettah. Both have good water. Local resident, 55-year old Krishnan Kutty recalls that about 30 years ago, people from areas within one and half kilometer radius-around fifty families-were drawing water from here. Now, except the adivasis, all others have independent wells. Despite that, they take drinking water from Keni because the well water is not that good. Hailing these he says, “These haven’t dried up in any of the past droughts. Even during the unprecedented drought of 1983, this Keni gave water. It is like an ‘akshayapatra’. You go on taking water; it goes on refilling after a while.”

What is apparent from all of this is that earlier generation of adivasis had good water divining knowledge. The site selection was perfect. This is evident from the fact that if the location is shifted or the wells are deepened, it doesn’t catch water. It is perhaps a pity that not only have we been unable to acquire such knowledge, but have also failed to hold on to the resources that traditional wisdom yielded.