As part of my Economic Development course I had the opportunity to take an overnight field visit Baramati, an agricultural center about two hours away from my home in Pune. For the duration of two days we learned about innovative efforts being undertaken in rural Maharashtra in order to increase agricultural productivity and technology.

Agricultural Demonstrations

One of the most exciting aspects of the Baramati Agricultural Trust was its demonstration farm. The demonstration farm was set up to display the most advanced technology and agricultural practices for dairy farming, fruit production, and goat rearing. The photo of the cow cells shown below is an example of Baramati’s live demonstration strategy.

A living model of the Israeli Model of cattle raising (pictured above) is practiced on the farm so that local farmers can experience first-hand the farming practices that lead to greater agricultural productivity. Profit yielded from the livestock and plants at Baramati is used to continue operations at the farm, making it a sustainable model with over 40 years of operation. Farmers come to the Baramati farm for a three day training that exposes them to methods of technology applicable to their produce and works with them on plans for implementing these technologies in their own farming operations. Farmers are given low-cost alternatives to traditional inputs (for example, using bamboo poles rather than steel poles for fencing) to make implementation of new technologies more feasible. After completing the three day training, farmers are given a certificate of completion that can be presented to Baramati Trust’s partner bank in order to access credit for purchasing new technology or agricultural inputs. This is a critical component of Baramati’s model because it makes credit accessible to previously necessary to previously ineligible farmers. Without this access to credit, many farmers would be prevented from implementing the methods they learned during training.

Plant Modification

Baramati partners with a local Agricultural College to develop modified plants that are both high yielding and resistant to Maharashtra’s weather patterns. Through a process of plant grafting in which two plants are combined to make a more resistant plant, Baramati is producing high yielding and high resistance plants that can be purchased by farmers at low or subsidized costs. The photo series below shows a few of the modified plants: mangoes and guavas.

By combining one plant with steady roots to another that is resistant to Maharashtran weather, the resulting plants are more likely to produce higher yields for farmers. The grafted plants are formed by making an incision in both plants and joining the two together. They are wrapped tightly around the point at which they are connected and after they mature will possess the qualities of both initial plants.

Soil Testing and Crop Advisories

Baramati Agricultural Trust also provides low-cost soil analysis to farmers. Farmers can bring samples of their soil to the soil testing lab and scientists working at Baramati will perform an analysis of the soil and, depending on the results of the test, make a recommendation for which crops should be grown on particular plots within the farmer’s land. Technology such as this is not widely available in India, so this opportunity gives farmers the ability to forecast which plants will be successful and which are likely to fail given the composition of their land. Within days, farmers can learn to take an efficient soil sample, Baramati will arrange to collect the soil and deliver the results to the farmers so that transportation costs do not prevent farmers from using the service, and a recommendation for crop and pesticides will be made. This resources is extremely important for farmers who are working with limited land resources and need to reap high yields from small spaces. Photos of the soil testing lab are below.

Access to Information

While the training and resources available to farmers on site at Baramati are incredibly important, another part of Baramati Trust’s mission is ensuring that local farmers have access to information on a day to day basis that can help them gauge the market, the weather, and their crops without needing to leave their farms. Baramati Trust’s radio station provides constant weather updates, features on new farming practices and success stories that help farmers make changes to their own operations, and information regarding market prices for crops that can help farmers decide which crops to focus on during particular seasons or months. We had the opportunity to visit the jockey booth, pictured below, from where information is distributed daily to farmers throughout Baramati. Information is also transmitted via SMS (text messages) in the local language, Marathi, so farmers have a diversity of ways in which to receive updates for their farms. Access to information is enabling farmers to make more informed and efficient decisions regarding their farming and practices.

Living in India can sometimes make me tired- exhausted, even. And as I admit this, I feel foolish. I feel selfish and spoiled and self-centered and, most of all, uncomfortably aware of my own privilege. These feelings need explanation: The reasons for which I am tired are products of a standard of luxury living in India. I am tired from many things: intense days of classes; long rides in rickshaws that weave recklessly through ceaseless traffic; a shortage of change everywhere I go; language barriers that make simple conversations frustrating; children who run up to me begging for money, tapping my legs and arms and sometimes grabbing at my chest; street hawkers who press their items in my face; a bed that is so hard it makes it hard to fall asleep at night. Sometimes, I need not do more than travel to and from class without being ripped off by a rickshaw driver, cross a chaotic road without almost colliding with a two-wheeler, and say a few words in Hindi and I can easily end the day feeling as though I’ve conquered some sort of daring study abroad experience with skill. I could write blog posts about how beautiful the saris are and how funny it is to take a bucket shower and how annoying it is to wash clothes by hand. I could post pictures of street food and Kurtis and bangles and maybe some would think I had been immersed in all that is India…Hardly.

It is easy to be blind to poverty, to hunger, to tragedy, and to sickness when you are so carefully sheltered from their brutalities. Even on a study abroad program that is focused on development, I find that I need to really look to see the lives of those who are working day and night to survive in a city where I am simply “studying poverty”.  I need to look past the tables of alluring Kurtis and saris and bangles and see the tougher stuff, the real stuff: The man looking for food and recyclables in an overflowing dumpster; the boy wrapping his leg in a scarf to make himself look crippled in order to make more money begging; the child dragging a rock down a sidewalk by a worn red string- his makeshift toy. How do I reconcile an experience in which my dollar can buy so much for myself while benefiting so few? How do I indulge in the purchase of new clothes and knick-knacks and food when thousands of people next to me could never dream of these luxuries? Finding answers to these questions is sometimes harder than I would like given the prevalence of the “Bribing as a Business Model” schemes that lead children to be forced to beg on streets from sunrise to sunset only to turn over their meager earnings to their owner. If the money you put into the hands of children isn’t even used for their benefit, in what ways can you constructively help them? These are questions for which I do not yet have answers.

I should not complain about exhausting days of intense classes and teachers with high expectations. While according to the Indian government 96% of children are enrolled in primary school, teachers employed by government schools to sculpt the minds of India’s future leaders are often absent. Unless they know beforehand that they are going to be observed, their students can wait. Children may be in school but this does not guarantee that they can afford books or transportation or sanitary pads when they are menstruating. This does not mean that the food they eat in school will be nutritious or tasty or even safe, as India learned recently when several children died from toxins found in their school-administered free lunch. Does the figure of 96% account for India’s “invisible” children living in rural villages and urban slums? Those who are unrecorded in India’s census data? What if for these children it is more important for to be at home taking care of younger brothers and sisters so their parents can work? What if investing in education- in the future- is impossible, let alone securing work or food or shelter or healthcare? How can these children begin to contemplate a life so luxurious they complain of access to challenging classes? Again, questions to which I do not have answers. Many students yearn for days of intense classes with attentive teachers that I gripe are too tiring, too demanding, and too stressful. India is teaching me to not only value but to cherish my education.

The ride from my homestay to Fergusson College’s campus where I take classes costs me approximately 55 rupees. In a day, I spend about 110 rupees (almost $2) to travel a distance of approximately 12 kilometers. While I complain that rickshaw drivers too often try to rip me off, pollution in the city makes my head spin, and traffic slows to a crawl for hours, my access to transportation is a luxury. India has defined its poverty level at an income of 40 rupees a day (about $0.75). I spend more than that each and every morning on a “tiring”, “loud”, and “dusty” ride that many of India’s poorest citizens cannot afford. Poverty in India is brutal, it is widespread, and it stands out in stark comparison to the luxuries of the very wealthy who are also found. Poverty and wealth coexist in India as is evidenced by skyscrapers and building complexes that cast their shadows onto shanties of bamboo sticks, tattered sheets of plastic, and strings that piece together the homes of the laborers who make construction of such large buildings cheap.

In India, it is typical for children to grow up speaking three languages. While Marathi and Hindi medium schools (those who teach subjects using Marathi or Hindi as the language of instruction) are quickly being abandoned in favor of English medium schools for their perceived economic profits, students in the state of Maharashtra are still expected to learn all three languages. While teaching English in a non-native English speaking country is a contentious decision in and of itself, the multi-linguicism of India’s youth astounds me. I come from one of the most developed countries in the world where our educational infrastructure, access, and quality is beyond that of most of the world. How is it, with this being true, that we only learn English until we get to high school and are required to fulfill two years of (often half-hearted) foreign language study? While it may be frustrating communicating with Rickshaw walas and storekeepers whose English is a little rusty, who am I to complain? After all, I am the one who has come into the homes and lives of others without learning their language first. I have grown up in a country where it is assumed that the language I speak is good enough. Where we believe it is sufficient. It is the language of business, of globalization, of commerce. English is enough. For me, it is not. In a school system where we have the resources to learn more, we should!

As is obvious from my extended “rant” on my thoughts about India, studying abroad here has invited me to think about my own privileges in a completely new light. I am also infinitely more thankful for the home, the school, and the town I grew up in! Maybe it takes leaving home to know home. And even more than knowing home…to appreciate home 🙂

First of all…let me apologize for being so bad about posting updates! Internet is one of many conveniences I took for granted before studying abroad. No worries though. I am at an internet cafe and plan to get you caught up on my exciting experiences in India!

Let me introduce you to Lord Ganesha (also known as Ganapati, Varad, and Ganesh). Ganapati (as he is most often called in the state of Maharashtra, where I am living) is the Hindu God of Success, Knowledge and Wisdom and is celebrated for a duration of 10 days in many homes and temples throughout India. He bears the body of a round-bellied human and the head of an elephant, a physique he gained from the following story:

A boy was charged with the task of guarding the goddess Parvati as she bathed. When her husband, Shiva, returned home he was angry to find the boy blocking his way and, enraged, cut off the boy’s head. When Parvati learned what Shiva had done, she was distraught. In an attempt to atone for his actions, Shiva sent his troops to cut off the head of the first being they saw. A sleeping elephant was first encountered by the troops and his head was brought back to Shiva and attached to the body of the boy. Shiva brought the boy back to life and made him the leader of his troops, bestowed with the name “Ganapati”.

Ganapati Festival is an extremely exciting, intense, and jubilant time. In the days approaching the first day of the Ganapati Festival, huge mandals (covered stages or platforms) were assembled and decorated lavishly to prepare for the installation of their Ganapati idols. Throughout Pune, there is a competition for the most beautifully decorated mandal and Pune-ites don’t take this competition lightly, erecting 30-foot tall mandals bejeweled with thousands of twinkling lights, bouquets of hundreds of fresh flowers, and booming with music projected from speakers taller than me.

In the days preceding Ganapati Festival, you can find hundreds of storefronts like the one pictured below featuring rows and rows of Ganapatis. Ranging from less than a foot tall to six feet tall (or thirty feet tall in bigger cities like Bombay!), Ganapati idols are selected by families far in advance of the festival and are placed on display before they are collected by eager families on the first day of the festival. According to tradition, once you have kept a Ganapati idol in your house one year, you must keep one in the following years of at least the same size for all coming years.

The day before Ganapati Festival began, I went with my host aunt, Ma Pai, to deliver vases to her daughter-in-law for use in her Ganapati preparations. As we got to the heart of Pune, our car crawled slowly to a stop in thick traffic as thousands of families made their way through the city and between motionless cars to pick up their Ganapati idols and welcome him into their homes. From the distance we could hear the sounds of drumming troupes practicing their routines for the final day of Ganapati, when they would play throughout the entire night to celebrate the end of the festival and thank Ganapati for the time spent in their homes. Later that evening on my way home, my host sister and brother took us to one of the drum troupes’ practices and we were given the opportunity to practice holding one of the drums. They were surprisingly heavy! Those who bear the weight throughout the entire night think not of the weight of the drum, but of the satisfaction that comes with honoring and celebrating Lord Ganapati.

On the first day of Ganapati, I attended a pooja (prayer or worship ceremony) at my host mom Aai’s sister’s house. My host great-aunt (Ambu Mowshi) is all of 4’8” in stature but possesses extreme endurance, grace, and coordination when it comes to organizing poojas. Her two-bedroom flat was full of family members, food, sweets, incense, offerings, and aartis (songs, similar to hymns) from 5am to 10pm as she brought together her entire extended family to worship Ganapati. I was lucky enough to participate in the poojas at her household and even got to play one of the percussion instruments during the aartis (a task many children fight over because noisemakers are so fun, duh!). At each pooja, family members gather around Ganapati to sing aartis, clap their hands, sound their percussion instruments, and offer words of praise and worship. One male family member leads the pooja and wears a traditional thread of the Brahmans (the highest of the castes in Hinduism) as he rotates a plate of fire and incense in front of Ganapati throughout the aartis. At the end of the aartis, the plate of fire is presented to each person, and we cupped our hands around the flame then slid our hands from our foreheads, over our hair, and down to our shoulders. Then we each took a handful of flowers to the Ganapati idol, place them on his body, and whispered “Namaste” as we bowed respectfully. Poojas were then ended (as all good things end in India) with a plate full of food, handfuls of modak (sweet dumplings), and time with family.

Ganapati can stay in a house for a duration of one and a half days, five days, or the full ten days, but my family decided to only keep Ganapati for one and a half days. When it was time for him to leave, his departure was celebrated by another pooja and then immersion- the final stage of the Ganapati Festival. Our family crammed into cars during the middle of a monsoon-like downpour and drove to a designated immersion tank. (In the past, Ganapatis had been immersed in natural water sources but due to the environmental degradation this causes, tanks are now set up throughout the city to be used for immersion). While a multi-colored umbrella was held carefully over Ganapati to protect him from the rain, a coconut was broken in half and its contents poured over his head. A final aarti was sung and “Ganapati bapaa, moryaaa!” chanted heartily several times before he was carefully immersed in the water of the tank. The immersion of Ganapati, according to my host sister, represents a returning to nature until he comes again. Ganapati bapa, morya!