Environment, no longer a sideshow

National Council of Educational Research and Training ( NCERT), the apex curriculum setter in India, in its latest guideline, has allocated scores to environment education in the school-leaving examinations. As per its guidelines, assessments now will no longer be based on the conventional 'study-text-books : write-examination' mode but on how active the examinee has been 'on the ground.'

Sumita Dasgupta, programme director, environment education unit, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) and editor, Climate Change & Natural Resources: A Book of Activities for Environmental Education, recently published by CSE, explains, "The book is in response to this new and exciting development.

Full report here Times of India 

Right pricing of water

With the growing scarcity of water, we need to invest in institutions for water allocation rather then work at interventions for augmenting its supplies, says M. Dinesh Kumar in Managing Water in River Basins: Hydrology, economics, and institutions (www.oup.com). Citing studies, he adds that in situations such as what India faces, the opportunity cost of not investing in institutional reforms would be much higher than the transaction cost involved.

A section on ‘pricing of water’ opens by stating the general principle that the price of water for competitive use sectors such as irrigation and water-intensive industries means that pricing of water should be fixed in such a way as to discourage economically inefficient uses.

Wasteful practices
The author traces how, after Independence, the Indian governments saw irrigation as welfare means and therefore were reluctant to raise irrigation fee charged to poor farmers. “Also, the charges are paid on acreage basis and are not reflective of the volume of water used. It is believed that the lack of linkages between volumetric water use and water charges, and lack of agency capability to recover water charges and penalise free riders create incentive for overuse or wasteful practices.”

Full report here Hindu

Masanobu Fukuoka: The man who did nothing

More than 30 years after it was published, farmer sage Masanobu Fukuoka’s cult book One-Straw Revolution, continues to inspire. On the occasion of his second death anniversary, DNA talks toIndian farmers whose lives were transformed by Fukuoka’s radical vision of farming, nature, and life.

Do-nothing’ or minimal interference is a radical idea. Especially for a civilisation obsessed with jumping from one complexity to another while simultaneously idealising simplicity. In 1983, a group of 20 farmers in Rasulia, a small village near Hoshangabad in Madhya Pradesh, was trying to find an alternative to chemical-intensive agriculture. Since 1978, they had been battling the legacy of the Green Revolution — hybrid seeds, pesticides, fertilisers — to redeem the promise of rishi kheti (farming as practiced by ancient sages), a practice that involves letting nature take its course. They had been successful. But there was more to be done, or rather undone. What that was, they weren’t sure. But they were open to learning.

It was no coincidence, then, that they attracted the internationally recognised Japanese spiritualist and Buddhist farmer Masanobu Fukuoka into their lives. One of the Rasulia farmers, Pratap C Aggarwal, came across a review of Fukuoka’s The One-Straw Revolution. Here he heard of the ‘no-till’ technique, a farming philosophy pioneered by Fukuoka. Aggarwal couldn’t wait to read the book, which was not published in India back then. So he wrote a friend in London asking her to send him a copy.

Full report here DNA

Barefoot - Naren’s last testament

Naren’s book is an insider's plea to save farming from the many ills that afflict it today, mainly as a result of the industrial-chemical agricultural practices…

A little over a year ago, we lost one of the finest men I have known. As his wife Uma aptly noted, ‘Naren passed away peacefully after (not) fighting brain cancer on July 5, 2009'. I wrote then in these columns about the many ways in which my friend Naren had taught me many lessons about life and goodness. I continue to learn from him.

Naren left behind an almost completed manuscript, “Dilemmas in Agriculture: A Personal Story”. We persuaded Uma to update the volume, and add a few personal notes. The little book is ready and published by Vasudheva Kutumbukum ( kutumbukum@gmail.com). It is rich with wisdom and gentle insights about the predicaments of rural life in India today, but what makes it significant is that it is based on their own journey. The narrative begins in 1987, when Naren decided to leave his well-paid job in a Bank to return to his ancestral village Venkatramapuram in Chittoor, Andhra Pradesh, for a ‘life of organic farming and social work'. With heavy hearts, they sent their older daughter Samyuktha to a school, Kalakshetra in Chennai, whereas the younger Lakshmi was raised for many years in a village school. Looking back, Uma writes: ‘I have no doubt that villages are the best places for children to grow up'.

Full report here Hindu

Times book brings climate issues closer to people

The Times of India has always strived to keep issues on environment in focus, engaging its readers with burning topics and raging debates. In an initiative to bring science and issues surrounding climate change closer to the people, the group launched a compilation of essays on climate change on Thursday, August 12.

Climate Change, Society and Sustainable Development: Agenda for Action was launched by agriculturalist M S Swaminathan at a ceremony hosted jointly by Times Foundation, supported by Times Group Books, and FICCI. The book encompasses 20 essays contributed by 20 authors and 10 co-authors. The essays have been listed under five main heads of `Impact and assessment issues', `Science, society and environmental education', `Financing market mechanism and food security issues', `Volunteering and CSR for a smart planet' and `Mitigation and adaptation strategies'.

"The book is highly comprehensive and deals with pertinent issues such as CSR and mitigation. Climate change largely affects poor nations and the poor in all nations. We also have to study and understand the societal impact of climate change and how it affects lives and livelihoods. Anticipatory mitigation measures are extremely important to take,'' said Swaminathan.

Full report here Times of India 

Teaching toxicity

Sage India brings out an illustrated guide to hazardous substances in our daily life.

Aniruddha Sen Gupta sets off the conversation with a truism. “The nature has a mechanism in place to handle waste produced by every species in the world except one, which is human beings.” With the death of a scrap dealer in Delhi's Mayapuri area due to exposure to toxic waste still in news, one can only agree with him.

Expanding the thought, Aniruddha has just come up with Our Toxic World, an illustrated guide to hazardous substances that we come across in our daily lives. In simple language, he highlights how toxic waste, that we humans produce, knowingly or unknowingly, is increasingly affecting the quality of our life.

Points out the Goa-based author of children's' books, “I have been working on the guide since 2007, the Mayapuri death is coincidental.” His book is meant for people on the street, who might have heard about or read about things that harm the quality of their lives due to bad waste management but are not aware of its full impact,” he underlines. Through the pages of the book, a Sage India publication, he is stressing the fact that one stitch at the right time can indeed save nine.

Full report here Hindu

Trapped in a quake, they share stories

Award-winning author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's latest novel about people trapped during an earthquake gets new meaning in a year that has seen devastating quakes hit Haiti, Chile and China.

In One Amazing Thing, a group of nine people are trapped in the visa office at an Indian consulate in an unidentified American city. As they wait to be rescued, they tell each other stories -- sharing one amazing thing from their lives. Divakaruni, who teaches creative writing at the University of Houston in the United States, won the American Book Award in 1995 for her short story collection, Arranged Marriage. Her novel, Mistress of the Spices, was short-listed for the Orange Prize for women's fiction and also made into a film.

The author usually focuses on the experiences of South Asian immigrants, but this time, Divakaruni's characters are from different cultural backgrounds and have their own reasons for wanting to go to India.

One Amazing Thing, published in India in April, also explores their will to live and how they respond to a natural disaster. In an email interview from Houston, Divakaruni told Reuters about the genesis of the novel, her love of complicated narratives and her next project.

Where did the idea for One Amazing Thing come from?
“It was when I was volunteering with (hurricane) Katrina refugees who had come into Houston in 2005 that I first started thinking about the whole phenomenon of grace under pressure, which became a major theme in 'One Amazing Thing'. Some of the people I worked with were so angry. Some of them were devastated. But others were able to maintain calm, or even joke about things. I kept asking myself, Why? Why some and not the others? “A few weeks later I was experiencing a similar situation first-hand -- hurricane Rita was coming through Houston and we were asked to evacuate. As we sat on the freeway late into the night, paralysed by traffic and wondering what would happen to us, I saw people around me responding in many different ways.

The pressure brought out the worst in some and the best in others. Some were toting guns, snarling at people; others were sharing their meagre supplies of water and snacks. That's when I knew I'd have to write a novel about this phenomenon.”

Would you describe it as a novel about karma, about multiculturalism or the human will?
“I think it is all of the above. Or at least it questions the notions of karma and what they mean and how much we as humans can control our lives through our wills. Since in this book right at the beginning the characters are trapped by an earthquake in a visa office situated in the basement of a high-rise building, destiny or karma is obviously a force. “But how they choose to respond to this disaster -- that's where human will comes in. The novel is intentionally multicultural in its character make-up.

Full report here Daily Mirror

REVIEW: The Green Pen

REVIEW:
The Green Pen, Environmental journalism in India and South Asia.
Keya Acharya and Frederick Noronha
Sage
Rs 395
Pp 312
ISBN:  9788132103011
Hardback

Review
‘Green’ in black and white Hindu
Many people believe that water is a very ‘dry’ subject, frets Shree Padre in ‘Water journalism warrants better attention,’ an essay included in ‘The Green Pen’ (www.sagepublications.com). To Padre, the subject of water is so wide, important and deep that to do justice to that we need a battalion of water journalists. He anguishes about the dearth of right kind of information in the form of books, videos and so on that can teach the layman how water can be conserved in the local situation or how rain can be caught.

“Take the example of open wells that are there in many parts of the country. For nearly 4,500 years, these have been serving people. But in the last 50 years, this structure is being neglected, abandoned and refilled with soil.” If only a booklet can explain the possible methods to increase the water availability in a well or to revive a ‘dead well’ or at least to reuse a dried well as a percolation pit for the surrounding community, it can encourage the local communities to shoulder the easy, low-cost revival process, the author argues.