From editorial of Down to Earth Magazine.
By Sunita Narain
Some innovations change lives. A favourite of mine is the village milk
collection system, a cooperative model. There's a dairy in the village,
people bring in milk, the dairy in-charge places a sample on an
instrument, checks the fat content, prints a receipt that tells the
seller the fat content and the price. Once a week, the milk-seller
encashes receipts. As most villages do not have electricity, instruments
and computers work on diesel generators. Every day the co-operative's
van arrives to take the milk for sale in the nearby town.
In villages I visited last week, in arid Rajasthan, I saw this system at
work. In the evening young girls, women and men streamed into the dairy.
Their milk was checked, they collected their receipt. I asked them if
they could read the numbers, written in English. They did not know the
language, but could read their receipts. Just consider the economics:
one buffalo gives roughly 5 litres of milk each day; people earn,
depending on the fat content, Rs 15 to Rs 25 per litre. Even the
poorest-one-buffalo owners-earn. The money reaches them directly, in
their village.
Consider also that this village, Laporiya, has seen a back-breaking
drought for the past nine years. Meteorological data shows the last good
monsoon was in 1997; it rained 700 mm. Since then rainfall has varied
from 300-400 mm, it comes in a few cloudbursts. It is in this situation
animals become the mainstay of the economy. Animal care is much less
risk-averse than agriculture. The dairy is the vital link in
adversity-it links people to the market. It helps them cope with scarcity.
Market and retail proponents must understand this system is simple but
not simplistic. It provides for the poorest and most marginalised, by
investing in improving the productivity of common grazing lands. A
critical move, for livestock need fodder, usually desperately short
during -peak droughts. Lesser the fodder, lesser the milk. This is
investment in hard-core infrastructure, critical for markets to function.
But today, across India, fodder is desperately short. Where there is
land but no water for irrigation, farmers cannot cultivate crops, and so
cannot use the bonus of residues for animals. The common lands-village
grazing lands and forest lands-are over-exploited and under-productive.
In most regions, villagers have told me they spend Rs 12,000 to Rs
20,000 per year of their meagre earnings, on an average, to buy fodder.
But this economy is underground. There is no fodder policy in India, no
intervention to protect the grazing lands or improve the productivity of
forestland for food for our livestock. This is the 'other' food crisis.
It must be understood that livestock is not wasted or inefficient. It
plays a critical role in the village agricultural and livelihood
economy-from manure to enhancing soil productivity and nutrition. But
its food is nobody's priority. The pastures-reserved for animal
grazing-have shrunk over the years; forestlands are the only remaining
commons. Foresters say animals are biotic pressures; they suppress
regeneration of forests. They want domestic livestock out of these
lands. Their concerns may be valid. But it is equally important to note
that domestic animals will need forests, as much as wildlife. We need an
explicit policy for this food crisis. We need to find answers.
For instance, the dairy in Laporiya works even in severe drought because
it is connected to the common grazing land. In this village and its
vicinity, the NGO Gram Vikas Navyuvak Mandal has spent huge energies to
vacate encroachments from common grazing lands. These lands are
administratively under the gram panchayat, but over the years most have
been taken over-not by the poor but by the powerful. It is a tense
battle within the village to reclaim the commons. Laws to protect such
lands are weak, the administration helpless. But without the supportive
common pasture, there can be little private gain, particularly for the
poor.
Reclaiming the commons is the first step towards regenerating these
lands. In these villages a fascinating technique has been evolved,
called the 'chauka' system, to trap the little rainfall they get and
improve the grasslands. The villagers dig rectangular trenches-less than
1 feet deep-to temporarily hold rainwater before it flows into the next
trench and then the next and so into the tank. With this system in
place, the village common land has become a grand water collection area.
The aim is to make the entire village a rain collection system, to
recharge the aquifer, withstand drought. In neighbouring Sihalsagar
village, every bit of land has been re-crafted for water-villagers have
dug three big nadis (ponds), 25 small ponds and made chauka in their
grazing land. Every field has a bund; every drop of rain is trapped and
harvested. As a result, the village has water even as its neighbours do
not. Since work began on water conservation, the village has never seen
bountiful rain. But it still has some water.
In other words, even meagre rain, if harvested, can provide sustenance.
The issue then is to increase the productivity of each raindrop. If that
scarce water is used for crops, it will benefit some and not all. It
will also deplete the groundwater table, for farmers will dig deeper to
get water for their fields. The economy will not be sustainable. On the
other hand, if that water is used to turn it into milk, it will add
value to that scarce resource. If that milk is processed locally, so
that more value is added, it will make the economy prosper. The market
will work, but only if this politics of scarcity is understood.
In the dingy dairy of Laporiya I learnt: last year, after nine years of
persistent drought, when it rained less than 300 mm, the village of 300
households sold milk worth Rs 17.5 lakh. It was a valuable lesson. I
will not forget it easily.
