Sports Day

This was the start to out 65^th Independence day of India. Ananda Vidyalayam school assembly prayer being said. Followed by the flag hoisting and some recitals performed by the school children. This was followed by the annual sports day

Flag hoisting by chief guest Ms. Maitreyi Kanjilal while everyone salutes the flag.

Ring-a-ring a roses

Songs performed by std 4 taught by Henry (left) our school English teacher. He has joined us this academic year and the children have been introduced to singing classes this year due to Henry’s musical talents.

Ananda Vidyalayam has 70 students this academic year. These 70 students are from the lower kinder garden till standard 5. This year they were divided into tiny tots, sub-junior and junior categories. This is the juniors performing at long jump.

Rolling pins. This game done by the tiny tot category which are the lower kinder garden and upper kinder garden grades, is performed by rolling a football and knocking as many pins down. Other games for the LGK AND UKG were a biscuit eating competition, lime and spoon race, frog jump, musical chairs, in & out, sack race.

This was the running races that were conducted for the sub juniors and juniors. In this picture you see Murthy from the junior section coming first with Anji and sri latha in third place. Other games were lime & spoon, frog jump, frisbee throw, long jump skipping race, sack race.

Prize distribution was followed after a cultural program of plays written by Henry performed for the whole school, staff of SEDS and parents who attended.

Finally, at the end of the program we had a surprise box event for the children. Euro SEDS from Germany sponsored this event. The children were each given a packet of Boost, a chocolate milk drink and a toy. The toys were cars, Rubik cubes, for the boys and kitchen sets, toy cell phones and Rubik cubes for the girls. There were also a few other gifts that were donated by individual people from Bangalore.

As the children were on their way home after the day of sports, they spent some time opening presents and snacking on a packet of puffed rice. Ananda Vidyalayam would like to say thank you to Euro SEDS the sponsors of the surprise box !

Coming to SEDS

Coming to India was something of a whirlwind, touch and go affair for me. I resolved to travel to Andrha Pradesh to work at the Social Education and Development Society (SEDS) with my close school friends Nikki Ghorpade (whose family lives in Bangalore) and Douglas Jakobi during an equally impromptu visit to Miami – where Nikki attends university – back in March. What I didn’t count on was the rigidity of the Indian Embassy in Washington D.C., who basically refused to issue a visa to a UK citizen studying in the United States.

What followed was a flurry of rejected visa requests and applications, frenzied calls to companies designed to ease the process and the eventual realization that I would have to simply apply when I got home to London and then join my friends in India a little over a week later.

While I was twiddling my thumbs, watching rubbish films like Pirates 4 and venturing up to Twickenham Stadium to watch two rugby games in the space of seven days, my friends were sweating it out in the Indian heat .

My passport finally came back with the visa intact and within a few days I was on the Heathrow to Bangalore flight. A conversation with a Bangalorian sitting next to me on the plane confirmed many of my suspicions about India as a first time visitor: yes, Bangalore is very busy; yes, you should watch out for taxis and storekeepers trying to scam you; yes, the trains and buses couldn’t get any more crowded. But Andrah Pradesh? No tourists out there, hardly any crime, very traditional experience.

Certainly, walking out of the uber modern Bangalore airport at four in the morning and being confronted immediately by a Baskin-Robbins and a Subway was not quite what I was expecting from a country which I knew mainly from old Sharpe novels and certain parts of East London.

But as my taxi driver drove us out of Bangalore, the novelties of city life fell away around me. English signs advertising Sheraton hotels or jewelry stores were replaced by signs written in Hindi directing patrons to small shacks selling crisps, water and coconuts; bridges and tunnels disappeared and all that left was the road. For a few hours of my life, at least, I felt like Dean Moriarty, hurtling down that flat road into somewhere that I didn’t know, something that I had never experienced before.

As we dodged errant wild dogs which threw themselves in front of the wheels of the car and swerved to avoid cows or sheep which were simply sleeping in the middle of road, I was struck by just how totally different it was from where I had been just one day earlier. Skinny women sat on the ground, breaking nuts with a stone or a brick, with their children running around in the dirt, smiling and laughing and breaking out the biggest smiles in the entire world.

We arrived at SEDS at 7:30 AM, drove in through the golden-yellow gates and continued down the dusty driveway lined on both sides by tremendous coconut trees. SEDS’ motto is “Toward a Greener Tomorrow” – and on that front, they are certainly making progress. The driveway is paved with bright green royal oak trees which wouldn’t look out of place in Malibu, and the rest of the campus is chock full of coconut trees, bushes and plants.

Within a few hours I had awoken Douglas and Nikki and we were hurtling down the road in a resilient old Land Rover belonging to Rajen Joshua, one half of the married couple who created SEDS back in 1980. Rajen is a very large man with a big bushy mustache who carries a lot of respect around this rural area; I had previously heard that he had successfully repelled an attempt by the Indian mob to run him off the property.

As we drove down the road, Rajen exchanged harsh words with the driver of a small white car because he cut him off near the train track and literally ran into a cow that didn’t move out of his way fast enough. Twenty minutes later, we were bouncing along rocky trails which led into the Barren Hills where SEDS has set up watersheds to trap the few spats of water which fall over the monsoon season in manmade lakes in order to raise the water index and help nearby trees to grow. Rajen was very proud of the work that he and his organization has accomplished over the last thirty years and treated us three foreigners to an Indian picnic of fried chillis and mangoes in a shady grove in quite possibly the most isolated spot that I have ever been in.

We returned to SEDS and I collapsed on my bed, exhausted. Since then the experience has been a strange but culturally rewarding one. I hope to write a few more of these blog entries over the course of my three weeks here and try to show both my growing appreciation for the nobility and character of the Indian people as well as the work being accomplished by SEDS in this area.

Low Carbon Farming II

Peasant farming by smallholders is the most sustainable and non-polluting way of life. Unfortunately the manner in which peasants traditionally tilled their fields does not work any longer. Cultivating small holdings is now an annual gamble. In order to help these people SEDS started with a sustainable agriculture (SA) programme (http://sedsngo.blogspot.com/2010/04/sustainable-agriculture-lead-farmers.html).

But glorifying the peasant lifestyle with clichés alone will not work. Small and marginal farmers will not agree to stay impoverished forever. They are lured by quick and easy returns. Mainstream cultivation, with high external inputs offers them a green dream but it ends in a nightmare. Over usage of chemical fertilizers and pesticides turns the soil into a lifeless medium. Annually farmers are forced to increase the inputs if they want to keep up the soil fertility leading to pauperisation and acute farmer distress. Mechanisms of the carbon market present a solid solution to this impending crisis by leveraging resources.

We started with a project called Low Carbon Farming (LCF) (http://sedsngo.blogspot.com/2010/01/low-carbon-farming.html). Simply stated, sustainable agriculture + carbon credits = LCF. By adopting SA practices farmers reduce the output of their green house gasses. These reductions can be quantified and sold on the carbon market.

LCF involves a basket of practices that reduce/minimize/remove use of synthetic fertilizers (methane avoidance and N2O reduction) while, at the same time, improving soil carbon. This is done through reduced tillage, precision fertilization, anaerobic composting, organic fertilizers, mulching, intercropping, multi-cropping, irrigation efficiency and a horde of techniques specially designed for particular regions and communities.

In collaboration with FCN we provide them the methodology to achieve this. Complex science is broken down into simple linked tasks. Staff visits the farmers and records demographic and land data.

For this we even go to the fields and record the plots with GPS so we get correct positions and figures of their landholdings. Walking around the circumference of the plot we register each corner point and create a two dimensional picture of the field.

These readings get double checked by going to the village and overlaying the figures over Google Earth

This is necessary to calculate the emission reductions the farmers will get by applying SA practices. The emission reductions of the practices are scientifically measured by a science team. Samples of soil, farm yard manure together with the knowledge of the emissions of chemical fertilizers will give us a precise picture of the reduced green house gases. In the end we will execute carbon contracts which each farmer individually.

Carbon revenues will be the incentive, and show the way for small and marginal farmers to reverse and restore the damage done to their lives, livelihoods and the environment and also receive an income for these practices from carbon buyers.

SEDS & Beyond

Dear All

Blood, sweat and and a lot of laughter have gone into the making of this movie.

Please enjoy SEDS & Beyond with the link below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIRxRmUmEIY