Wild and Wonderful Jharkhand, Part 2

After a few weeks of nagging my hosts to help me visit a very "sensitive" bauxite mining area called Lahodaga I'd been hearing about, I was sort of haphazardly put in contact with some people at a missionary school near Dumri. This school was chartered by a local Adivasi priest to educate a couple of local tribes, one of which had never had its language put into written form. I'll say a quick word about the nature of Christian/missionary work, schools, etc in this part of India...To my understanding, German, British, and Belgian missionaries came to the interior tribal areas starting in the mid 1800s and over the next several decades set up quite a few schools and ended up intervening on tribal peoples' behalf when the British government was trying to impose laws that would have stripped them of their ancestral land. This was probably the most Christian area I visited in India, and it wasn't uncommon for a single family to have both Christian and tribal religion members. I didn't see any white clergy on several visits to churches, nunneries, and other religious institutions; it seems to be perpetuated solely by the local Adivasis themselves.

Back to Lahodaga...After a chaotic series of minibus transfers in the absolute middle of nowhere in rural India, me and my "guide" (who turned out to not know any more about the place or the situation than me) were let off at a dirt road junction where the driver pointed in the direction we'd have to walk another few miles to get to the school. We arrived just after sundown to a fresh chicken dinner, and it turned out to be a very nicely designed school though it could use a bit of financial help to finish the last bit of construction. The next day was a bit of a miss but interesting nonetheless. I tried to explain that I really wanted to see some areas with large scale hill-top bauxite mining and speak to people who had been affected by it, but we ended up having a bunch of sisters (as in nuns) jump in the jeep and direct us to a convent for our first stop. It was a very lengthy tour of a big pretty Catholic campus, then they wanted to go stop at one of their parents' homes for lunch, and while it was very tasty and I really appreciated the hospitality (and they strangely insisted that I let the matriarch of the house wash my feet) it also knocked out any real chance to see strip mining affected communities that day.

Before going to bed for the evening (and after dropping the sisters off), we made a detour to the jeep driver's home village which was just down the road. Here I got to see mahua liquor being made for the first time, and it was pretty awesome. I also got to see some really drunk villagers, how people steal electricity from government power lines, and one dude demonstrated how they make their clay roof tiles which is something I'd been pretty interested in. The next day proved to be much more fortuitous almost right off the bat.

No one had told me there was a model solar energy village right down the road, so needless to say it was a massive surprise when we suddenly rolled into a remote hamlet that had a very impressive photovoltaic array, not to mention a community-owned rice mill and a state-of-the-art water purification system. Apparently someone from the village ended up being a well-known priest out in the greater world and was able to secure some government funding for this model village project. Obviously I was stoked to just randomly happen upon this seemingly very well-functioning example of how rural India could sustainably become a bit more modern, though it seems pretty doubtful that this will become a widespread phenomenon anytime very soon.

After dropping off a sick kid to his family somewhere outside Lahodaga, we finally made it to the super-devastated site I'd been looking for. Several miles before actually coming to the Hindalco bauxite mines at Bagru Hills, I started noticing these elevated cable cars carrying something or other above the arid farmlands of western Jharkhand. A hair-rising ride ensued up and around the side of a mountain on a road that was not unlike the road up to a strip mine in Eastern Kentucky. At the top was a guard gate, and for some reason they were willing to let us come onto mine property and wander around. It was very, very much like a big mountaintop removal site from Appalachia on the top, complete with random pieces of rusting heavy machinery, apathetic security guards, and of course huge gourges of destruction where the earth had been laid bare to get at whatever of value was inside it. But one main difference with back home was that quite a few people seemed to be living here. Not just any people, but the people who had been here before the mining ever started, and who were now the ones operating the machinery at best or doing grunt labor at worst. The story here was that this community didn't know it was even possible to organize against a mining project when Hindalco first came around back in the 1960s with orders that they had the right to mine the land and that the people who had traditionally lived on the land would either have to find somewhere else to live or could work for the company and live in company-built housing. According to the very friendly, hospitable fellow who befriended us and became our unofficial guide, they would have definitely resisted back then (when he was just a boy) if they'd known they could. They used to have diverse forests and rich farmlands that they could easily support themselves with; now they only had the meager earnings from the company, which was barely enough to pay for basic schooling for his kids. He was one of the main guys running the miles of cable cars that I had seen on the ride up here.

Well, that had all been a pretty intensive series of experiences, so I reckoned I was due for something a little more recreational. I had met a young woman at the Netarhat firing range rally a week or so ago who was from a town in this area where I now found myself, and we'd made plans to hang out if I ever ended up over her way. I spent a few days with Nisha and her family in Gumla, which is really not a very interesting place in and of itself but I did enjoy riding a moterscooter with her and one of her friends waaayy out into the hinterlands to visit her mother's village. I don't think they had electricity there whatsoever, all of the buildings were traditional earthen structures (very durable, weatherproof, and naturally air conditioned), and we had a very nice hike along with her beautiful and tough single mother cousin up to the top of a hill overlooking the area. Once we got there she told me that this was one of the main forest hideout areas for the Naxalites (remember the anti-government guerrilla force?), but we shouldn't worry because they knew her and wouldn't want to mess with her dad. OK.

Nisha and I had some other random adventures in the following weeks, such as happening upon a place of worship on this remote rock outcropping where we witnessed a nearly naked Sadhu rescuing a calf from drowning in a pool, inviting me back to Gumla where I was some kind of special guest along with her father (apparently the guy was some sort of mafiesque Don Corleone political figure but I could never ascertain his exact position) at the massive Sarhul festival, and a special trip to the neighboring state of Chhattisgarh where we were hosted by her aunt's monastery/school and went to go check out the nearby mega-industrial town of Korba. Needless to say, I could nearly write a book on these exploits alone, but that probably wouldn't be the best use of blog space.

I finished off my "really screwed up places in Jharkhand" tour in the infamous coalfields of Dhanbad and Jharia. The underground mine fires have been blazing in the Jharia district for nearly 100 years, and they're showing no signs of stopping. Dhanbad was a fairly decent-looking modern Indian town, but just behind the facade were apocalyptic mountains of destruction, smoke and gases spewing out of the ground just feet away from houses, abandoned old megalithic industrial structures, little kids carrying big baskets of coal on their heads, and coal dust absolutely everywhere. Just googling "jharia coal fires" should give you enough to go on for awhile, and although I had read about the place and even seen a documentary about it, it's really something else to physically feel the immense heat of the ground and then to see kids and women scavenging coal from huge open pit strip mines in either bare feet or tattered flip flops so they can have something to try to sell to be able to eat that day. I honestly don't know how they do it; I couldn't keep my hand on the ground for more than a few seconds. Maybe I'm naive, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find more abject forms of poverty and tougher overall living conditions anywhere else in the world, excluding actively war-torn areas. Obviously the government should be doing something to not allow this situation to perpetuate especially when India is making so much money from haphazard industrial expansion, but once again we see what really matters in mining areas when people are pitted against minerals in terms of value...

My last official stop in Jharkhand was a bit more of an uplifting example than the most recent visits. I had connected months ago with a fellow coordinating the Jharkhand Alternative Development Forum, and from our emails it sounded like we had very similar interests and goals in terms of promoting local sustainable development. He and some others would be traveling to a remote hilly area in the south to visit a community bioenergy and organic farming project and I was invited to come along. It was definitely remote, and I surely enjoyed the windy, bumpy, hilly roads on the way out to the village site. I was told at a certain point that state vehicles wouldn't travel any further than here for fear of Naxalite ambushes, but the Naxals were aware of and very supportive of the project we were going to visit. It was basically a big firebox that would have huge chunks of wood shoved into it to convert water into steam in a compartment within it, and this steam would be used either to turn a small generator that powered lights throughout the village or it would power an oilseed press. They were using the oilseed press when we arrived, and it was honestly pretty awesome to see these folks take organic mustard they had grown, use fallen timber they had gathered as firewood, and process mustard oil that they could sell at local markets or use for their own cooking. In the background a building was being constructed that would later house a seed saving bank and an organic farming training center, not unlike some of the other projects I'd visited in Orissa and earlier at Navdanya.

Thus concludes my month and a half in Jharkhand. While this is a very long entry, I feel like I just barely skimmed the surface of what was probably the most intense and impactful of any place that I visited during this entire year abroad. Part of me still wishes I could go back there right now, part of me is very glad that I'm not there, and part of me might still be there. I feel like I should have some kind of wise conclusion to all of this, but for some reason I still don't feel terribly wise...Jharkhand to me represented most concisely what India as a nation is going through right now, which in a way is what the world has been going through since the Industrial Revolution. India is racing headfirst toward being a "developed" country with malls, cars, cell phones, and semi-regular electricity, and the fuel for that is coming most directly from places like Jharkhand. The Adivasi people are the ones most intimately affected by the ugly side of industrial capitalism, though many of them openly embrace the coming industrialization as the best way forward, including current chief minister Arjun Munda who hails from the same village as the afore-mentioned bioenergy project.

Of course I have my own opinions as someone who deeply respects and reveres traditional, "tribal" ways of living that don't rely on external inputs and are very resilient; in fact I think the "developed" world could learn a lot from the few people who still practice this lifestyle. I definitely had some interesting exchanges trying to explain that to tribal youth who just want to go to college, get a good paying job, have nice clothes and a nice motorbike, and who accept the industrialization that will displace their families as "the price of progress." This place is the battleground at which the raw things that modern society needs to survive clash directly with the sustainable societies who had lived on top of those resources for thousands of years in relative contentedness, and it literally is a battleground as evidenced by the Naxalite insurgency. I would like to be a resource as much as possible to connect people abroad with folks on the ground there who are doing good work, so please contact me if you would like to somehow support any of these people or spread the word about what's happening there. CLICK HERE TO SEE THE FULL PHOTO ALBUM ON FACEBOOK

Wild and Wonderful Jharkhand, Part 1

Jharkhand might be the state receiving the least foreign tourists per year of anywhere in mainland India, and it was the first place that I decided that I definitely had to go in this country as I was planning my Watson travels from the comfort and safety of Whitesburg, KY back in Spring of 2010. My interest was sparked by the fact that it was known as the most mineral rich state in the country (especially in coal), and also the most densely populated with tribal Adivasi peoples. It had once also been the most densely forested state, though even the state forestry website admits that this is rapidly changing due to destructive industrial development. It also carries a somewhat notorious reputation as the state harboring the greatest number of Naxalites, the guerrilla anti-government paramilitary force that gunned down 60 cops in a bus last November.

Once again through my British author friend Felix, I found myself with very good contacts in the heart of this "rogue" state. My first introduction was a bit surprising. I arrived in the capital city of Ranchi a couple of days before a community rights conference, and though it was rife with the trash, filth, and open sewers that I'd come to expect from Indian cities, it also had massive brand new malls, shopping complexes, and cinemas that rivaled those anywhere else in the country. The conference was a weird mix of sitting around listening to impassioned speakers hollering in Hindi about things I couldn't understand (the limited translations I got seemed to all be pretty similar, the need for communities to come together and organize against government and corporate oppression) and after-hours partying with very intense Adivasi folks who spoke almost no English but were very happy to teach me their dances and have me play drums with them.

By the end of the three day retreat, I had made many contacts and been invited by the primary community rights NGO (BIRSA MMC) in the area to stay with them as long as I wanted and accompany then on field visits to mining-affected communities. The first visit would start the next day. I soon realized that chaos would be a constant theme during my stay here, and with very little explanation of what lie ahead I found myself tightly packed into a jeep with 10 other Adivasis. We rumbled down the road out of Ranchi toward some place that had some surface coal mining, but I had no idea of the extent of what I would see.

We passed dozens of men pushing bicycles that were unbelievably loaded down with bags of what appeared to be coal chunks, and my main guide Punit explained that they haul this coke about 22 miles every day to make a meager living. After spending a night in a village where another NGO is working on community health and water sanitation (email cass.hazaribagh@gmail.com if you'd like to help support the purchase of water testing kits), we rumbled on down toward the village of Agariyatola. Before reaching, we stopped at the active surface mining area. It was visually pretty similar to what I saw in northern Orissa with a huge pit that extended farther than I could see with rock trucks and excavators that would be equally at home in Appalachia, though something felt different here. A few hundred meters down the road, we encountered a village that was and is still the most brutally screwed up place I've seen in my 6 months in this country. Agariyatola and a few neighboring villages have intensely resisted government efforts to relocate them from their ancestral villages, but their fierce independence has come at a very high price.

To give a little background, many of these Adivasi communities have existed in roughly the same location for 3 to 4,000 years. They are unique to other Indian cultures in that until recently they were so remote that they were never affected very much by invading Persian or Aryan groups, and to a lesser extent by the British colonialists. It's only been in the past 20-40 years that the Indian government has realized that rich deposits of coal and other minerals lie beneath the ground in many of these traditional farming and forestry communities, and with brutal and unreported tactics they have repeatedly forced these groups to relocate, often with nearly no compensation into substandard, cramped, lifeless housing that pales in comparison to their indigenous earthen buildings. Most Indians have no idea that this is where a majority of their electricity comes from, not to mention the rest of the world which scarcely knows that Jharkhand even exists.

Agariyatola could best be described by watching this video that I wrote and recorded the narration for. There are so many things I could say about this place and this situation, but the thing that really stuck out was the toughness and even positivity of the people who were living in these conditions. Despite not knowing if they would have enough drinking water and losing much of their agricultural land, they didn't seem to be feeling sorry for themselves or unable to smile and joke. (you really need to stop and watch the video before going on!)

From here we traveled to a much more positive place, somewhere that the local community has so far been able to save from surface mining. A nearby district in Hazaribagh (can't remember the name!) has recently been discovered to have a rich, thick seam of coal below it's surface, and over 30 companies have signed MOUs with the government to acquire leases to extract the coal. There also happens to be lots and lots of people and a rich diversity of agricultural crops sitting on the surface. We stayed with Deepak, one of the strongest local leaders and also a Dalit, the lowest caste in Indian society. Through his outspoken and charismatic leadership, the farmers and villagers have so far resisted efforts at persuasion and coercion to accept monetary compensation and resettlement packages to abandon their ancestral land. In addition to the opposition based on traditional livelihood, there also exists a series of ancient artworks on some rock cliffs within the area that is proposed to be mined. A local philanthropist named Bulu Imam has been instrumental in documenting this artwork and attempting to have it placed on the national register of historic places. I was lucky enough to be taken to this rock art which is quite remote and past a lovely but "primitive" village where all of the homes were built from mud right onto large rock outcroppings; the exact age of the art is yet to determined but is estimated to be around 1,500 to 2,000 years old.

This part of the trip was capped off by a visit to maybe the most "sustainable" coal mine in the world. A bunch of local villagers had decided to just start digging down into the earth and into the coal seam by hand, haul the coal away from the site with oxen, and after coking haul the coke to the nearest urban areas via bicycle. They didn't mind a bit for us to come right down into the mine and hang out while they hacked coal loose with picks (standard workplace footwear here was flip-flops) and carried it out in baskets on their heads. Back at Deepak's we sampled some mahua which is a very nice and supposedly vitamin rich homemade liquor that uses fallen tree flowers as the main feedstock while we listened to him play some of his self-made protest songs that he would be recording soon.

And then Holi happened. Shortly after coming back to Ranchi I realized that the infamous Indian festival of colors would be happening and I was determined to experience it to at least some degree. The Adivasi folks at BIRSA who'd been hosting me were all Christian and as such didn't observe Hindu holidays, so I had to go out of my way a little. I was eventually able to get random powdered colors, water, and various other things thrown and smeared all over me (and vice-versa), and I even managed to pick up a bunch of "colors" and bring them back to the BIRSA office to get the young interns into the fray on the roof of the building. All in all I'd say it was a success.

Almost by chance I learned of a bus load of Adivasi college kids that would be going to a rally to celebrate the protection of some tribal land from getting turned into a huge bomb testing range, and before I knew it I was greeting a bus full of enthusiastic folks on the way to Netarhat. The thing that really impressed me about them and which I didn't know was even possible beforehand was the fact that they pretty much consistently had a dance party going on the bus the entire time, as evidenced by this video. We stopped on the way to have a big lunch with somebody's family and made it to the site just before sundown for another big meal of rice, dahl, and pickle on these interesting plates made out of leaves stitched together. I barely got any sleep due to sleeping out on some blankets on the bare ground fairly close to where a generator was blaring all night, then the whole bus went down to the "sunrise point" to, surprise, watch the sunrise. We eventually made it back up to where the main events were going on, and I spent most of the day sitting on blankets surrounded by my newfound friends or walking around taking pictures of the community plays that folks were putting on. The dance parties continued full-force on the ride home, and I was pretty sad to say goodbye to all of the awesome folks I'd just met.

This is a little less than halfway through the overall Jharkhand saga, so I'll leave a little space between here and the next adventure. Til next time..

Oh, Orissa

While I'd had a fairly dramatic experience of being biked around remote, rural, "tribal" Andhra Pradesh in the Araku Valley, it turned out to be a very tame precursor of what was to come. I caught a train from Vishakapatnam up the coast to Bhubaneshwar and then to Puri to attempt to attend an independent film festival, though this didn't exactly turn out as planned. I ended up meeting a British author named Felix who has spent the past 10 or so years living half time in India and half time in Britain, and he ended up being a wealth of information and an excellent contact.

After spending a couple of days checking out the beach and some veerry old and intricate Hindu temples, I started on a journey that I could not have expected. As I may have mentioned before, part of this fellowship travel that I'm on is to spend time in places which have parallels to my homeplace in the coalfields of Appalachia, which to me means places that are fairly remote, have lots of hills, and also some issues with mining. I had heard for awhile that the mountains of southwest Orissa are capped with bauxite, the mineral used to create aluminum, and that the process for mining is very much like mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia. I'd also heard about some "primitive" tribal groups in this part of Orissa who had successfully protected their mountains from mining by a huge multinational corporation, but I was told that it would be next to impossible to actually go to this place due to the remoteness, lack of English speaking, and potential danger from company agents. I was therefore very happy when the aforementioned Felix (who has written a very good book about the worldwide aluminum industry and its effect on rural India) informed me that there would a big festival/celebration on top of one of the mountains that has so far been saved in the next couple of days and that he could put me in touch with the right people to find my way there.

To give a little background info, the aluminum company that wants to strip mine the Nyamgiri mountains (Vedanta) has a history of being insidious, relentless, ruthless, and very good at PR so as to make themselves appear to be a valuable asset to the community while destroying vast areas of land and forcing indigenous populations to leave their homeplaces and accept housing in cramped concrete boxes where they might have an opportunity to earn a few dollars a day as day laborers, as opposed to the self-sufficient farmer-gatherer lifestyle they had known. Although they had not been able to get the lease to mine these mountains, they had gone ahead and built a massive aluminum refinery in anticipation of the leases but are now being forced to import bauxite from other parts of India to justify the plant's existence. I arrived in Lanjigarh after a confusing navigation through the train system and a local jeep where I was bounced down some of the roughest, dustiest roads I had ever seen, doubtlessly made that way by the dozens of bauxite trucks making their way from the train station to the refinery and back. The jeep actually stopped at the gate of the refinery, and I was greeted by at least a mile of cruelly ironic propaganda painted on their fortified border wall containing bizarre messages such as "He who destroys a tree destroys himself! So beware!" and "Life: Not fair but still worth living. Drive carefully!"

From the gate I had to find my way to the contact that Felix had given me, but unfortunately he wasn't answering his phone. I decided to start walking in what I assumed was the direction of the actual town, and as I passed a non-descript, unlabeled building a friendly fellow with good English came out and offered to give me a ride if I would come in for a cup of tea first. It turned out that this was the local Vedanta CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) office, which apparently doubled as an interrogation chamber. Before I knew it I was in a tiny room surrounded by about 8 men looming over me while one very official-seeming fellow asked me many, many questions, often repeating the same ones and not seeming a bit friendly although the guy who originally lured me in would occasionally chime in that they are my best friends and only want to make sure that I stay safe. After trying to convince him for a half hour that I'm just a recently graduated traveler who is randomly visiting mining areas with no objective in mind, I finally had enough and stormed out of the room. The original guy was still wanting to give me a ride, and for some reason I let him. He did actually let me go after dropping me in the town, and luckily by this time my contact was answering his phone.

After that extremely creepy and jarring experience, I was greeted by a local fellow who gave me a ride to a meeting point where I caught a ride in a jeep with a few other folks to the foot of the mountain where the celebration would happen. There was a very nice organic hillside farm at this gathering area, and I was very surprised at how green this place was considering how brown the rest of India is in the dry season. It turns out that in addition to being great for refining into aluminum, bauxite is also a natural sponge which is amazing in its ability to retain and slowly release water over the entire year, providing clean water for drinking and agriculture for communities both near to and far from the source. Strangely, these perennial streams and rivers tend to disappear after an area has been strip mined and the communities often face life-or-death water shortages. After a large enough group of people had gathered, we started up the 30 minute trek to the top of the mountain where the festival would be held.

I was mainly walking with progressive urbanite Indians who were supporters of the cause of the local tribal people, as well as some disinterested reporters and a few of the tribals themselves. Once we reached the top it was nearly dark, but for the first time I was able to really see the people who I had been hearing about for some time. The Dongria Khond are considered to be some of the most unaltered by modernity Adivasi people in India, and this was most obvious in the distinctive hairpieces, facial piercings, and simple handwoven dress that was especially apparent with the women. They were also the most beautiful people I have ever been around, and it's really hard to describe exactly what I mean by that. There was a quiet, almost shy kind of look in their eyes, but also intense strength and confidence. They also seemed supremely healthy and full of calm energy. I spent the night and the next day trying to be as unobtrusive and unobnoxious as possible, very self-conscious of my camera (which I tried to keep as hidden as possible) and my glaring whiteness. Among other things, I heard many songs and saw many dances, and witnessed the beheading of a ram as a living sacrifice to the mountain deity that they worship. My biggest regret is that as I was descending the mountain to return back to the town, a group of young Dongria Khond men stopped me and seemed to be asking me to come back up the hill with them. I had already made an appointment with a nearby organic farming organization for the next day, and I declined their offer as they smiled and continued on their way. I'll always wonder what might have happened, whether they might have invited me to stay with them for some time, or what...

Soon I was bouncing down the road past the slums surrounding the Vedanta refinery toward the nearby town of Bissamcuttack to meet up with the Living Farms NGO. Similarly to the Naandi project in AP, their work was focused on preserving traditional organic farming and promoting new techniques that can help farmers to not be reliant on chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Unlike Naandi, they're not partnering with Vedanta on any PR campaigns! Once again I was ferreted around on the back of a motorbike to many remote villages to check out composting projects, community seed banks, organic rice and vegetable fields, as well as lots of very friendly people (all Adivasis or Dalits, the lowest caste) and tons of goats, cows, and buffaloes. One difference with this trip is that at many, many of the stops that we made I was offered a fresh tree sap drink known as "tarae." I decided to rename it "magical tree beer" because somehow it comes right out of the tree as a fermented beverage, though unfortunately it continues to ferment in your stomach, producing some undesirable side effects. Still it was a very nice way to see the hilly Orissan countryside. These folks also refused to accept any donation from me even though they spent quite a bit of time and gas over three days to show me around, and they were much, much smaller and less funded than Naandi.

After a brief excursion back down to the seaside town of Puri, I decided to check out the coal mining region of Orissa near the border with Chhattisgarh. A friend of a friend put me in touch with a local fellow who has been working on community rights in the Jharsaguda area for sometime, and soon I was meeting Mr. Gopinath Majhi in the small town of Belpahar. This very kind though somewhat defeated and weathered fellow hosted me for a few days in his family's home and took me around to see places that had already been extensively strip mined and those that would soon be destroyed, as well as people who had been struggling for some time. In the midst of it all, I also got to witness my first and only Indian wedding, a story in and of itself. There weren't too many success stories to tell here, as the government-owned surface coal mining operations had repeatedly forcibly evicted people from their land, often with zero or very little compensation of efforts at relocation. Only recently had people started to receive some reparations, though it was often fairly bizarre. We rode through one town where everyone was dismantling their own homes; apparently the government mining company had agreed to give them good paying jobs but only if they would destroy their own homes in advance of the mining operation. The amount of coal dust and dry, parching heat in this place made the Appalachian coalfields seem like paradise, but this would actually not be the most dramatic example of mining destruction and exploitation I would see in India.

Orissa is known as one of the poorest states in India with documented starvation deaths in the past 10 years, and I reckon that I was in some of the poorest parts. However, the issue of poverty here and elsewhere in heartland India is a complicated one. In the places where I visited people who could grow their own food without external inputs and save their own seeds, they were money-poor but contented and rich otherwise. In the places where mineral extraction and heavy industry were making this previous lifestyle impossible though they might actually have more money due to dangerous day labor, I saw the most abject poverty of anywhere in the trip so far. This theme would be continued as I traveled northeast to Jharkhand, arguably the poorest and most chaotic state in the country.

Araku Valley and Adivasi Farmers

DISCLAIMER: A friend of mine recently made me aware that the NGO that took me around in Araku Valley is also working with a huge, very destructive mining and aluminum processing company called Vedanta to get good press in a nearby state for "helping the poor" when they are actually doing the opposite. While I still appreciate the experience I had in Araku and I do think they are doing good work here, it's important to understand that these nation-wide, well-funded NGOs often have more than one side to them and sometimes get into bed with some unsavory characters. So, understand that I am not trying to completely endorse Naandi and all that they do, but only to relay a couple weeks of my travel experience in India.

With Auroville fading as a weird and out of place memory, I soon found myself in the coastal town of Vishakapatnam on the very northeast tip of Andhra Pradesh. This was only a brief stopover before traveling up to Araku Valley, a reputedly beautiful hilly area which is home to a heavy concentration of indigenous tribal people, generically known as Adivasi. I had randomly read a newspaper article while across the country in Rajasthan about a project in Araku to plug Adivasi farmers into organic certification and marketing schemes, and also to receive carbon credits for reforestation. It seemed to be worth checking out and the NGO heading this work emailed me back quickly after I found them through an internet search. After a train ride through very Appalachian-looking hills, I was greeted by a friendly chap at the train station who would give me a ride into the interior areas.

Naandi Foundation is a pretty big and well-funded NGO working on a diverse set of health, education, and livelihood issues in different parts of rural India. While there might be a bigger hierarchy at play, I found myself being hosted and taken around by very humble, helpful, and down to earth folks who were all from the local area. Once again on the back of a motorbike, it was a very strange but beautiful world I found myself in. The entire area was full of big hills, and though the people lacked much of anything in the way of tools or infrastructure, there were huge, well designed terraces everywhere for growing rice and other crops. People had ingeniously directed water from its source to flow through each of these fields so that they could be flooded and irrigated at key times. The dwellings were very simple, mostly made of packed mud or wood with clay tile roofs, and people (mostly women) were engaged in lots of different kinds of manual labor, like chopping wood, carrying water on their heads, planting rice, and working with water buffalo. I didn't know it at the time, but this scenery would come to be quite common to me over the next two months.

Our first stop was a village that was too remote to receive any connection to the national power grid (the villages that were "connected" had a single thin wire that supplied only enough power for light bulbs for maybe 3-4 hours per day), and it was chosen by TERI for a solar lighting project. A small set of solar panels were connected to an array of battery-powered lanterns, which the villagers charged everyday and then used to be able to see at night. From here we checked out some of their reforestation-cum-coffee plantation projects, whereby people were taught to grow shade-giving trees (silver oak) together with organic coffee. Apparently Naandi has been able to get carbon credits for the reforestation bit because these hillsides have been seriously denuded due to overharvesting and population pressure, whereas they were once densely forested carbon sinks. By dusk we had reached the state-of-the-art coffee processing facility that had also been built through Naandi. Apparently all of the growers in their program bring their beans here to be dehulled, cleaned, and ready to be sent off to roasters, and I believe it was done in a cooperative framework wherein the villagers are involved with the running of the plant as well. The hulls are are turned into biodynamic vermicompost, and the beans are mostly sold to high-end markets in Europe, bringing the most possible profit back to the growers.

I checked out their organic training center/tree nursery the next day, and learned a bit about the teaching programs they have to make innovative organic growing methods known to the local folks. David Hogg, originally a New Zealander who's been in India for the past 30 years, is the head of this whole farming development program and is very much into creation of biodynamic composts and pesticides, so that is the main focus of their methods here. Looked like some pretty potent stuff, maybe I'll try mixing up a brew when I get back to Kentucky. We went to one more village which was kind of a model because all of the different aspects of the program (coffee/reforestation, organic farming, biodynamic compost/pesticide production, and a Naandi-funded school) were happening here. Through my guide/translator, I was able to spend a fair amount of time talking with these folks about how this transition from mainly rice production with synthetic fertilizer to diversified organic agriculture has really benefited their lives. I was a bit surprised to see a flag in the middle of a remote village with a big communist symbol on it; apparently a lot of people in this region are not the biggest fans of the central Indian government and don't believe it really cares for the welfare of the rural poor.

I wanted to climb one of the hills, so the fellow who had been taking me around on motorbike and I reached the top and surveyed the surrounding farming valleys and hills rising off to the distance. I noticed that there was a big plume of steam rising from somewhere around the base of the hill, and descended to discover a pretty interesting scene. A bunch of guys were processing sugar cane into jaggery by pressing the juice from the cane with a diesel engine-driven press system, and then boiling the juice in a huge vat to leave only the thick, sticky crystals that are formed into big, solid chunks. They gave us some raw cane to chew on while we watched, and I just remember being almost overwhelmed by the wafts of sugar-filled steam that kept rising. This would be my last stop with Naandi, and I was very grateful to their generosity as I packed my things to go. As with many times on this trip, my hosts and travel guides wouldn't accept a penny from me as thanks.

On my way out of Araku, I made a stop over at Borra Caves, one of the biggest cave complexes in India. It was definitely impressive, but being in the villages for the past several days had caused me to forget how intensely obnoxious Indian families on vacation from the cities can be. The caves were filled with children and youth hollering and going crazy, and I had to go outside and wander off the beaten path to find an apparently unknown set of caves and waterfalls that were just down the river from the main set. I was the only soul around, and it was very good to sit and take in these surroundings before jumping back onto a train and into the cities.

A Week in Auroville

To be honest, I had kind of a prejudiced attitude before I even got on the train toward Auroville,
and it really didn't do too much to change my preconceived opinion. This place was started back in the 1960s by a bunch of mostly European "spiritual" folks seeking to create a community dedicated to expanding universal consciousness and furthering the evolution of the human race. Riiiight. Anyway it now has a global reputation as a place where many innovative startups have taken root, especially with renewable energy, organic farming, value-added products, and other "social enterprises." Also this chunk of land near Pondicherry in eastern Tamil Nadu was severely deforested and degraded when the original legion of hippies moved in, and actually they have impressively reforested the area so that they can have ridiculous tree houses and such.

I spent the week sleeping in a "capsule" (actually quite nice, made only from tree branches and

thatch as far as I could tell) and trying to check out as many interesting projects as possible. One of the many, many differences between this place and "real" India was that a lot of people didn't have or didn't want to make time for me. I guess they're inundated with obnoxious tourists who come to India only for Auroville (I met several of these), and also the place had a palpable feel of European (especially French) snobbiness. Nevertheless, I did manage to shoulder my way into a number of places and the following is a brief rundown.The Auroville Earth Institute has apparently pioneered some innovative ways to use raw earthas a building material, mainly through the use of a human-powered press machine and various dies that form dirt into convenient shapes and sizes, such as interlocking tongue-and-groove blocks. They didn't have time to talk to me unless I was going to pay for an expensive earth building course, but the French guy in the office was nice enough to let me walk around and look at their displays. I briefly checked out Auroville Wind Systems although the main guy (German) didn't have time for me; apparently they make 5kw low-altitude wind turbines. I got a tour of Upasana fair trade clothing from an Indian fellow I had met the night before. Not really my interest, but at least this one was started and run by a lady from Bihar, one of the country's poorest states. Supposedly she's a real hardass and a also a former Ashoka fellow, quite a prestigious title. Finally, the (Indian) director of Sunlit Future, the Auroville solar energy installation company, was willing to give me a chunk of time and tell me about how most households and farms in Auroville have at least some solar capability and about the remote village installations they do from European grants. However, he said that solar makes up only about 8-10% of Auroville's total energy usage. The rest comes from the massive brown coal power station in nearby Neyveli, and I decided to make a trip there with the guy who gave me a tour of Apasana.

This nice fellow from Dehradun didn't really know what he was getting himself into, and I think

he wasn't really accustomed to my style of seat-of-the-pants industrial disaster tourism. Still he was a good sport about it and I couldn't have seen the completely massive open-cast lignite mines if not for him and his rented motorbike. It was visually reminiscent of the huge mines I saw in eastern Germany, except in this case a lot of really poor people were living right on the edge of the mining area. I found out that the huge, outdated power plant turning this extremely inefficient fuel into power for Auroville and the rest of Tamil Nadu was just down the road, so me and bubby started that way. He decided to ask the guards if we could get a tour of the plant, and while they were nice at first and seemed to be entertaining the idea they suddenly became very suspicious of me and even brought some "head inspector" to question me. I guess I was looking like a terrorist that day. We then went to the village area which is just outside of the concrete and barbed wire fence, and it was yet another intensely surreal Indian moment of the very traditional meeting the ugly side of modern development head-on. Massive smokestacks seemed to emerge directly from mud and thatch huts; field workers tending crops were overshadowed by huge steam generator units.

I spent the last bit of time at Auroville checking out some organic

farms and food processing enterprises, two more things I hope to do back in Appalachia. Buddha Garden was a 2-3 acre organic farm started by Priya from the UK who originally moved to Auroville as a spiritual hippy like everybody else but got fed up with the realities (i.e. hypocrisies, BS, etc) of the "communal life" and decided to move just outside of Auroville proper and start a farm. It was a very nice and efficient operation with a young Indian farm manager and a ton of white interns, with growing methods consisting almost entirely of permanent raised beds and drip irrigation lines. She has written several books about farming now and was nice enough to take over an hour to talk to me when she had several other things to do. I did a bit of volunteer work threshing rice at Solitude Farm (yes they all have stupid names) and ended up with a nasty rash, but it was nice to see their "one straw revolution" style planting methods and windmill-driven water pump. I also visited Botanical Gardens, which was actually a seed saving and selling farm as well as tree nursery, contrary to the name.

Naturellement was a value-adding business started some 20 years ago, and it seemed to be a

very nice enterprise despite the obnoxious French name. Martina, the Swedish founder/owner has done a good job of employing quite a few Indians from the surrounding villages for much higher than standard wages to make a diverse line of sweets and baked goods. While not all of the ingredients are local, almost everything is organic and the distribution is within India only. Kofpu was a small raw foods producer (mainly kombucha, spirulina, and such), and while I thought they were casually inviting me in to have lunch with them they ended up asking for 200 rupees, about 4 times the cost of a typical Indian meal. Pebble Garden was a fair ways outside of Auroville, but it was worth the trip to see how they've managed to turn very rocky, barren land into a thriving organic farm. As far as I could tell this half-Swedish-half-Indian older couple doesn't sell anything and mainly function to sustain themselves and save seeds which they distribute for free to nearby farmers. More than any other place I visited, they were focused on permaculture techniques with in-situ composting and raised beds using only fallen branches for the walls and a mix of leaves, biochar, and bits of dirt to make excellent soil. My last stop was the Sadhana Forest intentional community. I was too late for the proper tour and so I was only barely able to see the reforestation project and the dozens of "capsule" homes for the interns, and mainly ended up watching a film about how badly the aborigines of Australia are being screwed over. As with the rest of these projects you can learn plenty just by looking at their website that I've linked to, but basically this place was started by an Israeli family with the intention to bring back the native forest and its now home to a mass of almost completely white interns.

So, that was my Auroville experience. Definitely a lot of really good ideas and quite a bit of good execution, and I really only scratched the surface in my week there. But I just couldn't bring myself to actually like the place, and you would almost have to pay me to live and spend any more time there. Maybe it was the fact that it was an island of European wealth and pretentious attitude surrounded by some very poor villages, even by Indian standards. Maybe it was the way that I could feel this snobby attitude rubbing off on the Indian locals, as opposed to the very open and friendly India I had come to know. Or maybe I just don't like new age hippies, and there were plenty of those. Either way I was pretty happy to be taking a bus up to Chennai to catch a train to the mountains of northeast Andhra Pradesh, but at the same time I really appreciate all of the time people took to share their experiences with me and I hope it can all be somehow relevant for my future.