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.

Bioenergy and Sustainable Living in Rural Karnataka

A big part of my focus back in Appalachia has been sustainable distributed bioenergy systems, and I've been hoping to make that a focus of my time in India as well. I was finally able to make a solid contact with BERI (BioEnergy for Rural India), and after leaving Gudalur I was on my way to the Tumkur district of Karnataka, about a 3 hour bus ride away from the software megacity of Bangalore. BERI has received some big grants from the UN, the state of Karnataka, and a few others to show what a model distributed renewable energy system could look like for the rural parts of India, and I wanted to see how this framework could be relevant for back home. I could tell from their website that the technology (gasification of locally harvested wood) and scale (0.25-1MW) was roughly inline with my past research, and soon I was being greeted at the bus stand by a fellow who would give me a ride on the back of a motorbike to the area where I'd be staying for a few days.

This was the first of what has now become a trend of being treated to tours of rural sustainability projects on the backs of motorbikes through windy roads that range from falling apart pavement, dirt roads, or foot/animal paths. Needless to say it is a very awesome way to travel and the photo opportunities are endless. I did in fact get to see a few biomass gasification plants which were way lower-tech than the places I saw in Austria but also much more affordable and better suited to local conditions and feedstocks. Also this technology results in about 10-15% leftover biochar as a co-product after gasification, which to me is a big advantage over the Austrian model that completely gasifies the biomass and therefore release all of the CO2 to the atmosphere. The biochar here was apparently being used by local blacksmiths, but it could just as easily be used for improving agricultural land and sequestering carbon.

The BERI project had a few other facets that I wasn't initially aware of and which definitely worthwhile components of an overall rural sustainability model. First, several dozen bore wells have been drilled and connected to the power supplied by these plants; the water is then pumped into holding tanks that supply drip irrigation lines for small-scale organic farming. In a country where rainfall only really occurs from June-September, this has enabled very poor villagers to produce nutritious vegetables for their families and local markets at times that wouldn't have been possible before. Second, several multi-family cooperatively run biogas digesters have been established, wherein the families put cow manure into the system and then get clean gas for cooking (displacing traditional indoor wood-fired cooking which is terrible for respiratory health and depletes nearby forests) and organic fertilizer for their fields. Finally, many of these villages now have vermicomposting systems and composting toilets to better process waste and give nutrients back to the lands that they depend on for survival.

I definitely appreciated the time they took to show me around, and all of this without charging me a single rupee. But for the sake of balance I should include some critique. The main problem I saw was that the feedstock for the bioenergy plants is coming from non-native eucalyptus and acacia trees. They're growing short-rotation "energy forests" on land which is too rocky, uneven, or distant from villages to b used for farming, which in theory can be a good model if using native and ideally multipurpose trees. Also, I have to wonder how replicable this model would be without inputs from agencies like the UN and state government. But the counterpoint to that would be the massive expenditures the Indian government is already making on huge centralized coal and nuclear fired power plants, and in my opinion it would be much more cost-effective, reliable, and environmentally friendly to have a network of small-scale renewable energy power plants than to rely on megalithic installations that displace thousands of people and put this rapidly developing country on a fast track to ecological destruction and which provide only about 2-4 hours of electricity per day to the rural poor. In short I think this could be an excellent model for the entire country if the feedstock was from native species and if the government had the best interest of the people at heart, which I'm pretty sure it doesn't.

A friend in Wales had told me about a place called Navadarshanam, just a few kilometers past the Karnataka border into Tamil Nadu near Bangalore. They had a very nice website and I decided to pay them a visit as it was apparently an "intentional community" dedicated to sustainable living and Ghandian (as in the Ghandi that led the movement for independence from the British) philosophy and spirituality. I only spent a couple of days there, and while it wasn't exactly a groundbreaking experience, they did have a nice collection of good ideas. They had some solar panels, a wind turbine, a biogas digester, a couple acres of organic gardens, buildings mostly made from compressed earth blocks (CEBs), and a value-added food processing center that employed about 35 local villagers. The latter two were of the most interest to me as I had never seen these CEB buildings before and they were very, very nice. Cool and comfortable in the heat of the afternoon sun, and they had an attractive and conventional appearance (as opposed to many of the hobbit-looking natural buildings found in the US). There was one building dedicated solely to making chutneys, pickles, peanut butter, jams, and other nice things from organic and mostly local ingredients, and it ran on a cooperative management model employing mostly women from nearby villages.

I ended up my time in Karnataka by meeting with the head gasification scientist at the Indian Institute of Science, a world-renowned technology development university. I still don't know why top guys like him are willing to meet with my uncredentialed self. As I've been thinking about getting projects going in Appalachia, I'm always on the lookout for potential partners and I was mainly interested to make a connection on the chance that it might make sense to work with these folks to do a pilot installation back home in the case that I can't find anyone with suitable expertise or in the right price range in the US. Of course there's the logic that it's always better to use domestic resources than outsourcing, but to be honest I think there's a good chance that US companies will be far too expensive for an initial small-scale installation and the Indian technology seemed much more simple and adjustable than the highly automated systems typically found in Western countries.

Next stop will be Auroville, arguably one of the weirdest places in India and somewhere I definitely wouldn't go if not for its reputation for innovative renewable energy, organic farming, and reforestation projects.

PS for more pictures click here

Biochar in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu

Mumbai wasn't nearly as much of a shock to the senses as I'd expected, but the sleeper class train (basically the lowest class and cheapest trains where you can lay down) I took to Hyderabad was a bit more of an experience than I thought it would be. I guess I had gotten used to the relative comfort of the AC trains with their cleaner berths, fairly sane comings and goings of passengers, and controlled environment, so the wide-open windows, tons of people squeezing onto one seat, and unkempt nature of the ride was yet another adjustment in this country of constant assaults on the senses. It really wasn't so bad and despite being constantly stared at by the youths crowded together I really enjoyed being able to see the scenery so clearly, as well as the random conversations with folks happy to practice their English skills.

The next stop was Hyderabad, a mostly uninteresting city which is now becoming one of India's fast growing IT outsourcing hubs. I was there to meet with Dr. Saibaskar Reddy, a fellow trained in geology but now one of the country's main proponents of biochar as a means to sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide in charcoal and use it for improving agricultural land. The approach his group, GEO, has taken is to build and distribute low-cost small cookstoves to rural villages which enable people to remove the charcoal before it completely turns to ash and which also create much less smoke than traditional wood-fired cooking methods. I spent a couple of days out in the countryside with him visiting places where the stoves are made from completely recycled materials, seeing their biochar training center, and also villages where the stoves are being used.

This was definitely one of the poorer areas I'd visited so far, and it's been strange to see the limited means people have to work with yet how they generally seem to be in better spirits than people from more "developed" places. They were also uniformly friendly and happy to share with outsiders like myself. I was also a bit surprised to see a couple of monuments adorned with communist flags; apparently this region produces some of the leaders of the Maoist Naxalite movement from time to time. Through Dr. Reddy I made a contact with a group in Tamil Nadu that was just starting to work on a biochar project, and after receiving a positive response from them I made plans to travel to the Nilgiris area of the Western Ghats mountains as my next stop. After checking out Golconda Fort and a nice museum, I boarded a bus headed to Bangalore where I would get another bus to Gudalur.

One of my favorite aspects of this trip is watching the countryside change from a bus or train window, and this time I got to see the arid plains of Andhra Pradesh turn into the tropical farmlands of Karnataka and then into the forested hills of NW Tamil Nadu. I was lucky enough to see a wild elephant as I passed through the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve, and soon I was finding my way to the office of the Shola Trust where I would be collaborating on their biochar project for a couple of weeks. The Shola Trust has a few different focus areas (biological conservation, tribal livelihood development, etc), and this biochar project touched on a few of these. There is an invasive shrub known as lantana camara which has taken over large areas of the ecologically sensitive Mudumalai Tiger reserve, and it's particularly nasty because the leaves are inedible to wildlife, the roots exude chemicals which prevent other plants from growing nearby, and it resprouts more vigorously when cut or burned. Therefore Shola is working with the Forest Service and nearby tribal communities to uproot lantana, remove it from the forest (open burning in the forest leads to forest fires and actually encourages lantana), use the nicer branches for tribal-made furniture, and convert the rest into biochar to be mixed with manure/compost and applied to agricultural land.

My task was to design and build a portable, efficient biochar kiln that could be taken to villages to utilize the nearby lantana and also use the excess heat to remove the bark from the lantana branches that they would be using for furniture making. After some hours of internet searching I had a basic design, and the next day I started working with a local metalworker to cut, weld, and put everything into place. This was a growing experience in a few ways. First, this fellow spoke almost no English, and I had to communicate only through drawing, gestures, and moving pieces of metal around. Second, I was amazed at their working methods, as they use hammer and chisel to cut thick pieces of angle iron and there was no welding mask in sight, despite quite a bit of high voltage arc welding. Finally, this fellow and his family were devout Christians, and they were the first I'd met in those mostly Hindu country. I came to find out that South India and Tamil Nadu in particular has a much more even mix of Christian/Muslim/Hindu peoples, and that here they coexist very peacefully.

After a few days it was time to test this oil barrel + galvanized pipe + angle iron contraption, and thank the Lord it worked as it was supposed. It always ended up being a bit of a party when we would do a test firing as everybody wanted to come and help with building the containment walls, getting the wood ready, starting the initial fire, and watching the flames roar out of the gasification pipe. As far as I know they're using the unit out in the field now, but unfortunately I felt like my time was too limited to stick around for more than 2 1/2 weeks.

I'll just say a quick note about some other people and projects in the area that are definitely worth mentioning. Many parts of India have serious problems with the exploitation of the indigenous tribal peoples (known as Adivasis), and this mountainous area is no different. Back in the 1980s a very inspiring fellow named Stan Thaekaera started an organization called Accord, and they have had many important victories which have forced the government and non-tribal Indians to recognize Adivasi land rights even when they don't have a formal document asserting their ownership. There is a hospital and school in Gudalur dedicated to Advasis, and both were excellent models of non-condescending ways to help locals. From Accord, a side group known as Just Change developed in the 1990s with the aim of empowering Adivasis through community owned sustainable enterprises and an international marketing framework that takes "Fair Trade" a step farther. The Shola Trust was started by the Stan's son Tarsh, and they share an office with Just Change. Finally, there's this awesome guy Madhu who rescues snakes (including lots of cobras) who have come into contact with humans as Shola's wildlife conservation fellow and releases them into safe habitats, and sometime soon I'll try to post a youtube video of one of his capers.

India: The First Month or so

I have to admit that I was experiencing a fair amount of anxiety and trepidation as the flight from Germany to India finally got into the air. I had never been to a “developing” country before (unless you count Appalachia), and most people I had talked to had given me more to worry about than to look forward to. However, I had chosen this destination for good reasons, and I was determined to at least spend a few solid weeks in the country before giving up.

Upon arriving in Delhi, my first day went about as wrong as it could have. Air India lost several people's checked baggage (including mine) in Germany, and we had to wait for hours only to find that they would take our information and deliver the baggage when and if they found it. I had been planning to stay with someone that I had contacted on www.couchsurfing.org, but I couldn't access the internet anywhere to look up their number so I got a taxi ride to a part of town that I heard had cheapish hotels.

To make a long story short, the taxi driver drove me through some very sketchy looking streets to arrive at a relatively opulent hotel which was way more expensive than I was looking for. My senses were overwhelmed on the ride there by the completely new sights, sounds, and smells of one of the biggest and fastest growing cities in the world, including traffic with no rules whatsoever, random cattle all over the place, lots of tiny three-wheeled cargo vehicles, horse carts right next to huge trucks, and the most intense haze of smog I've ever seen. Basically he pulled a tried-and-true scam where a shell-shocked foreigner who has just arrived in super crazy Delhi is shown some of the “rougher” parts of town and then delivered to a cushy hotel, and the driver gets a fat commission if the tourist stays there. It was getting dark and I didn't have the energy or guts to go searching for somewhere cheaper in this overwhelming place, so I paid my 1800 rupees and got some sleep.

I spent the night wondering if I would be able to handle this place for any length of time, although I had barely seen anything at all. Thankfully everything started to change almost immediately the next day. I finally did hook up with the fellow I had found on couchsurfing.org, and I eventually made it over to his flat after visiting the Qutb Minar monuments. Abhinav and his flatmates were all young professional Indians (mostly with MBAs) living in the area of town known as Mehrauli, technically the oldest part of Delhi as it existed as an independent town even before the actual city. I spent some time wandering through the amazingly congested and chaotic narrow streets filled with cows, motorcycles, bicycles carrying amazing loads, little kids, trash, and every kind of shop you could imagine. I definitely felt like I was in a different world, and I don't think words can describe the intense sensory onslaught. Somehow I felt relatively comfortable walking through these streets where I was the only white person around, and I no longer felt overwhelmed as when I had first arrived.

I quickly came to be familiar with the public transport system in Delhi as I was mainly there to have meetings and make contacts that would ideally help pave the way for the rest of my time in India. I was reasonably able to get around town on my own only using the metro and my feet, which I felt proud about considering how chaotic this place can be. I met up with people at the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE), The Energy Research Institute (TERI), Indian Institute of Technology's Centre for Energy Studies, and someone associated with Navdanya. In the end I wasn't sure how useful it was overall, as I came out of the week with only a few additional contacts and no more set places to go. I missed out on most of the more “touristy” attractions in and around Delhi (like the Taj Mahal), but this didn't concern me so much as I was pretty determined to not be a typical India tourist.

Before heading to my next “official” engagement, I made a four-day detour up to McLeod Ganj, AKA the home of the Dalai Lama and a Tibetan refugee settlement. I mainly went to go see some Himalayan foothills and interesting cultural stuff, but I ended up being very affected by the situations that the Tibetans are in. I've always been vaguely aware of the issue of Tibet having been violently taken over by China in the late 1950s with most of their ancient monasteries destroyed and many peaceful monks tortured and/or killed, but it never really hit home til I was in their capitol-in-refuge. Through documentaries and hanging out with young Tibetans who spoke broken English, I came to learn about the ongoing systematic undermining of their culture by the Chinese authority and the persecution of any dissidents within the country. Unfortunately this left me feeling mostly frustrated and powerless, but it did plant the idea of possibly going to Tibet to see things there with my own eyes if I end up going to China later. Otherwise I got to see some very beautiful mountains and waterfalls and such, and then onto an extremely uncomfortable overnight bus ride to my next destination.

I had planned for some time to go to the Bija Vidyapeeth organic training farm outside of Dehradun in Uttarakhand. This was originally set up by world-infamous author, speaker, activist etc Vandana Shiva along with a couple of other people back in the 1980s. Not only does it contain about 25 acres of organic fruit, vegetable, herb, and grain production, they also have a diversified seed bank and they host research, development, and regional farmer trainings. Bija Vidyapeeth is the demonstration farm for Navdanya, a nationwide organization that sets up seed banks, trains farmers to grow organically, and which also helps them with marketing and branding with many branches and operatives working in several regions. This is significant considering that at least 60% of this country of 1.2 billion people still makes a primary living from agriculture, and since the 1960s they have become quite dependent on synthetic chemical inputs that they can scarcely afford and which contribute to further degradation of already damaged lands.

I was excited to arrive and jump straight into hands-on work alongside the Indians who work there full time, but this was thwarted on the first day by a crippling stomach illness. I had been told that I would probably get sick at some point in India, and so I had attempted to inoculate myself in the first week by eating samosas from street vendors. I still don't know what triggered it, but after two weeks into the trip I found myself struggling with the most unpleasant night of vileness that I can remember. For the next several days I was much weaker than usual with a very limited appetite. Eventually I got violently ill again, and finally decided to go to the doctor for antibiotics. I was cured within a day or so and have not had any such episode again.

Although I was at less than full capacity for about half of my time at Navdanya, it was at least good to see and spend time with an organization that is doing activities all over the country that are similar to what I would like to do with organic farming in Appalachia. I can't say that I really learned anything new about farming as I didn't notice anything particularly innovative about their methods, and it was surprisingly expensive to stay and volunteer there. In fact I have the feeling that the financial side of the organization is significantly propped up by the high prices foreigners pay (about $14 per day, which is a ton of money here) to come have an authentic Indian farming experience, as well as the very high prices they charge for their products in fancy markets in Delhi and Dehradun. I certainly could have spent my money on worse causes, and while I wonder about the overall financial sustainability of a model that depends on constant input from foreigners I do think they are doing good work that deserves to be supported.

I had planned to go from Navdanya back to Delhi for a week and then over to the mining regions of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, but this was not to be the case. I met an Indian visitor at Navdanya who's family lives in Rajasthan, and soon I found myself pulled in an unexpected direction. Rajasthan is known as a mostly arid desert state which is home to some of India's most impressive ancient structures (built by the old-time kings known as Rajputs) and also beautiful folk art and music. I ended up spending about 2 weeks traveling through Jodhpur, Jaipur, and Jaisalmer, and while it wasn't all completely relevant to my project it was definitely an unforgettable experience in many ways.

Without going into too much detail, I received the most luxurious treatment of my life due to my friend's father being very high-ranking in the Indian railway system (the largest employer in the world apparently), I got to see massive old forts built on top of sandstone mountains, I spent New Year's Eve camping on a sand dune after riding for awhile on camelback, and I rode a motorcycle for the first time with a Rajasthani village native into his home area and then spent the night in a mud hut there after trying their version of moonshine. Actually this fellow is trying to set up an organic farm in his village that visitors can come to and spend time, and I would highly recommend hooking up with Shivnath if you have the chance (http://dumpalorganicfarm.blogspot.com/). I could easily write an entire entry about those two weeks only, but it would end up being too much in the way of personal details and little of project relevancy.

Finally I got back on track and ended up in Mumbai (Bombay) for a few days to have some meetings, again with the intention of making contacts that could help pave the way for my next steps. That did happen to some extent (i.e. coordinator for Biochar India and a fellow running Oikos, an ecological design business), and also I can now say that I have spent time in and successfully navigated around the world's 2^nd largest city. Highlights include the Elephanta island caves where massive thousand-year-old Hindu carvings adorn the walls, seeing the sunset from the beach, catching the extremely crowded local trains, driving around the city in a top-down jeep with one of my “contacts,” and touring the Dharavi slum (2^nd biggest slum in the world) with someone I randomly met at a dental appointment. Just like with Delhi, I experienced anxiety and trepidation on the train ride in, and within a day I felt strangely safe and comfortable moving around a ridiculously huge city on my own.

This covers the first month and a half or so of my time in India, and from here I end up heading south to spend time in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu. Hopefully I'll have the next entry finished in much less time than it took to put this one out, so stay tuned.

PS I know I'm being very sparse on details so as always feel free to ask me more about specific people, places, and/or projects at nathandavidhall@gmail.com.