Speaker: Bengaluru, once called the city of lakes is expected to become the next city to run dry.
Speaker: Tamil Nadu and its capital city are struggling to meet the water demand of its citizens.
Speaker: The Indian farmer, they say is born in debt, lives in debt and dies in debt.
A harsh truth closer home in Karnataka,
which is on the brink of a crisis in one of the most fertile regions of the state – The Cauvery belt.
Sadhguru: The rivers in India are in a serious condition.
On an average all rivers in India are depleting approximately eight percent every year.
In sixteen years most rivers will be gone.
Eight percent drop, almost seven months in a year Cauvery doesn’t reach the ocean.
It dries up right here, somewhere.
Today it is forty-six percent less than what it was forty years ago.
Your children, or maybe their children will not know what is Cauvery.
When we launched the Rally for Rivers movement, we did over 50,000 art competitions around the country,
because we want the children to become conscious.
You won’t believe this, many children painted brown sand and they thought that’s the river,
because that’s the only river they have seen.
The biggest concern is not even water, the biggest concern is soil.
There is not enough organic content means you can’t hold water.
India has hundred-and-sixty million hectares of arable land.
Of this one-hundred-and four million hectares of arable land is under distress, soil distress.
This means this country is going to have serious problems about growing food,
in the next fifteen to twenty-five years.
With 1.3 billion people if you can’t grow your food that’s going to be the biggest disaster.
Ninety-six percent of our rivers flow only with rain water.
If you have vegetation, our ability to hold the rain water is enhanced.
Either the rain water which happens approximately in forty-five to fifty days in the year,
it all flows out within the next fifty days.
The only way you can slow down is by vegetation, simply no other way.
Increasing the forest cover is out of question with the kind of population pressure we have.
So the only way is to transit them into agroforestry.
We have converted literally over 69,670 farmers in Tamil Nadu.
Their incomes have gone up five to ten times in a matter of eight to ten years.
Right now in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka we’ve launched what’s called as Cauvery Calling.
Twenty-five of us will be riding motorcycles from Talacauvery to Thiruvavur in Tamil Nadu,
all along Cauvery.
And create not only awareness, we are talking to both the governments to support the farmer
to move from regular cropping to agroforestry.
All it takes is three to four years of subsidies to help him transition, after that he doesn’t need support.
These four years if you support him he will shift to agroforestry.
Once, there’s economic benefit after that even subsidies are not needed, people will anyway shift.
Cauvery basin amounts to about 83,000 square kilometers.
We want to convert one-third of the Cauvery basin into agroforestry.
If you do this, the forty-six percent depletion that’s happened in the river waters will come back.
River will flow once again.
Farmers will be rich and well to do.
When I was speaking in the UN, I said, I want to officiate the marriage of economy and ecology.
Only then, we will produce something significant.
Ecology is not against the economic well-being of the people. Economy and ecology have to go hand in hand.
How to do our economics in a ecologically sensitive way, this is the important thing.
This project is called Cauvery Calling. So, she’s been calling.
Can you hear is the question.
Hello, can you hear? Cauvery is calling!