So, income has doubled and expenditure has become half...
So, that is how they see their experience.
In our last episode, we toured the winning village of the Paani Foundation’s Water Cup Competition, and saw the biggest permaculture project on Earth.
From there we traveled across the width of India to the State of West Bengal,
where there is a different language, different weather, and a different center of influence: the mega-city of Kolkata.
We arrived by train into the dense mayhem that is the city center.
It was a time of turmoil, with mass strikes and protests blocking city streets.
We found our way to the offices of the Development Research Communication Service Center, or DRCSC, to meet a living legend.
I’m here with my good friend Ardhendu Chatterjee.
Ardhendu Chatterjee has spent the last 40 years working to end poverty, hunger, and environmental degradation,
for the most marginalised people on the most marginalised lands.
DRCSC is a non-governmental development organization
that specifically targets the poorest people on the poorest soils with the lowest rainfall.
This means working with India’s indigenous tribal communities, who are on the lowest rung of the social ladder.
Originally forest dwelling hunter-gatherers, they have had to adapt, and now practice agriculture mostly on marginal lands with poor water resources.
So during the dry season, their water runs out,
and they are forced to become migrant laborers to survive,
often traveling far far from home to toil for low wages.
DRCSC has worked in over 600 villages to bring food security, water security, and ecosystem stability,
so people can stay and thrive in their communities all year round.
I travelled for 5 days with Ardhendu and his team to far flung remote tribal villages to see the inspiring work of DRCSC.
We began in the region of Purulia in the village of Sunra
where this last year the villagers hand dug a new reservoir
that shows off the innovative terraced pond design that DRCSC has pioneered.
Previously this was a barren land.
A fully Barren land. Nothing is here.
Now they are doing...the huge area they are cultivating, utilizing this water
Just one year, they dig that huge structure
By hand actually!
Fifty to sixty people, they are doing this whole thing
This pond is located just down from a forested area, with a catchment area of about eight and a half acres,
and is part of a 250 acre watershed with numerous ponds.
The ponds are placed high up in the landscape, so the fields below can be irrigated using only gravity.
The ponds also provide water for the lands below them through subsurface seepage.
So villagers can plant thirsty crops that are watered by the underground flow from leaky ponds.
I hiked down below the pond to see the seepage that is now feeding rice paddies.
Before this pond, these fields could only grow one rainfed crop per year.
But now, they can plant multiple crops in a year, including highly valued rice.
This translates directly to greater food, water, economic, and social security.
The common area is huge, where we can utilize this water.
And they are utilizing this water and just cultivate many various kinds of crops.
And for fisheries also!
And you can see that they are using the steps also for cultivation.
The ramps are not only for access.
Another thing is they are for cattle also.
You know the erratic nature of Nature now
due to the climate change and all the things...
So the critical irrigation, for the life saving irrigation, they are using.
Where the crop is almost dying, the chance of crop failure is higher, that time they are using this water
There is more to this pond than meets the eye.
As the water level drops, more planting terraces are revealed that are sub-irrigated by the receding pond water,
so the pond structure itself becomes a planting surface.
A terraced pond also reduces evaporation, because each time the water level drops below a new terrace, the surface area is reduced.
Seepage is also reduced, because there is less surface area of earth as the water level recedes.
Not only the terraces but the embankments are also planted with grasses and vines to stabilize the soil and prevent erosion,
while providing harvests, so every surface of the structure is producing yields.
From Sonra, we travelled to the village of Seja in the district of Purulia, where we found another terraced pond that had been built this last year.
This pond was hand dug by 100 villagers over 90 days, who were very proud of their efforts.
The design for this pond is similar to the previous pond, but the scale is larger.
Wide terraces grow 5 to 6 different crops, and on the embankment they are growing oil crops, pulses, and vegetables in the rainy season.
There are two more terraces below the water level, so as the dry season continues and crops are irrigated, more planting areas are revealed.
I only needed to look over the embankment wall to see the downstream effects,
where there is a thriving crop of mustard, and where the villager's dream of growing rice is now fulfilled.
This pond will enable them to cultivate and irrigate 30 acres of barren land downstream from the pond with enormous benefits to the whole village.
From Seja, we travelled to the village of Gholkund,
to see a 30 acre watershed restoration site that is turning a barren degraded landscape back into a water soaking forest.
We began our tour at the bottom of the project, at the pond that is currently under construction.
Previously, this is fully barren land
So what is our plan is to make independent this plot in terms of water.
More than 125 people of this hamlet, of this village, are actually getting benefit from this overall watershed management project.
So what is the result that we are seeing here -- that there is a seepage
And they are using this runoff water for paddy cultivation.
We have planned for a series of this kind of large water harvesting structures.
They have planned for fisheries and growing season extension also.
The water seeping at the bottom of this project is the result of the work done at the top.
The real innovative part of this project is up the hill and at the top,
where DRCSC is using a technique that was developed by a team of NGO’s
called the 30-40 model for turning a barren ridge back into a diverse forest.
We are at the top. We are at the ridge area right now.
So, what is your watershed? We have to collect all the runoff from ridge to valley.
There is no kind of a structure to harvest the rainfall.
No kind of a structure to harvest the runoff.
So there is less productivity. There is crop failure.
Previously it was a fully barren land. There is nothing. No crop. No productivity. Nothing.
But after doing 30-40 model, you can see here -- there is a huge number of biomass.
More than 20,000 plants are there in this 12 hectare area.
There is biodiversity also bring back this area
The native people -- they are collecting some native foods from this, some mushrooms, rodents, and rabbits for their daily livelihood.
And they use this kind of bushes for their cattle feed.
They placed a grid over the landscape, dividing the ground into sections that are 30 feet on one side and 40 feet on the other.
The sections are divided by mounds, and in the corner of each section, there is a soakage pit.
So when the heavy monsoon rains fall, the runoff hits the berms and soaks into the ground, with any excess runoff being diverted to the soakage pit.
This way, none of the runoff leaves the 30 x 40 area.
And is all soaked into the ground supporting a wide diversity of drought tolerant, seasonal, and perennial plant species.
This is the water harvesting pit I'm standing in
This is a typical pit and you can see, this is the 30-40 area
This is the bund of a 40 feet interval, and this is the bund of another 30 feet interval
So we are in a 1200 square feet area
So, what is the science behind it?
All the runoff; all the excess water of this 1200 square feet, it directly seeps down to this pit.
We have to make the plants independent of outside water.
These plants directly have the water from this recharge pit.
Creating stable water supplies creates stable food supplies and stable villages, communities, and society.
The physical work of DRCSC is really a tool for social justice,
and their choice to work with the poorest and most marginalized communities on the poorest and most marginal lands is what Gandhi himself taught.
Basically, poor community, poorest of the poor community
Basically, they are tribals.
They have to do migration.
Now they have quality of life. They send their children to the school now. They have now a vision for their life.
They don’t use the word permaculture.
We call it ecological agriculture, but it is the same as permaculture.
But I’ve got to say that this is the most effective permaculture organization that I’ve ever seen.
And this video captures only a fragment of their work.
I’ve focussed on water projects here, but the full breadth of their development work is diverse, holistic, and has literally been world-changing for the many villages that they work in.
DRCSC is lifting people out of poverty and ending economic migration using permaculture and ecological agriculture.
They are developing food security, water security, seed banks, composting, biodiverse forests,
healthy fisheries, small animal husbandry, alternative energy sources, cooperative savings groups, and climate change resilience for the people they serve.
DRCSC couldn’t have done all this great work without the support of many international aid organizations, private donors from abroad, the United Nations Climate Change Adaptation Fund, and many Indian government and civil organizations.
And YOU can help support their work as well by donating on their website.
They are truly lifting whole communities from poverty to permaculture.
Like, subscribe, and tune in for the next episode, where we travel to the state of Telangana to the oldest permaculture farm in India,
where Aranya Agricultural Alternatives has turned a wasteland of bare bedrock into a thriving permaculture food forest.
We’ll learn the secrets from Narsanna Koppula of how to turn bedrock into bounty.
So stay tuned!