The Land of Tea

The capitol of the Nilgiris district of the southern-most Indian state of Tamil Nadu is Udhagamandalam, or Ooty for those who can't pronounce the full name. Nilgiris means "blue mountains" in Tamil. Indeed, the Nilgiris are a bluish hue - outside of the protected forest areas much of the natural vegetation has been cleared for eucalyptus stands and tea plantations, reflecting green-ish blue light across the hillsides.

Ooty is home to a number of NGOs and government offices dealing with conservation issues in the Nilgiris.  We sought out a few for interviews. A Mudumali national park wildlife officer told us that the three greatest threats to the park were poaching, invasive species, and forest fire. In previous years poaching was a huge problem, but recent government-run programs to employ villagers as anti-poaching watchers have brought improvements. Lantana, a bushy shrub, and parthenium, a toxic plant in the aster family, are the region's two worst invasive species, affecting food webs, agriculture, and human and animal health. Lantana, along with recent erratic rainfall, has made the park more susceptible to forest fires. The wildlife officer shared stories of his efforts to increase the park's fire management capacity, as well as to start programs to provide sustainable vocational training for local adivasi youth. He also revealed that, as is the case with many of India's national parks and protected areas, there are currently about 300 families living inside the park. India's conservation protocols require that these people be relocated (for more on this controversial issue see the post on the Biligiri Rangaswamy Temple Wildlife Sanctuary).  In a deal many are calling the "golden handshake", the government has offered families living in the park 10 lakh rupees (1 million rupees or about 21 thousand dollars) as well as land outside the reserve as incentive to leave. By all accounts this is a great deal. However for many families, the emotional and historic significance of their ancestral home in the park outweighs the financial benefits of moving.

Making our way to Ooty's sister town of Kotagiri, we met with the director of the Keystone Foundation, a natural resource and rural development NGO that has been working in the Nilgiris since 1995. The Keystone Foundation emphasizes the need to include local people in natural resource management decision-making. Its work includes reviving natural vegetation, environmental governance, documenting indigenous knowledge of biodiversity and local cultural practices, and promoting the sustainable harvest of non-timber forest products such as honey, beeswax and fruit. The Keystone Foundation also works to implement the 2006 Forest Rights Act, a piece of legislation restoring rights of forest use back to traditional forest dwellers and indigenous people. This legislation, enacted by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, is seen as a threat by the Forest Department, an entrenched bureaucracy with a history of managing forest land for timber revenue rather than wildlife or the livelihoods of local people. The story of the Forest Rights Act and the Forest Department is a fascinating one that I will discuss in a subsequent post.

Tea cultivation plays an important role in the economy and ecology of the Nilgiris. The state government, under pressure to increase local incomes and standards of living, provides subsidies of 60,000 rupees per acre for tea cultivation and has ambitious plans to expand production. However the Keystone Foundation maintains that this incentive system leads to superficial land values and no recognition of the significance of the greater landscape. A lack of rules promoting soil and water conservation results in loss of trees and soil through erosion.  The money spent on tea subsidies would be better spent encouraging the cultivation of local millets that have less environmental impact and increased food sustainability benefits.  But tea cultivation provides reliable income for 10 months of the year, and it is much more difficult to quantify the benefits of preserving traditional crops and intact ecosystems.    

Deciding our understanding of the Nilgiri biosphere reserve was incomplete without seeing tea production up close, we talked our way into an impromptu tour of one of Kotagiri's big plantations. The tea warehouse was a massive dimly lit space, filled with giant steel machines and the fragrant aroma of Nilgiri tea. Sunlight from the skylights filtered down through motes of tea dust permeating the air. A fine film of tea layered every surface and clogged every knook and cranny of the machines.

Tea leaves are plucked by hand and carried into the processing warehouse, where they are left to wither for a number of hours under fans.  This tea factory used the CTC method (crush, tear and curl) to process their product.  After being bruised and fermented, the tea leaves are then passed through a machine with cylindrical rollers with sharp teeth that, yup, you guessed it, crush, tear, and curl the leaves.  Over 80% of tea production in India is of this sort and is suitable for use in teabags or for the loose tea used in making the ubiquitous Indian chai.  CTC tea produced in the Nilgiris has mild tannin, a generic flavor, and is low cost, contributing to its popularity in the Indian domestic market.  

West Bengal Farmer Consultation

One of the two projects on which I'm working with TERI deals with how climate change affects water resource availability in north-central India. The project has multiple components being handled by several partner institutions in India and Europe and includes climate and water modeling, socioeconomic scenario development, field visits and stakeholder consultations. In brief, the idea is to 1) downscale global climate model projections to a more useful regional level, 2) use these regional predictions to model the likely impacts on water resource availability (both in terms of glacial melt and monsoon precipitation patterns, 3) think about how things like population growth, income change, and urbanization over the next 50 years will interact with changing water resource availability, and 4) to go talk to people in a couple of case study sites to better understand the local situation and what climate change may look like in that particular place. Finally, 5) wrap it all up with a bunch of reports/workshops/information-sharing.  

All the case study sites for this project are in the Ganges river basin. The Ganges river has a significance in India that is difficult for westerners to understand. It is a holy river in Hinduism, worshiped as the goddess Ganga. Over 400 million people live in the river's catchment area, making it the most heavily populated watershed in the world.  Stretching from the Himalaya in northern India through the Gangetic plain to the Bay of Bengal, the Ganges is a critical artery through the subcontinent with massive cultural, biological, and agricultural importance.  

         From http://dilipkumar.in/india/rivers/ganga_purity.php  

The four case study sites were selected to represent a variety of agricultural landscapes within the basin. The district of Udham Singh Nagar in Uttarakhand state is in the upper basin. From the middle basin are the sites of Delhi and Allahabad, in Uttar Pradesh state.  And in the lower basin is the town of Kharagpur, near Kolkata in West Bengal state.

In March I attended a community consultation in a village near the Kharagpur case study site. Rousting ourselves early from our guest house at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, we drove for 3 hours to a village in Midnapore West district.  Our first meeting with about 10 district-level officials and agricultural scientists was held in the local Krishi Vigyan Kendra (KVK), an agricultural extension office run by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research.  The researchers from IIT Kharagpur and TERI explained how we were there to learn from the local experts and to connect on-the-ground fact-finding and human stories with the output of the impersonal computer models. For the next hour, the researchers lead the workshop participants through a discussion of what environmental problems were impacting agriculture in the area and what some possible solutions might be.  

Overall, the participants were fairly pessimistic. The discussion focused on the increasing cost of cultivation due to both labor shortages and small land holdings.  Poor farm laborers are migrating to the city in search of better jobs, leaving insufficient manpower to cultivate even the small plots of land held by most families. Efficiencies of scale through mechanization are impossible due to the high cost of equipment and the small farm size. The area is highly water-stressed - the water table has been over-exploited and the local characteristics of the soil make recharge a very slow process.  Rainwater harvesting has been going on in the area since 2005, but the structures are very expensive to build. Increasing temperature and decreasing humidity have negativity affected the cultivation of fodder grasses for livestock, impacting the health of cattle.

The participants were also very pessimistic about the ability of the government to help them.  They also questioned the value of our visit. Over the years, many NGOs and researchers have come to ask about their problems. But then off they go to publish their papers, never to return with assistance or information.  I felt very self-conscious during this discussion - a large white lady expressing intellectual curiosity but with very little understanding of the problems these people face every day. Although none of these problems can be firmly attributed to climate change, these issues are vulnerabilities that decrease the resiliency of the area to the eventual inevitable climate change impacts.  

The Krishi Vigyan Kendra office 

IIT Kharagpur researchers consulting with the district-level officials 

The district level meeting concluded with lunch - dal, rice, and vegetable stew delivered from the kitchen in massive buckets. We all sat at long tables, shoveling up the sticky mixture with our fingers and depositing it in our mouths with the minimum of mess.  Eating rice and gravy with your fingers is very much an acquired skill, and more of my rice may have ended up on my face and the table than in my mouth.  I asked one of the Indian researchers why people ate with their fingers when spoons, which are not exactly advanced technology, are not hard to come by.  "When you eat with your hands, you enjoy your food more" was the answer.  "The feel of the rice in your fingers enhances the experience, and allows you to eat with an additional sense, the sense of touch".  

After lunch, it was time to consult with the farmers themselves.  The KVK officials had recruited about 20 farmers to come and share their experiences with us.  Their comments were much the same as the district level officials.  They told of increased problems with elephants raiding their crops and of high-energy rain events that it was impossible to store and that just ran off straight into the ocean.  Rice seeds had failed to germinate in recent years due to high temperatures.  Overuse of chemical fertilizers and pesticides had killed all the earthworms, causing a decline in vermiculture.

The farmers were much more enthusiastic about the session than the district level officials had been.  They seemed ecstatic to have such a strange group of people interested in hearing about their problems.  We tried to communicate clearly that we didn't have anything to give them, that we were just here to learn.  They accepted this, and were still excited to share their story.

Last activity of the day: to visit the village.  One farmer guided our research group through a sal forest plantation to his family's fields.  And there it was, iron-age agriculture.  Buffalo-driven plows and hand-picked potatoes.  And in the village, mud huts with equal proportions of wide-eyed children and goats peering out of them.  More than half of India's 1.2 billion people live in rural villages such as this. This is the real India, and seeing it first hand, far removed from the tourist sites most visitors to India experience, was uniquely special.

Disclaimer: Before I inadvertently give the impression that my Hindi is amazing, I should reveal that due to the mixed language abilities of our group, simultaneous translation of most comments occured in Hindi, Bangla, English and Dutch.  Fortunately for me, I can speak at least one of these languages fluently.