Category — India

Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture (UA and UPA)
West Bengal State Agriculture Commission – Government of West Bengal
March 2009
Annexure Item 20, page 725

Preamble

With rapid urbanization in the past few decades, already half the world population lives in towns and cities. These occupy less than 2% of the earth’s surface, but use 75% of the earth’s resources. The per capita resource consumption of urban areas is thus 3 times that of rural areas. Considering the alarming rate of depletion and degradation of natural resources, the sustainability of the present path of urbanization, with its high ‘ecological footprint’, is questionable, even in the medium term.

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Mumbai Port Trust Garden receives Friends of The Trees first prize for its Terrace Garden at the Central Kitchen from the hands of the Governor of Maharashtra, in Durbar Hall At Raj Bhavan.

This garbage dump doesn’t raise a stink. Rather, it helps produce exotic fruits, vegetables and flowers. Lekha Menon meets city farmers who have mastered the art of making the most out of waste.

By Lekha Menon
April 05, 2009
Mumbai Mirror

At 80, Y V Damle conducts laughter therapy classes for women at Hindu colony, Dadar East. But the “fees” for his efforts is rather interesting – a bag of garbage! On other occasions, he trudges to the Dadar sabzi mandi where, along with greens and fruits, he asks the vendors to pack in vegetable peels and sundry rubbish. All of which find their way into plastic bags, drums and laundry baskets in his terrace where the retired BMC engineer farms for veggies, fruits and flowers.

Sounds incredible? But that’s exactly what the magic of city farming is all about. Like Damle, quite a few Mumbaikars are recycling waste to generate organic farm products right in their homes. Not just an effective method of waste management, these green thumbs believe, this form of urban agriculture is just what the eco-doctor ordered for solving critical food security issues.

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Photo: Nyandarva boarding primary school in Kenya, Rift Valley Province.
© 2004 Didier Ruef

“Over 20,000 children and young people, 400 teachers, with many families and communities (we estimate about 50,000 people in total) in four continents in four continents have participated in garden-based teaching and learning and community action and have come to generate new ways of learning about, and living in, an uncertain modern world.”

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By Anand Pendharkar
August 14, 2008
Visits a 3000 sq ft terrace kitchen garden in Ghadiyal Godi (Victoria Dock) of the Mumbai Port Trust, India

I walked out on the terrace of the catering department and entered through a canopy of climbers into a heaven of chikoos, guavas, bananas, coconuts, lemons, mint, bhindis and a 120 other varieties of trees, shrubs, herbs, climbers standing in drums and plastic baskets right on the roof of the building. I saw that the plants had not only food value but also immense medicinal and ornamental values.

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Photo by Belinda Pryse. Elephant plant holders at Hyderabad hotel.

BBC’s OnePlanet: Farming in the City
By Andrew Luck-Baker
24 July 2008

Andrew Luck-Baker investigates the pros and cons of urban farming in India. Hyderabad is a city with a booming IT industry. Its streets are also home to thirty thousand buffalo – the animals behind the Indian city’s booming urban dairy businesses. But are the two compatible in a fast modernising city? And is re-using Hyderabad’s polluted waste water to grow vegetables good environmental practice – or a danger to consumers?

Link to BBC Hyderabad podcast.

“Dr. B. N. Vishwanath, a pioneer in promoting urban agriculture in India, said that the only way to counter the health hazards of chemical poisons in food is to take up organic terrace gardening.

“With the pressure on farmlands and its rising cost in the urbanisation process, there is hardly any space to have a garden. This is where terraces come into the picture, he says.

“Giving some alarming information, Indian Institute of Horticulture Research (IIHR) scientist Dr. M. Prabhakar says that vegetables grown in the peri-urban area around Bangalore contain higher chemical residues than what is accepted at the international level. Presence of sewage and heavy metal effluents in water used for irrigation purposes and chemical pesticides render the yield unfit for human consumption.”

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