Category — India

V. Y. Wilankar in her terrace garden in densely populated urban India.

With bursting populations and high food prices, the food security of urban dwellers is approaching a crossroads

By Nisha Kumar Kulkarni
Beyond Profit
May 19, 2011

Excerpts:

Sustainability, however, remains a challenge for urban agriculture, as does its scalability.

“People throw around the word ‘sustainable’ a lot in our field,” says Peters. “Urban agriculture is absolutely sustainable in the sense that it does not require the inputs of fossil fuels or chemical fertilizers.”

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Nearly 200,000 farmers have committed suicide in India over the last 10 years

But the mainstream media hardly reflects this.

Nero’s Guests is a story about India’s agrarian crisis and the growing inequality seen through the work of the Rural Affairs Editor of Hindu newspaper, P Sainath.

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Green revolution Gynaecologist Deepali Prabhat and entrepreneur Vipul Sanghvi prepare compost soil at Maharashtra Nature Park. Photo by Vikas Munipalle.

Across Mumbai, Pune and Bengaluru, a movement is taking roots: citydwellers growing food on terraces, balconies and wall spaces.

By Sunaina Kumar
Tehelka Magazine
Apr 2, 2011

Excerpt:

There is nothing unusual about the Bandra street — cramped, grimy, choked by traffic — that Adrienne Thadani lives in. Up above, though, on the terrace of Thadani’s building, the cheerily painted walls offer the perfect setting to her rooftop garden. Here grow crisp lettuce, cucumber, spinach, okra and ripe red cherry tomatoes. The fresh fruits and vegetables here look sprightly, as if a testimony to the audacity of hope.

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The children were first shown how to loosen the soil and clearing it of stones

Organic Conversations blog
Dec. 2010

Excerpts:

For the last couple of weeks, some of us at the Bangalore Terrace Gardens (BTG) group had been discussing the possibility of community farming with children and today we finally made a start.

It was interesting to watch the children in such a setting. They were keen to help, yet unsure of how to proceed. As one mother shared, ‘ They are so eager to help then why are they being so hesitant to step on the soil or make furrows, etc?” And as we realised, it holds an important learning for us – that the disconnect between today’s children and the earth around them is so real that unless we make efforts like this to familiarise them with it, they will fail to see any connection at all.

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Urban Leaves India
Dec 5, 2010

Early morning on 28th Nov 2010, saw enthusiastic members of the Park join Urban Leaves volunteers at the inaugural heap making day at Nana Nani Park. This is the second Community Urban Farm initiated in Mumbai city by the Urban Leaves Volunteers. The first being at Maharashtra Nature Park.

The project at the Nana Nani Park funded by the Nana Nani Foundation is aimed at providing a green activity of composting organic waste, growing herbal, medicinal plants and veggies in the Natueco way. This activity is mainly for the senior citizen members of the park.

See more photos here.

Fruits Of Labour: Deepak Heilekar, another urban farming guru, on his terrace garden. Photograph by Apoorva Salkade.

Radish On The Rooftop

By Smita Mitra
Outlook India
October 2010

Excerpt:

For A.M. Malati, who runs her own detective agency in Chennai, as well as an organic farm and a bee farm to boot, it was a heaven-sent opportunity to share her expertise and meet other enthusiasts. Like Moonstar Kaur, for example. Hailing from Chandigarh, this Indie-filmmaker has been growing veggies at her joint-family homestead and also on a plot of land her family owns in the middle of the city. “I think I am the only city farmer in Chandigarh,” she says ruefully. But in nearby Ludhiana, she discovered fellow urban farming buffs, Dinesh and Meenakshi, who grew veggies in broken neon signs and wooden crates.

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Seeks to become a nation-wide movement

By Vinita
Citizen Matters
Sept. 16, 2010

Excerpts:

The recently concluded two-day national seminar on Organic Terrace Gardening at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) Alumni Association Convention Centre, Hebbal was in all respects a great meeting point and a good start to a process that seeks to become a nation-wide movement.

One of the primary objectives of organising such a seminar was to ensure that organic terrace gardening spreads as a movement across the country, rather than merely as a hobby or passion for a select few. There was also a need felt to bring together like-minded practitioners, individuals and institutions on a common platform and use the momentum to take the process forward.

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Charchil Jain with a small plant on terrace in Hiran Magri Scheme.

Farming In City! Farming Without A Field! Is This possible?

By Mr. Manish Jain
Udaipur Times
September 8, 2010
Mr. Manish Jain is an educationist and environmentalist. He is an active member of Swaraj University and runs Shikshantar, a community organization in Udaipur.

Excerpt:

It is not only possible, but it is a growing movement in Udaipur. Shikshantar, a community organization, has been working with interested individuals to produce fruits and vegetables at their homes. Healthy, holistic living is rare in the city, but now a clean, self-sustaining city is possible and growing our own food is a major step in this direction.

“We have built our homes over soil and greenery, so we should grow greenery on our terraces to replace what we have destroyed,” says Vishal Singh, a zero waste consultant, who has planted many plants on his terrace near Gantaghar.

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J-garden, Kitchen Garden Installations, Susapta Garden at Bank Colony, Bangalore.

J-garden, Kitchen Garden Installations

By Vinita
Citizen Matters
06 Sept. 2010

Excerpt:

Having understood the basic principles of urban farming, he started his own research and experimented with various models which has now taken shape as J-garden, a social enterprise. J-Garden provides kitchen garden installations and related equipment.

Over the last six months, Chandra has done eight installations for families in individual homes and apartments and one for a group of social engineers in a bank colony.

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Cobra.

Cobras and the Russel’s viper are responsible for the close to 20,000 yearly snake bite deaths in India. Many of these fatalities occur because of the Cobras’ appetite for rats. It’s not uncommon for the snakes to lay in wait for the rodents inside a home or a hut. If a human gets in the way the encounter usually proves fatal.

The Big Four are the four venomous snake species considered to be responsible for the greatest number of human deaths caused by snakebite in South Asia.

Indian cobra, Naja naja, probably the most famous of all Indian snakes.
Common krait, Bungarus caeruleus
Russell’s viper, Daboia russelii.
Saw-scaled viper, Echis carinatus.

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Garden at our DRCSC – Development Research Communication and Services Centre – rooftop, Kolkata, India

By Anshuman Das, Shankar
Bhattacharya, DRCSC
20.08.2010

Excerpt:

Our office is on the middle of a crowded city, Kolkata. (formerly called Calcutta, the city is classified as the eighth largest urban agglomeration in the world.) Though we work with sustainable agriculture in rural West Bengal, we hardly experience any greenery when we are in the city.

We have a very small space on our rooftop, but we are growing a garden there throughout the year. This year, we have gardened systematically. We focused more on the design aspects in order to set a model for how a small space can be planted vertically to produce a good amount of vegetables.

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Banashankari resident Jagadish Shri set up his own terrace garden where he grows organic vegetables like beans and carrots. Photoby Chetan Boray.

Does growing vegetables on your rooftop seem a bit far-stretched? Meet Banashankari resident Jagadish Shri who does exactly this with his own organic terrace garden.

By Vinita
Citizen Matters
August 13, 2010

Excerpt:

Meet 44-year-old Jagadish Shri, whose entry into organic terrace gardening more than a year ago was, well…organic! Having set up a rainwater harvesting (RWH) system at his independent house in Banashankari 2nd stage, he was wondering what he could experiment with next. He was also concerned about the high pricing of organic food, when a visitor to his blog pointed him to organic terrace gardening and a company that helps set up such gardens.

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Moonstar visits a terrace with a veggie garden

Moonstar Kaur Doad visits the home of Meenakshi and Dinesh, a couple who enjoy growing their own vegetables organically on their terrace, and share great tips with us in this video.

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At Mahim’s Nature Park, horticulture enthusiasts can grow a variety of fruits and vegetables.

Professionals by week, they turn farmers by weekend at the city’s first community farm, where they use an experimental technique to grow a variety of fruits and vegetables

Lekha Menon
Mumbai Mirror
July 10, 2010

It’s a curious group of Mumbaikars that meets every weekend at the lush environs of Maharashtra Nature Park (MNP) near Dharavi. Armed with soil, kitchen waste, saplings and seeds, they assemble at the park at a rather early hour in the day to become farming students. And the platform for their experimentation is also unique – a 500 sq ft concrete slab over a water tank that serves as a base for growing the most sought-after vegetables and fruits available in the market.

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Flower Sherbet. The lad from Udaipur brought enthusiasm and ideas galore. Upon his suggestion we went for a neighbourhood flower gathering spree and returned to make the first batch of hibiscus sherbet.

Secret Sacred Garden

By Moonstar Kaur Doad
Urban Organic Farmer
Punjab, Chandigarh, India

Flower Sherbet

Soak 35 flowers in 1 kg lemon juice for 6 hours approximately. Squeeze the juice out with a muslin cloth and mix 1 kg powdered sugar. Voila. Ready for the summer, instant hit with friends and family.

Only job remains to return to the neighbours with small bottled sherbet, so they realise the importance of their gardens and hopefully inspire them to start sher-betting!

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Organic shift: Veggies sprout on home rooftops; FTII has a patch too

Ranjani Raghavan
Indian Express – Pune
Mar 15, 2010

Less than two months ago, a small vegetable patch came up on the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) campus on Law College Road. Those running the boys’ hostel mess planted vegetables like cabbage, spinach, fenugreek (methi), chilli, and tomatoes. Recently, they harvested at least 6-7 kgs of fenugreek, enough for a meal for the students at the mess.

The mess gets its supplies from designated organic vendors around the city. “Our aim is to ensure we are able to sustain ourselves as much as possible with our own vegetables,” said Shammi Nanda, part of the team that runs the boys hostel mess at FTII.

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Students of MET Rishikul Vidalaya gardening in their school.

Fed up with food grown with chemical fertilisers, ecologically concerned Mumbaiites are taking to terrace farming and more

Humaira Ansari reports
DNA Daily News
Mumbai, India
March 20, 2010

Food inflation, hoarding of grains, Bt brinjal… Food has dominated national headlines for quite some time now. But while most choose to whine, a few are making a choice about what lands on their plate. Some are opting for organic food, others growing their own vegetables and herbs.

Preeti Patil, 42, donned the farmer’s hat when she transformed the 3,000sqft terrace of the Mumbai Port Trust’s central kitchen into a mini-farm. The intention was to recycle the garbage generated at the canteen daily. Today, the terrace garden grows over 100 varieties of fruits, vegetables and flowers. Sugarcane, tamarind, guava, mint, banana, corn, cashew nut, orange and mustard harmoniously coexist here. Butterflies and moths only enrich the biodiversity.

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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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