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The Village Classroom: Rural Indian Women Can Teach About Climate Resilience, Fight For Survival

“On International Women’s Day, I acknowledge and thank those rural women who taught me about climate resilience, environment protection, and how to fight for survival. “

Special on International Women’s Day

It was during a reporting assignment that I found myself in a tribal village on the Bihar and Jharkhand border. It was inside the forests, an area once known for Maoist activities. I met Soni Murmu there who told me about her tryst with YouTube.

Soni, a madhu palak (bee keeper), lives in Rasuiya village with her husband, a farmer, and their son, who is in middle school. Soni herself has not gone to school. But that has in no way stopped her from running a flourishing honey business from her village in Banka district of Bihar and through an all-women FPO (farmer producer organisation). The honey she produces goes to clients as far as Mumbai.

Intrigued, I asked the Santhal Adivasi woman, who in the back of beyond village taught her bee-keeping and the business of honey.

“YouTube,” she replied. “Whenever I am free, I watch videos on the phone [smartphone] to learn new things. I used to watch videos on bee-keeping on YouTube, and during the pandemic when my husband had no work, I decided to try my hands at bee-keeping,” Soni smiled shyly.

I was surprised. Here was Soni, who was breaking down all preconceived notions of the tribal women living in remote corners of the country. She was strong, confident and efficiently running an enterprise, and had plans to add more bee boxes to her business.

Women farmers of village Kedia, Jamui district in Bihar. Photo/Nidhi Jamwal

Rural women constitute 48 percent of the country’s total rural population of 833 million (which is more than the total population of Europe at 742 million). But women from the villages in the country make it to mainstream media either when they are raped and murdered, or when a handful of them are picked to receive the Padma Awards. The rest of them live out their days in oblivion.

But time and again, as an environmental journalist, I have experienced something different. It is the rural and tribal women who have taught me some very important lessons in conservation and resilience, and what they know about ‘climate resilience’, would fill books.

In 2017, I travelled in north Bihar to report on floods. There, in Sahorwa village, in Ghongephur panchayat of Saharsa district, I saw what every other visitor to the Musahar (colloquially referred to as rat eaters) village of an extremely marginalised Mahadalit community saw. Poverty, open defecation, naked children running around on the kachcha lanes…

The author holding holding a kid goat in village Kedia, Jamui district of Bihar. Photo/Yash Sachdev

But, it was the women there who sat me down on a charpoy and it was there that I learnt all about the flood-compatible paddy variety, the indigenous desariya dhan, that they cultivated and ate. In that classroom under a tree, the ‘unlettered’ women of Sahorwa taught me about climate resilient crops that grew right there on their flooded fields not too far from my charpoy.

Sahorwa lies between the embankments of two major rivers in north Bihar – Kosi and Kamla Balan. Surrounded by water, its farmlands remain inundated under several feet of water levels for seven to eight months in a year making regular farming practices impossible.

This has led to the menfolk migrating in search of work. The community is so poor that buying foodgrains from outside is an expensive dream. But the women manage with the wisdom and lived experiences of a community that has lived in want for hundreds of years. They have lived with floods for centuries and have evolved their lifestyles, livelihoods and eating habits around it.

Desariya paddy, which they cultivate, is supposed to have evolved from the wild rice varieties grown in eastern Indo-Gangetic plains. It grows in flood conditions, and is hardy and nutritious. The coarse grains of desariya rice come in three varieties – white grain, black grain, and a mix of black-white grain. The latter is also known as cheeta or barogar dhan.

When I asked my teachers if they sold the desariya rice they grew, they laughed at my question. “Desariya dhan is a poor man’s rice. It is coarse and doesn’t look good. Why will anyone buy it? There are better rice varieties in the market. Also, we are able to grow only enough to feed our families.”

A woman drying cow-dung cakes to be used as fuel for cooking in village Kedia, Jamui district of Bihar. Photo/Nidhi Jamwal

Rice aside, those women also have a local source of rich protein in their diet – ghongha (freshwater snail). The women stand in the chest-deep waters of their flooded fields and catch them.

Over 150 kilometres south of Saharsa district, across the Ganges in south Bihar, lies Kedia village in Jamui district. Here the women have helped turn their village into an organic village, and they also generate biogas which is used as a cooking fuel in their kitchens. Women feel strongly for organic farming as they are the ones, who do most farm labour work and are concerned about the health and nutrition of their children.

Those of us who churn out reports on climate change, climate vulnerability, adaptation and mitigation strategies from our comfortable offices and homes have much to learn from rural women. I know I learnt so much from the women of Sahorwa and Kedia and even Rasuiya. About preserving and cultivating indigenous and climate resilient varieties of crops, improving the health of soils and their families, and displaying remarkable resilience in the face of climate change and the ravages of floods.

This is not to discount the biases and discrimination rural women face. I know that the women I spoke to in Sahorwa battled prejudice of class, caste and gender. But, they are not taking things lying down. They continue to be a repository of traditional knowledge. And, while it may not be widely acknowledged, they are the backbone of our rural agrarian economy. Solutions to many of the complex problems of climate change and ecological destruction will come from the lived experiences of these women and their cumulative learnings.

In December 2022, Gaon Connection released a report titled 50 Success Stories of Rural Women in the Pandemic, which has documented several such stories of women. The book is available for a free download. Go ahead, download and read it to celebrate International Women’s Day!

*Nidhi Jamwal is a journalist based in Mumbai. She writes on environment, climate, and rural issues.

Courtesy: Kashmir Times

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