Thousands of families in Indian villages have better nutrition - and lives - thanks to a partnership between the U of A and the father of India's 'Green Revolution.
A visitor emerges from a car in rural India and walks toward a group of villagers. The sound of drums and cymbals fills the air as three dozen men, women and children start to sing. The visitor, U of A development economist Brent Swallow, looks a little bewildered but keeps walking, his step slowing as he takes in the sound and spectacle.
Two women place garlands around his neck and wash his feet. Swallow clasps his hands to show gratitude. As he walks deeper into the village, the villagers walk with him. The traditional welcoming ceremony continues, music as loud as ever, and two men begin to dance. One insists that Swallow join them and, after some hesitation, he sheds his western inhibitions and dances with his hosts.
Welcome to the heart of India
Swallow is visiting the village of Ghiuriaguda, in the Koraput District of the state of Odisha, as co-lead of the Alleviating Poverty and Malnutrition project, a partnership between the Faculty of Agricultural, Life & Environmental Sciences and the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation. The partnership came about through conversations with Monkombu Sambasivan Swaminathan, '10 DSc(Honorary), after he received his honorary degree from the U of A.
The three-year, $4.9-million program runs initiatives in three of India's 26 states, developing and testing agricultural interventions designed to improve people's lives - specifically their nutrition and their opportunities to generate additional income. Funding comes from the International Development Research Centre, a Crown corporation that helps developing countries with projects such as this one, and the Canadian International Development Agency.
Tangible benefits
Swaminathan's genetic discoveries in the 1960s led to a several-fold increase in India's wheat and rice yields. Sitting in his foundation office in Chennai, India, he says the country has all the resources it needs to feed its 1.2 billion people, yet hunger and extreme poverty continue.
"It's a national shame," thunders the normally soft-spoken Swaminathan. "We call it the Indian enigma."
Those involved with the Alleviating Poverty and Malnutrition project are working to solve this enigma.
Researchers work with Indian farmers to introduce different types of interventions aimed at improving their nutrition and income - providing seeds to grow fresh vegetables in home gardens, supplying treadle pumps for easier irrigation, testing different rice and cassava seeds to improve yields, building fish ponds or providing machines to grind millet.
Overall, the interventions have touched more than 2,000 households in each of the three states where the project is running.
In Manjalpatti, a village of 18 households in southern India's Kolli Hills, a young mother of four who introduces herself as Annakkili, wife of Kaalidass, describes through an interpreter how the project has helped her family. Now that they've been eating more fresh, green vegetables from their home garden, she has noticed her children have more energy.
Her own health is improving, too. She feels better, she says, and a recent visit to the doctor revealed that her hemoglobin levels have improved. Other women listening to the conversation - each with a home garden - nod their heads.
Farther north in the state of Odisha, in a small house in the village of Samarathguda, Chandrama Mali, a widow and the mother of two adult children, is grinding rice into flour so her mother-in-law can bake little treats to sell for additional income. Sitting beside a well just steps from their house are two newly installed treadle pumps, which Mali and her neighbours use to irrigate the nearby four hectares of crop fields. To work the pumps, villagers step up and down on treadles that drive pistons to draw water to the surface.
Before the pumps were installed, Mali, who owns and cultivates about a half a hectare, had to scoop water from the bottom of the 12-metre-deep well by hand - a process that was both labour-intensive and dangerous.
Pieces of the puzzle
In the end, of course, a single intervention - or even a series of them - won't unravel the Indian enigma.
Swallow and project co-lead Nat Kav, plant biologist and associate dean of the Department of Agricultural, Food and Nutritional Science, point out that some interventions may be successful in some areas but not others.
"That's part of the puzzle," says Swallow, chair of the U of A's Department of Resource Economics and Environmental Sociology. "What works for some people in the Kolli Hills may be completely inappropriate for people in the Odisha and vice versa. It can even vary from village to village."
Yet Swallow, who spent 25 years working in international development before coming to the U of A, is optimistic. Ultimately, he says, the real success of the project will be measured by whether villagers adopt and continue the new practices once the project ends as scheduled in August 2014.
"We're getting some very good, very positive feedback from the [Indian] participants," he says. "It's looking good … really good."
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