This is P. Sainath once again asking not just Indians, but human beings to reflect for a minute on farmer suicides in India.

256,949

(Read full post at The Hindu) It means over a quarter of a million Indian farmers have committed suicide since 1995. It means the largest wave of recorded suicides in human history has occurred in this country in the past 16 years. It means one-and-a-half million human beings, family members of those killing themselves, have been tormented by the tragedy. While millions more face the very problems that drove so many to suicide. It means farmers in thousands of villages have seen their neighbours take this incredibly sad way out. A way out that more and more will consider as despair grows and policies don’t change. It means the heartlessness of the Indian elite is impossible to imagine, leave alone measure.

Note that these numbers are gross underestimates to begin with. Several large groups of farmers are mostly excluded from local counts. Women, for instance. Social and other prejudice means that, most times, a woman farmer killing herself is counted as suicide — not as a farmer’s suicide. Because the land is rarely in a woman’s name.

A sculpture made from plastic bottles discarded at a yoga retreat becomes an artist’s environmental plea to save the severely polluted Yamuna River (Read the genesis of ‘Indra’s Cloud’ and the  full slideshow at Anne’s site)

Unfortunately the plea is practically insignificant in the bigger picture that is bottled water:

Bottled water produces up to 1.5 million tons of plastic waste per year. According to Food and Water Watch, that plastic requires up to 47 million gallons of oil per year to produce. And while the plastic used to bottle beverages is of high quality and in demand by recyclers, over 80 percent of plastic bottles are simply thrown away. (More at MNN)

Indra's Cloud, Vrindavan

One person. One vision. That’s all it takes to take on a challenge and succeed.

(1080 films) Dr Chris Reij of Vrij University Amsterdam who has followed Yacouba’s work over the past 25 years had this to say of his achievements:

Yacouba single-handedly has had more impact on…conservation than all the national and international researchers put together..In this region tens of thousands of hectares of land that was completely unproductive has been made productive again thanks to the techniques of Yacouba

DianaEl-Osta, Development & Production National Geographic Channels, International:

I think Yacouba’s story is both incredibly timely and important given the current crisis in many parts of the world with desertification.  It is also rare to find a conservation story with such an upbeat and inspirational ending.

We’re in a Rally To Restore Sanity frame of mind. A perfect state of mind the day before midterm elections in the US. In honor of sanity we’re not watching the 24-hr news pundits yelling about America’s most popular contact sport – politics. A perfect time to check what else goes on in the world outside the wells we live in.

Andrew Sullivan points us to this Global Reality Check, at worldometers.info – world statistics on health, population, society & Media, Energy/Food/Water consumption and many other counters updated real time. Tally up the numbers and we discover that some 50+ million people around the world have died this year so far, from lack of food and water, to disease and road accidents. The statistics are updated real time, but here’s a snapshot as of this writing.

Makes us pause to wonder why we bellyache over trivial things doesn’t it?

Here is an amazing turnaround story of Hiware Bazar, a village in Maharashtra that must be read in its entirety at thesolutionsjournal.com

All it took was one man Popatrao Pawar, to inspire the people in his village, create a self-sustaining plan with watershed development at its core, and smartly utilize Government funded programs.

Excerpt below:

Watershed management worked in Hiware because the village plan was a well thought out, integrated ecological plan. It first treated the forests, the catchments for the village wells. Then it addressed water conservation, and soil conservation followed this [...]

Today, the number of wells is 217, up from 97. Courtesy of the watershed works, grass production went up from 100 metric tons in 2000 to 6,000 metric tons in 2004. According to a household survey conducted in 1995, 168 families out of 180 were below the poverty line (BPL); the number of BPL families had shrunk to 53 in the survey conducted in 1998. There are now only three BPL families in Hiware Bazar out of 216. The state government spent a total of about 4,200,000 rupees (about $90,000) on EGS in the village. Treating 2,471 acres of land, the per-acre cost of treatment was about 17,000 rupees ($370). But in terms of raising village residents’ incomes, the cost benefits were phenomenal.