bamboos and coconut

Bamboos and coconuts
by muniza shariq

Foundation students of srishti school of art design and technology, context 2 went for a 5 days trip to kelpetta in wayanad district of kerala. The basic objective was to get familiar with the working of a NGO and basically get familiar with the communities living there.
overview

§  16^th nov day 1

Uravu head office
bamboo plantations
bamboo nursery

§  17^th nov day 2
neravu
unarvu
sneha
saubhagaya

§  18^th nov  day 3
edakkal cave
museum
waterfall

§  19^th nov day 4
biodiversity terk
kannavu school

§  20^thnov day 5
hands on bamboo

    Uravu
uravu is a place situated in wayand district of kerala, a place with huge coffee and tea plantations but not coming up with a bamboo industry too. Surrounded by foggy hills on all sides and coconut trees further adding up to its beauty this place is recently gaining attention by many tourists. Place is a little backward and lacking a feel of a city, broken roads, no hotels and language barrier are the things people might suffer with.

Reaching kelpetta on the morning of 6 nov at around 5:30am, headed toward M.S. swaminathan research foundation. After resting for couple of hours, left for a NGO called Uravu. Uravu is a NGO started in 1996 by group of people who were searching for alternate way of living, this NGO is located at wayanad district of kerala the reason behind choosing wayanad as their head office is that this place is very backward, there is a decline in small scale commodity production, there is poverty, unemployment and unrest among rural. So the concept behind setting up a bamboo industry is for the well-being of rural, particularly women and adivasis and also because of the easy access to the natural resources. Their goals are ensuring access to natural resources, knowledge, technology, market and marketing. Their main objective was to improve the socio economic status of women. The reason behind choosing bamboo is that bamboo grows rapidly, they grows 3 times faster than the eucalyptus, reaches their full length in 60-120days, can be used as a substitute of wood and the bamboo shoots provide food security. Benefits of cultivating bamboo are they prevent soil erosion. So the annual turnover of the uravu is about 62lakhs. The wayanad has 18 bamboo clusters working and 6 of them are working under uravu.

      clusters

After that we went to 4 clusters namely NERAVU, UNRAVU, SNEHA and SAUBHAGAYA. They all are started around 4-5 years back, initially around 15- 20 people in each but as the years rolled by few left because some got married and some shifted their hoses. But the clusters drastically changed the lives of their employees the families are now getting sufficient income as these cluster mainly employee women. Now women need not to depend on men for their needs, they are independent now. They collect some amount of money weekly/monthly and deposit it in a bank called south Malabar gramin bank, this money they use it to get small small loans and for their personal use. They are paid monthly but the wages are fixed for a day, they don’t get paid leaves except for onam. They usually get orders from urauv and according to that they work, if the order is of a new prodeuct then they all have to undergo week long training before working on the order. All the employees are educated till 12^th std and now their children are perusing higher education, but none of their children are interested in bamboo industry. After they get home none of them carry any sort of work to their home they like spending the evening hours with their families.

      Heritage sites

After that we went to eddakkal caves trekking for few kms we reached eddakkal caves, those caves were estimated to be around 60000 years old they have cave painting on the rocks, those caves paintings depict a sort of story if u look at them carefully. These caves are the proof of the existence of many tribes.

After the caves we went to museum where there were sculptures from main regions of Kerala most of them were sculptures carved out on granite stones and picked from roadside, main subject of the sculptures were related to Hindu mythology, gods and goddess were shown in different form. After museum our next stop was waterfall, that waterfall attract many tourists and even locals, firstly because of the scenic beauty and secondly may people goes there for a bath, that waterfall was of religious importance to many tribal there.

      biodiversity

Moving on to next day we went for a trek in the mountains via forest that forest is under the locals there and there are grown many kinds of medicinal plants there, which are used by the tribal to cure many sort of diseases, that forest not only provides a habitat to flora but also to fauna, other than medicinal plant and medicinally useful plant many species of

Insects, Birds and animals can be found there.

      kanavu

KANAVU, a school run by the tribal, it started in 1998 by K.J.BABY, a social reformer, reformer and a theatre. They raised the issues of the tribal community, make students learn and understands practically then theoretically, for example first they focussed on the history on wayanad and then they went to different places in India to explore their history. But the main problem they are facing right now is the lack of funds this is because the school is not recognised by the government of India and it’s not registered. Due to this they are not getting enough funds to run the school, earlier they used to go in small groups and used to perform and collect money but gradually some people left and they started suffering financial crisis. The problem getting it registered under the government is they have to follow their syllabus, and this school runs on entirely different way of teaching but now they are planning to get is registered because they want to further grow this.

ISSUES AND SOLUTIONS

    uravu

Talking about the uravu group the problem I felt is with marketing their products, they are making product putting in hard work but the thing is that they need to make it popular among the people, unlike other NGO working in craft and textile sector for eg anokhi and fabindia , they are very well known by the folks, they need a proper branding method.

Or they could instead of distributing the things acoordind to the the orders they could start selling them under their name or could sell them to other popular barnds.

     Clusters

Instead of employing only women in the clusters, they could also employ men they will reduce their work load, it will also add on to extra income to their house.

For the issue of people leaving the cluster at a fast rate, the reason behind is because they are getting married, but even if they are getting married they can continue working in there if they are not shifting their houses to a very far place.

      Plantation and nursery

There is no issue about the plantation of bamboo thing but there was one thing which moved me strongly that, even if the land is under the uravu and they deal only with bamboo products but they are not exploiting any natural resources there they are taking care of both the flora and fauna of that area.

      Cave, museum and waterfall

The cave are of the stone age period, despite being ancient still they are in a good state, that is a good thing,  but there are people who don’t respect the heritages of their own country and purposely tries to destroy them by scribbling their names, littering around them and by spitting, though the caves were in a proper state but then also they should be taken care of, the people who are not interested in viewing them they should not be allowed inside them, only those who have keen interest in them should be permitted, also there should be guides there to explain the painting there so that we could relate them and remember them, the caves should be made a bit more interesting.

Also the thing at the entry where are tickets are bought, they put sticker on the plastic water bottle and take some money, if you after visiting the caves return that sticker back then you will get your money back, in this way they are protecting that nature trek from the plastic bottle littering, in a way making it a plastic free zone.

Museum on the other hand is having a good collection of craved stones, sculptures, rocks, weapons and idols, but the information provided there was very insufficient, even the guide was talking in Malayalam and that was creating a language barrier which in turn made us disinterested, a need of good English speaking guides are mandatory there or audio guides will also work.

Everything was pretty good and decent no issue, also the good thing that to minimise plastic littering they take out your water bottles. This thing has moved me a lot and I think this should be implemented all over India

    Kanauv school

The main problem they are facing right now is insufficient funds, so because of this they are not able to take this school on a higher level. There is no solution to this problem until and unless they get it recognised by the government or they get funds.