Prayaan: A journey to Ladakh and Within (Part 2)

It took us close to 2 and a half hours to reach this village from the town. The road to Umla was smooth and without any potholes or abrupt break-aways like the ones that have usually greeted me in the rest of rural India. The air was thin, but pure and clear, just like how mountain air has forever been. No other vehicle was on the road for miles at an end, occasionally some riders on Royal Enfields and other bikes zipped by; we knew for a fact that none of them was heading to Umla though. Beyond the windows of the van, on all sides, there was an unending brown barren range of mountains, the trees became grass, the grass became patchy and then they were no more. We were travelling way above and beyond the timberline. All the mountain tops were covered in ice, teasingly like upturned icecream cones. The sky was a blue, so clear, bright and pale, something that the cities in India had rarely offered me. The vast horizon, dotted with tuft-white clouds had been like that ever since we had come here. The sun was looking down on all our activities, not scorching us, not tiring us. What a sight, all of this together- the Zanskar mountains, the sky, the scattered poplar trees and absolutely nobody, nothing else. Just there, in a valley, beyond the snaking roads of the mountain was Umla.

The side view of Umla- a nondescript hamlet of few nondescript households. They struggle t o make ends meet is overwhelming to say the least.

We could have easily missed it. The houses were in the same tone of grey-brown that the mountains behind them were. Neither were the houses all clustered together. They were scattered over many many acres, adjoining the sloping and terraced fields. The earth in the fields was freshly upturned, the a darker brown than the mountains, it was the sowing season. Nice! We eagerly stepped out the van, the air was much colder outside and a fresh gust of wind hit us. Before we knew, small, precious drops of snow were smoothly floating down. Ever so gracefully, so soft, and Kashmir came alive somehow. By the community hall- a single room with a wooden rack- by the road, a smiling woman greeted us and the volunteer from LEHO. She smiled, waved and muttered something fast in Ladakhi to the volunteer. The plump woman, dressed in a black overall, a belt at the hips, held a rosary in her other hand by the back, constantly rotating the beads. Soon a middle aged man, in trousers and a sweater joined her. He seemed to understand hindi, and acknowledged us with a nod. Few other villagers joined them. And we all got chatting, sitting in that room that just about managed to seat the 30 odd people.

Ladakh Environment and Health Organisation (LEHO) was started in 1991 by Ms Razia Sultan. They are involved in a range of projects in Ladakh ranging from helping villagers to build passive solar houses to encouraging them to practice natural methods of farming and marketing the same produce. In their improved greenhouses, where they aim at supplementing the agricultural produce of Ladakh by tapping solar energy during the non-farming months, they have employed nearly 1000 villagers; "green jobs" they are called. Through a Participatory Gaurantee System they are involved in organic certification of the villages in their outreach area. This helps in marketing their produce at fair prices and hence, ensuring the farmers a good income. It is quite a commendable effort and task because in Ladakh every village is facing problems of migration to the cities and a shortage of livelihood options as farming doesn't provide much. And that is how I found myself in Umla, a beneficiary village- to talk to the villagers there with a hope to understand what livelihood challenges they face and how do such mountain rural communities get by.

For a village where all the farming happens only between May to August, and any cow gives only a maximum of 5 litres of milk, there is a pressing need to find other sources of income. Kunchuk Paljor, the 52 year old man that I was in conversation with, was a workman with the Water Dept, so he was in-charge of checking the pipelines and irrigation in his village. Though he had a government job, there was no work for him too in the winters, when the water is frozen and there is only snow all around. Neither do government employment schemes like NREGA function properly in Umla nor do they have any private companies employing them. The women in the village did get together as a group and processed wheat as a part of LEHO's initiative; some of the others found jobs, food and income through LEHO's improved greenhouses. But the money was hardly anything to get by during the winters. The flashfloods of 2010 had even destroyed the single government institution in the village- a primary school. There are a couple of public transport buses that ply twice in a day, to reach whose bus-stop the villagers of Umla have to trek 6 kms. So all their children are sent away to boarding schools; the youth- only 3 of whom have seen a college- are all away too. Umla is a village of old people, middle aged farmers and no livelihood. 6-7 families have members in the Army and Paljor grimly informed me that 3 more families had migrated to Leh town to pursue some other careers. This in a village of, maybe, 20 households.

Mr Paljor, standing against the backdrop of Umla. The hamlet suffered heavily in the flashfloods of 2010 and it  has been a struggle since forever to maintain sustainable livelihoods in the harsh conditions of Ladakh

So remote, so cut off- just not from India, but from the rest of Ladakh too!-, so much at the mercy of only Government and NGO interventions. Stepping out of that community hall, the cold air hitting us once again, this time however what glistened more than the snow was the light in the eyes of the villager who told us of their plight and sought some hope in the form of some income-augmenting intervention. How were we to know that the same scene would greet us in all the other villages too. Like at Nang the very next day, where we met the family of Mr Stanzin, the village head. They were all farming together. One lady and a man were ploughing the land with the help of the local cattle animal, dzo. Just behind them was an old lady scattering the seeds, looking curiously at these urban people in hats and caps and jeans and jackets shooting questions about them and their village. Their small house behind could be on one of those home-stay catalogues advertising holidays in the Swiss Alps. A small and beautiful mud house with wooden roof, lined with a little straw by the sides. One slightly dirty glass window on the wall, with a potted flowering plant by the sill. A small shed behind the house- the ladakhi dry compost toilet and another small shed on the opposite side of the field to house the cattle . Of course the Ladakh landscape and this time the sound of a gurgling stream to boot! That day we were at Nang, courtesy LNP to understand how an artificial glacier had affected their lives and what changes could be made to the process to make their lifestyles any better. A very tough and tricky chance to suggest anything better, because the situation was atypical Umla, atypical any Ladakhi village- remote farming community seeking better lifestyle. A very tough and tricky job because the man behind the idea of artificial glaciers was thorough in his efforts to keep nature, its people and their livelihoods in sync at their best.

In the late 1970s, a period that I can not imagine for Ladakh in terms of how remote and unconnected it could have been, there were many starvation deaths in the district. The Leh Nutrition Project (LNP) was started then, to do something for the villages to the south of the River Indus. They started working on several food security and water harvesting initiatives to increase the food production in Leh. Mr Chewang Norphel, called the "Glacier Man", joined them in the following decade and touched the lives of many many villages in that region. He designed what is now known as the artificial glacier, a process of simply diverting a little of the melting glaciers during the summers, leaving them frozen during the winters and again redirecting them in late spring for the next farming season. Absolutely in tandem with the natural water cycle and not changing the course of the streams, the amount of water flowing into the villages and its fields is all controlled by the villagers. It helps provide water in a constant volume and to places that were earlier out of reach. This ensures that the farming cycles are not disturbed by unpredictable weather changes. Also, it recharges their groundwater and spring in the villages. As Stanzin had pointed out, their productivity had increased and they were assured of a fixed yield. Moreover, these villagers themselves had the decentralized power to control the supply of water.

The visit to Nang village was preceded by a small guided tour of the artificial glacier at Nang, by the man himself, Mr Norphel. He has been showered by the Government with accolades, titles and covered by enough media houses as a pioneer and a hero. However, at 78 years, well past his working term at LNP he was as enthusiastic as a child to take us through his masterpiece. The passion that he displayed in explaining how the glacier worked, painstakingly pointing out every lever and canal in the system was just an inspiration. To see how keen he was in taking questions and brusquely walking across those tricky rocks and slippery slopes at his age was to take a knock on any little ego one possessed. He did not have any compulsions to be with us, he was not even an active member at LNP any longer. But to see how his eyes shone, how his feet took to the mountains and how his heart spoke was a lesson in modesty and magnanimity. Topped with the experience that this was a classroom at over 3800 metres above sea level, with an idealism to know more about a people of our own country- such a beautiful confluence of man, mountain and mind- this was indeed one of my greatest learning experiences ever!

Mr Norphel, explaining to the group how the water levels of the outlet is adjustable through the iron gates and locks. To just watch him stride the mountains and recognize every nook of the mountains and valley, is an inspirational experience indeed.

There were some more things that I had the opportunity to notice and learn in those two days, that made it a journey with each step quite as a unique event in itself. The challenges that we sought to deliberate with the villagers, were typically what an "outsider" might see as a challenge. Wondering what they did for festivals, marriages or emergencies that required a lot of money at one go, I asked them how did their meagre income support such events. I was told that it was not a chance for individual resplendence or worry, it was a matter of the community getting together. The entire village got together to celebrate Losar, the Ladakhi New Year. The able people in the village trekked miles to fetch medical help for the persons in need. They took turns in farming everybody's land. Everything was a community act- right from organic certification to caking the mud walls of a passive solar heated house. "Then it didn't matter if you had one cow and your neighbour had a dzo. The village always pooled its resources for all its people.", Paljor had put it. How beautiful, how economical and definitely, how harmonious! Between the passing poplar trees and the darting white clouds, the insignificance of Nang's and Umla's existence in the material world was completely overshadowed by the big lessons those village-schools gave me. In our fast paced and exceedingly independent worlds, it is only a privilege to be an exception that is undoubtedly more human! Still more of Ladakh to come...

What could be easily out of the picture postcard from Swiss Alps is but the humble Nang Valley, home to Nang's artificial glacier in Ladakh. 

Prayaan: A journey to Ladakh and Within (Part 1)

The largest district in the country, in terms of land area. The highest motorable road in the world, Khardung La. Many ancient Buddhist monastries. The Magnetic Hill. All the lakes. Definitely one of the most exotic and slowly off-beat-becoming-happening tourist destinations in the country, if not the world-  Ladakh. Parked right at the top of the country, wrapped on all sides by the Karakoram and Zanskar ranges of mountains, the sky all clear and blue, the snow glistening on the Himalayan peaks, River Indus gracefully meandering through the valleys- it is a dream holiday. An exciting getaway from the hustle-bustle of hot and dry India of the summers. The second two weeks of May, when unbearable heat waves ride across the country, few of us had the chance to ride above it and wander into the cool climes of Ladakh. Not as tourists, as seekers, students and travellers earnest in a query to understand mountain communities and their issues. And what do you know, the ten days from May 6th to 16th showed us how much Ladakh was different and same as the rest of India, sometimes specifically rural India.

"Welcome to Kushok Bakula Rinnpoche airport, Leh. The outside temperature is 6 degrees celsius, we hope you enjoy your stay here." And a motley group of many honeymooners, few monks, large Bengali families and us, the Fellow Designates eagerly rubbed hands and nervously ventured out into the single most modest and spectacularairport in India. The hangar has space just enough for two planes and the hall for the luggage conveyor belt can maximum accommodate 200 standing passengers. So small was the airport. However, the hangar was surrounded by a glorious range of mountains, some of them inscribed with messages from the Border Roads Organisation or the Indian Defence forces. A huge "Don't drink and Drive" screamed in red across the slopes of a barren mountain, just as a billboard signalled that we were in the territory of "The Clue Finders" of the Indian Army. A little beyond, as we got out of the airport, we found "The mountain tamers", walking in files to their barracks. Ladakh, now broken into the two smaller districts of Leh and Kargil, is scarcely populated by its own people and has a denser population of the Indian Army. The Indian Army is one of the pillars of the Ladakhi economy, because it forms the biggest market segment in Ladakh. Most of the Ladakhi farmers, mechanics, merchants, etc have the defense forces as their clients. Throw a stone in Ladakh and you will probably be serving a sentence for hurting a soldier! This is also one of the reasons, why you should not be throwing stones for no good purpose. (Just Kidding) This is also a reason, why almost every household in a Ladakhi village has a member serving in the Army.

A Ladakhi village. I never thought about it really. Ladakh was always a tourist destination, and an ignorant me was quite oblivious to the fact that just like every other district and block in the country Ladakh could be having its own villages. What presumptions! Why it never struck, that there could be rural communities here too, famers, artisans and the whole lot of them going about their daily lives; not only the hotels, lodges, shops and cafes serving the steady stream of tourists who populate the Leh town. Well, I am not completely to be blamed, that was all that the media, advertisements, Government ever portrayed about Leh-Ladakh. All the tourist hot-spots, not once about its farmers or the soldiers or the students! Maybe because the tourism industry, after the army, is the strongest pillar of the economy. Not to say that in the coming days it will only grow stronger, even as the rest of Ladakh's socio-politico-cultural dynamics may take a downward slump, like how Shimla is today. Streets and streets of the Leh town cater to every need of, guess who, ONLY TOURISTS. Handicraft shops (obviously selling their wares at indignant prices!), cafes serving international cuisines, T-Shirt shops, bars, shops renting out Royal Enfields for all the biker-tourists, outlets selling Buddhist trinkets, and ALL the hotels! Throw a stone in Leh and you would probably smash the window of a Hotel. A reason why you shouldn't be throwing stones at buildings. (well, couldn't help this) Anyway, this is just the reason why the youth from almost all the villages that we visited and interacted with, steadily moved to more "favourable" destinations like Leh, Srinagar or even as far as Chandigarh and Delhi.

A Ladakhi village, Umla, tucked in a pocket miles away from the town. All alone in a barren and rocky lowland, amidst towering mountains, the rural communities go about their daily routines.

Again a Ladakhi village. Really do they exist? What do the obscure communities do there? What do the farmers cultivate? What do the artisans produce? How does the government function in these places? Finally, we were getting to the challenges of the mountain rural communities. Our first destination within Prayaan was SECMOL- Students Educaton and Cultural Movement Of Ladakh. It is an institution that now caters to providing residential education for class 10 drop-outs/failures to help them get back to mainstream education. Apart from these fully funded students, there is also a group of college going students who use SECMOL's hostel facilities. SECMOL is a school/gurukul like none another I have seen earlier. Classes are interspersed between "responsibilities" and leisure time. So a bunch of them have the responsibility to milk the cows at 4.30 in the morning, just as another bunch of them look after the solar heating and lighting facilities. So the food that comes from SECMOL's kitchen is chopped, ground, baked or stirred by the students. Why a few of them would have even planted and nurtured the vegetables, in SECMOL's own greenhouse! And then, there is folk music and dance and volleyball and soccer during the leisure hours. In between all of this, the students put in a little of their efforts to learn Math, Science, Urdu or develop their "Conversation" skills. At dinner, with no TV to distract, or no point of gossip, they all listen to the Ladakhi News to understand the current affairs. One student by schedule, stands up and delivers a short two-five minute talk on anything. On one of the nights that we stayed there, Sajad Hussain spoke of archery competitions in his village and about his family in Kargil. He had travelled across the district with the hope of getting into a college sometime in the future. Scarce in number, very poor in content, absent teachers and partly uninterested parents. The less I say about India's deteriorating government schools, the better. There is always private education, one could say. But the cost of it and the number of them in rural areas are inversely proportional. The villages, like in Leh, deserve way better.

'Becky' explaining to us, how SECMOL makes the best of nature's replensihable and free resources- solar cooker, as in this picture.

A student at SECMOL fixing a crack in the roof of the dining hall with mud plaster. Students know it and do-it-all, operating and maintaining SECMOL campus and fields.

SECMOL, the lifestyle, the curriculum, our interactions with the students and the volunteer-teachers there gave us a peek into what might be going on in Ladakh's villages. The building at SECMOL was passively solar heated, meaning that it was constructed with insulating mud, by indigenous methods that could keep the rooms warm even during the severe winters that drove the temperature down to a minus 35 degrees celsius! But, Rebecca Norman, the Chairperson at SECMOL, pointed out that the classrooms would be still warmer than the electrically heated living rooms in Delhi on a December night. These days, however, she said villages and towns are slowly giving up on these local methods and choosing to spend money and precious fuel by adopting "modern" methods of electric heaters and kerosene burners. Just like the toilets, we later noticed. Traditionally, Ladakhi homesteads, like at SECMOL, have dry compost toilets- without the use of water, using sand and dry degradable material to convert human excreta into manure. In the Leh town, where numerous hotels and lodges have mushroomed into being, toilets are the normal water-using types. The water to the toilets and the dirtied drainage water both come and go back into the same ground, hence polluting and depleting the water tables beneath! The cycle of nutrient regeneration is abruptly cut-off with the introduction of modern toilets and water enabled sewers. The students at SECMOL were aware of all of this, much to our surprise and recognised the importance of other traditional techniques like natural farming methods. During the course of our interactions, we got to know, that almost all of them had set their sights on moving to the town. Nobody wanted to continue with agriculture, something many many generations of their elders had been practicing. It was then that the hypocrisy of that judgement dawned upon me.

Kashmir is so geographically poised that winters are cruel and harsh. The only spot of green that we could see in the barren mountain desert of Ladakh were the poplar trees. And it was end-spring and early summer. If at time when everything should be blooming and bursting to life, the only shades of green were from the few poplar trees, maybe an apple tree here and there, what shade was the desert in winters? Absolute white, we were told. For months at an end, from October end to March, the Ladakhis hardly came out of their homes. There would be snow everywhere, the temperature unbearably cold and the soil most uncultivable. All their food rations come through flights, in crates and sacks, in tin and packs. For four months, Ladakh is closed. Roadways don't work, the glacier's all frozen. How do they irrigate their fields, even if they managed to clear the snow and dig the soil up?! Sunshine was the only assured part of the photosynthesis, so few houses have improved greenhouses. These support minimum cultivation of countable crops like potato, peas and lettuce. So all their cropping happens between May to September- a little bit of wheat apart from the earlier mentioned vegetables, apricots and apples. What hope did I see in agriculture? None. What hope did the youth see in agriculture? None.  Nobody in the city strictly follows what their family elders do for a living. Why is it then, that we expect the rural youth to continue farming?! Only an uncomfortable silence follows this question everywhere. Farming is strenuous, city lifestyles seem luxurious and one is not hypocrite less to pay that price.

A typical sight in Ladakh: snowcapped mountains peering down on scarce poplar plantations and villages. The normal clear, blue sky, sometimes, like on this day spotted with cotton-tuft like clouds. 

Well after the 72 hours at SECMOL, talking, working, laughing, eating and playing with all their students, gradually many troubling questions started popping in my head. What about their school was it that really fascinated me? Traditional methods? Shared responsibilities? Community living? A sensitivity towards local problems? Why did not, as is the majority, most urban schools offer such education- educating young minds and not manufacturing products, in the truest sense of the word?! Why did these youth, like rural youth everywhere else want to migrate to the cities? And more importantly, is the State doing something about it? Who should, who must? I was finding it exhilarating just to be in the vast desert of Leh. Such an eye-opener and provocation to think about these mountain communities was only a sign of things to come. A week left, I could still rub my hands, inhale the clear mountain air, look at the majestic snow-capped mountains beyond the poplar trees and think to myself, "Prayaan continues…"