This Tuesday, November 19, was observed as World Toilet Day. I decided to join in, believing absolutely in the importance of loos. But there wasn't much I could do to celebrate, except spend a little extra time in my favourite place reading all the newspaper reports about how even today a third of the world's population has no access to hygienic toilets. According to the United Nations, more than one billion people across the world just "go" in the open - a practice that contributes to countess deaths from preventable diseases.This reminded me of Spiti, the high-altitude Himachali desert I had recently visited. Although the area is remote and undeveloped, almost everyone I saw or met there had access to clean toilets. It is the only district in Himachal Pradesh where every school and almost every Anganwadi has a toilet. But these aren't potties as we know them - completely waterless, the loos in Spiti convert human waste into manure even as they are being used, relying on simple techno

Geetanjali Krishna: Spiti's hole in one

Business Standard

Last week, the entire region of Spiti was cut off from the rest of the world for the duration of this winter, with snow finally rendering Kunzum Pass impassible. It will now remain shut until March, when the snow melts. While reading this bit of news last week, my thoughts were with Gantuk Namgyal, the affable Spitian from Demul, one of the highest inhabited villages in the Himalayas, whose family had hosted me last month. Even then, the family was busy gearing up for the long and hard winter ahead.Namgyal's house was constructed in the traditional Spitian style with two floors, the lower one used for storage and the upper one for living. There were sacks of potatoes and food grain in sturdy sacks of woven yak wool stacked high in the lower floor. Outside, their small stock of animals lowed peacefully in the paddock. "In the peak of winter, there's as much as 10 feet of snow outside. That is why we use the colder lower floor for storage and for the animals to shelter in," explained Nam

Geetanjali Krishna: Snowed in and loving it!

The old Bhimakali temple rose to the sky, a stately old wooden structure sitting on a stone plinth with a slate roof that glittered like black gold in the sunlight. Its wooden walls and floors were warm under my bare feet. I wandered through the temple, marvelling at how harmoniously its architecture blended with the climate and conditions of its environs in Sarahan, a tiny Himachali hamlet. "This construction technique is over 800 years old," one of the priests said when he saw me admiring the carvings on the walls. "Not only is it beautiful, it is also the most practical architecture for this region! The wood walls and floors add warmth, the tiny windows keep the building aired as well as insulated, and the high stone plinth ensures accessibility even when the area is covered in deep snow!"My admiration, however, turned to bemusement as I walked out of the temple to explore the little village. Sarahan was clearly in the middle of a modest construction boom. But everywhere I looked, t

Geetanjali Krishna: Old houses for new

By harnessing solar power in the mountain desert of Spiti, developers have saved the fragile ecology from both carbon pollution and unnecessary expenses on fuel and food

Sunshine success

The other day, I saw a monkey eating chowmein on Shimla's Scandal Point. After he'd polished off the plate with practised ease, his benefactor handed him a pastry and a plastic bottle of water. The monkey leapt up on to a branch to enjoy his dessert, as many walkers on the Mall smiled and laughed at the sight. I glared at the man. "Why did you feed the monkey?" I asked. "Not only is this food bad for him, he will expect all humans to be as generous as you, and bite the next person who doesn't feed him!" The walkers muttered dissent while the benefactor was appalled: "How can you call him a nuisance? Monkeys are the animals most dear to Hanuman. If we are good to them, we will directly get his blessings..." The other people around me assured me that the rapacious armies of monkeys in the hill capital, who enjoyed snatching bags and sunglasses, destroying gardens and ripping apart clotheslines, were no bother at all. "If we don't trouble them," they said, "they don't trouble us!"But they

Geetanjali Krishna: Shimla's monkey mafia

Over the years, I've heard all sorts of love stories. Some had happy endings, others culminated in tragedy. In Shimla recently, I heard of a tumultuous romance between a trucker and a village belle whose slightly twisted happy ending piqued my interest way more than the traditional "and they lived happily ever after".

Geetanjali Krishna: A love story, not a fairy-tale

Himalayas

Time seems to have stopped in the mountain desert of Spiti, where nature constantly fights off civilisation

In the middle of nowhere

The other day, we were driving on the Barapulla elevated road when a stall laden with seductively orange papayas caught our attention. It was in Sewa Nagar's Prabhu Market, and we stopped for a closer look. As it turned out, the papayas were great but their seller Shri Ram was even more interesting. A vocal supporter of street vendors' rights, he was the president of the Footpath Vikreta Ekta Manch. As we got talking about the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Bill passed by the Lok Sabha this September, he explained how this was a watershed moment in the history of street vending or tehbazari in India."People often call street vendors a problem. I say, we are the solution!" said Shri Ram. In a city with more migrants than employment opportunities, street vending offered people the chance to make a dignified living, he said. The substantial reduction in the number of cottage industries within cities such as Delhi has shrunk the job market, espec

Geetanjali Krishna: A vote for vendor rights

The other day, I was stuck in traffic on a busy road when I saw a man on a bicycle carrying a bushel of papaya leaves. Our eyes met and I gestured towards the leaves. "What are these for?" I asked. He said that he had started collecting these leaves when his father got dengue earlier this month. Apparently, he was treated with the juice of these leaves, and recovered fully with few adverse effects. "Now, in the RK Puram slum where I live, every house has at least one person sick with what seems to be dengue. I have been advising all of them to drink papaya leaf juice just in case, and bring these leaves for anyone who needs them," he said. "This treatment is much more effective than anything that the doctors in Safdarjung Hospital can provide!" The traffic cleared slightly, and off he went, bearing his medicinal load.Given the frightening spread of this disease in the last fortnight, I am not surprised that more and more people are looking for ways to deal with dengue on their own. Mor

Geetanjali Krishna: Fighting dengue at home

Fifteen years ago, when I used to live in the heart of rural Uttar Pradesh, most of the villagers I knew there had no clue about their age. They would say vaguely that they'd been born in the year when their grandfather died, or during a long ago summer outbreak of cholera. They weren't too fussy about sending their kids to school either. Their daughters tended to drop out after class five, while the sons hung on until class eight when they faced their first exam. Given the quality of schooling available, most flunked at this stage and dropped out. In the last few years that I have lived in New Delhi, the picture has been completely different. Most kids I've met go to school and know exactly how old they are. The capital has one of the country's highest literacy rates (86.734 per cent as per the Economic Survey 2011-12) while Uttar Pradesh has one of the lowest (69.72 per cent). I used to attribute this rural-urban divide to the fact that most reforms are put into action in New Delhi f

Geetanjali Krishna: An anachronism named Jamuna

The other day I read that this year's World Population Day on July 11 declared a special focus on adolescent pregnancy. Teenage mothers are at greater risk of childbirth-related complications, disability and death. Their infants face similarly high risks of infection, low birth weight and death during infancy. To me, however, the biggest tragedy of early pregnancy is that it usually means an abrupt end of childhood, a curtailed education and lost opportunities. The case of Yukta Tamang (name changed), the Darjeeling girl I'd first met with two years ago when she was seeking admission to Delhi University, exemplifies this.Two years ago, when Yukta started her marketing and management course in a Delhi college, she became the first girl from her village to come this far. To my admiration, the perky, pretty girl took up an evening job at a pizza parlour. If I ever wanted pizzas, she offered proudly, she could get me a 40 per cent employee discount. It seemed to me that she had more fire i

Geetanjali Krishna: The girl who wanted to have fun

Last week, the Supreme Court directed the environment ministry not to clear hydro power projects in Uttarakhand, expressing concern about their proliferation and impact on the Bhagirathi and Alaknanda. "The cumulative impact of those project components like dams, tunnels, blasting, powerhouse, muck disposal, mining, deforestation etc on ecosystem, is yet to be scientifically examined," the court said. A recent chat with Bhagwan Singh, ex-Pradhan of Agunda village in Uttarkashi, helped me understand that other than these, large dams had myriad other smaller impacts on local villagers. Singh and other villagers have been opposing the building of the Gunsola hydro power project on Balganga, upstream from their village."The government says that hydro power will bring prosperity to the state," he said. "What we know is that if this project in Gunsola takes off, our river downstream will run dry…" This would, first of all, signal an end to agriculture since the villagers are dependent on c

Rethinking 'Dam'ocracy in the hills

On the morning of Independence Day, I was doing my breathing exercises in a quiet corner of the Hauz Khas district park. Just as I inhaled deeply, I realised my choice of venue was not a good one. There was a furtive scuffling in the bushes near me, and then two little kids ran out pulling up their scruffy pants, dirty bottles of water in hand. "Hey," I said, "what are you doing?" The children stopped in their tracks. They looked like they were barely seven or eight years in age. "We just came here to do our morning job," said one timidly. "We come here every day! You can't stop us - this is a public place!" said the other. I pointed in the direction of the public toilets that had been installed in the park during the Commonwealth Games. "Why don't you use these toilets?" The kids shuffled uncomfortably. "We are scared to go there," said the timid one. "Anyway, they are only meant for rich people like you - not for people like us..." said the other.It turned out that the kids lived in

Going potty in the park

Some time ago, the village behind our house was agog with activity. Drum rolls punctuated the peaceful morning and the raucous singing made me surmise that someone was getting married. Actually the village was sending off six men on the Kawariya pilgrimage. I stepped out to see the procession and recognised one of the youths in saffron shorts as the son of a neighbor's driver. He smiled and said, "we're off to Hardwar! This is going to so exciting..." His uncle Raju was going as well. This was the first time he was undertaking this pilgrimage, he said, because he didn't want his youthful nephew to go alone."This auspicious journey is to propitiate Lord Shiva," he said. In the olden days, he said, only older people undertook this pilgrimage to the Ganges, bringing back holy water to bathe the Shiva lingam in their local temple. They'd wear saffron to show that during the pilgrimage, they'd renounced all worldly pleasures. The holy water would be carried in clay pots suspended from the t

The rise of the modern Kawariya

It's that time of the year again when my doorbell rings a dozen times in the day. Each time, I open the door to young, hopeful faces, collecting donations to set up elaborate tableaus, jhankis, depicting the birth of Krishna on the night of Janmashtami. This time, I decided to not just give my two-bit and shut the door on the youngest of the lot. Instead, I asked them exactly what they planned to do, so that I could figure out if I could contribute in kind as well. I didn't know that the next half hour with these children would teach me lessons in marketing and event management that a management school would be proud of.The group, aged between eight and twelve, said that theirs was the worst tableau last year. "The others had more money, so they had bright lights and music that attracted crowds. Nobody came to ours..." said a little girl dolefully. "Then it got washed away by the rains..." said another. "I hope it is a clear night this year!" An older boy Mukesh, clearly their leader a

Management lessons from kids

The other day, I had a long conversation with J P Maithani, chairperson of the Chamoli-based Aagaas Foundation, about the relief work they are doing with five villages in the Badrinath valley - Bhyundar, Pinoli, Govindghat, Lambagarh and Pandukeshwar. He spoke to me waiting on the edge of a blocked road for a truck of supplies from Delhi. Behind him was a continuous klaxon of horns as frustrated motorists inched through the narrow passage cleared through the landslide. "The situation here is as bad as you imagine," he said. "The rains continue, electricity supply and phone networks are intermittent while the roads are in a bad shape!" With support from Delhi-based Help Uttarakhand, a collective initiative by non-governmental organisations (NGO) Karm Marg, Kadam and Samoolam, Maithani's organisation has conducted a door-to-door survey of these five villages to assess the extent of damage. Their findings, as expected, are depressing."Their homes have been washed away, the animals on whic

Giving relief to the voiceless

In the middle of all the news about the death and destruction in the Himalayas, I finally heard something that gave me hope. There I was, listening gloomily to the news that the numbers of missing have gone up to 5,360 and forecasts of further rains, when my phone rang. It was Yogeshwar Kumar, the Indian Institute of Technology alumnus, who's devoted his life to training villagers to build, operate and maintain their own micro hydel plants. In Uttarakhand, to assess how the villages where he'd worked had fared during the recent floods, he wanted to give me an update of the ground situation in Agunda, district Tehri. In 2008, the micro hydel power plant that he'd trained villagers to build and maintain, had become operational there. Since then, the village, in true Gandhian style, had been on the path to self-sufficiency. Not only did the villagers have light in their homes, they also had surplus electricity to run small machinery, flour mills and more."On 16-17 June, when the rains wre

The powerful village of Agunda

When we returned from Uttarakhand in the second week of June, we couldn't have imagined in our wildest dreams, the devastation that rains would cause there little more than a week later. Off on another fortnight's sojourn, I watched the tragedies unfold on the web, horrified not only by nature's fury, but also the wanton development of the gentle hills that had left them so vulnerable to disaster. I'd seen the close relationship that the hill folk had with nature, and the indiscriminate building of roads and dams had seemed, even then, at odds with their nature. Again and again, my mind turned to Bhagat Singh, the philosophical guide-turned-friend I'd met in Auli. The first day when he and his mule, Miss Mary, guided us across hill and dale, I realised how unusual he was. He knew the names of almost every wild plant and herb in the mountains. He could predict the weather by looking at the sky and sniffing at the wind. What's more, the 60-year-old had never consulted a western doctor fo

Bhagat Singh and Miss Mary

Watch out!" I cried as we made our breathless way up a grassy meadow in Auli. A large, horned ram was hurtling towards us - its bells ringing a mad alarm call. There was no place to run, and none to hide. The animal barrelled into us, butting us painfully in our sides. We froze for a couple of seconds, before we realised that the animal was tame, and had come to play with us. "Hey!" shouted an old woman running nimbly down the steep slope, voluminous woollen skirts flapping wildly behind her. "Don't scare the poor city slickers," in a trice, she reached us and pulled the ram away. "I'm sorry," she said, "but my pet ram is so spoilt that she thinks she is a puppy - not a large animal with horns. I hope she didn't frighten you all too much."It turned out that the old lady was in Auli for the summer, herding her cows and sheep to higher pastures. "As the rains approach, I'll escape them by going high and higher until my animals and I are almost in China," she cackled. The ram affectionate

Nomadism in exit mode

During the 10 days we spent in Garhwal, Uttarakhand, not a day went by when we didn't eat jeera alu

God's gift to Garhwal

Its summer and the inclines in Auli are covered with colourful flowers rather than snow. But the ski resort under the sun is still an adventure in itself

Geetanjali Krishna

Geetanjali Krishna

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