Campaign with the School Students

           One of our broad objectives of the sustainable agriculture programme was to spread the awareness amongst the school students. We believe that livelihood practices should be included in the school curriculum.

           Our staffs Nani Gopal and Anjana are working with the farmers in Basirhat-I block for the last 10 years. One of our project areas is Nakurdaha (a small village and most of the villagers are schedule caste and farmers in profession) in this block. The significance of this area is that it is just beside the Indo-Bangladesh border. Here the school dropout rate is very high and in most of the cases the dropouts get involved in burglary, illegal trafficking and smuggling, etc.

Grafting Training

            In May, 2010 we invited local adolescence youths to come to our agri-school. Our main objective was to teach them some tools of sustainable agriculture practice, so that in future they can implement these in their farm lands. Surprisingly 27 boys and 18 girls (class-V to class-X and all from the schedule caste families) from local Itinda High school came to our agri school. On the very 1st day, we shared our vision and philosophy with them and also told them about our works. Initially they were not so interested in learning agriculture but they were very interested to learn grafting. The grafting was a very know term to them through their Bio-science books but they had no handheld orientation. Some of them told that then had even tried it independently in their home but was not successful. Then we gladly told them that we would teach them. Then we jointly decided that on each Sunday there would be one hour session on grafting. So far they had attended all the Sundays and attendance rate was cent percent. All the 45 students had learnt grafting and making saplings. They had even planned to plant some of their saplings on the Independence Day (15th August, 10).

           Besides grafting we had also trained them on how to select good seeds. Seed selection is one of the main practices in farming. The youths had adopted the methods of seed selection very quickly. We requested them to implement this technique in their farm. Mausami Sarkar, one of the successful trainees had implemented this seed selection method in their farm and had also trained her father and forced him to follow this method.

Training on seed selection