Sow the seeds of love

For the past three years, artist Lalit Vikamshi, along with artist-activist Shweta Bhattad, has been closely working with the farmers of Paradsinga village in Madhya Pradesh. Together, they have addressed and resolved several issues these farmers faced in their day-to-day activities by calling upon friends and experts from different fields, and by creating a collaborative platform where artists and locals could work together in a constructive, yet creative manner for a fruitful conclusion.

However, during the gradual course of their interaction, they realised that lack of support from officials at the grass-roots level throws them in a whirlpool of financial insecurities, majorly owing to the multilayered system of middlemen involved in the distribution of produce. To highlight several aspects of their invisible struggle, Bhattad created the ‘I Have a Dream’ project which aims at drawing attention to farming practices and communities by inviting artists to collaborate with farmers to sow fields and grow gardens.

Through this initiative they realised how farmers across the world shared similar woes and grievances. But their sense of awareness heightened during Nagpur ‘Beejotsav’ where they discovered a major, yet less-talked about, root cause of one of India’s biggest concerns – farmer’s suicide.

“The festival had invited farmers from 14-15 villages who use home-grown cotton seed for farming. As more than 90 per cent of Indian farmers use BT cotton seeds, it was disheartening to see how they have completely given up on using indigenous seeds,” Vikamshi tells Metrolife.

“Farmers turned to BT cotton seeds because they were promoted as high-yielding compared to indigenous seeds. But no one educated the farmer on additional costs — like use of chemical fertilisers and the high maintenance he will incur when going for BT cotton. This is why it is important to promote indigenous seeds. They are not high-yielding but they don’t overshoot the budget,” she says.

So, in order to educate people and reintroduce discourse around indigenous cotton seeds, Vikashmi and Bhattad have launched an “eco-rakhi” initiative under the umbrella of the Gram Art Project for which they have collaborated with farmers who use organic means to grow cotton, and roped in 50 women from four villages — Khairi, Paradsinga, Satnoor, Kelwad — in Madhya Pradesh to make rakhis.

“Rakhi has a direct connection with the skin and we thought it would be a good idea to create something that would bring together each and every link of the whole chain, right from producers to consumers,” says Bhattad, adding that each rakhi uses a cotton seed as a binding motif — one which will allow people to see how a seed looks like and something they can sow as well.

“This will hopefully enable a process of sensitisation of each one of us towards what we consume and then lead us to act on it,” she adds. The rakhis can be ordered from www.gramartproject.org and are priced at Rs 20, Rs 25 and Rs 30. The cotton grown in Wardha district in Maharashtra has been dyed at the Rangaai Unit of Magan
Sangrahalay and the thread is hand spun by 50 women who were trained by a young girl, Nutan Dwivedi, in rakhi designing.

The second year BSc student from Khairi Taigaon village in Chhindwara district of Madhya Pradesh had learnt macramé weaving a few years back, and women of nearby villages often requested her to teach them the craft, for additional income.

So when Bhattad got in touch with Dwivedi and informed her about the rakhi initiative, the latter readily agreed to come on board and mobilised 50 women to be a part of the project.

“They all were willing to learn and wanted additional income,” Dwivedi tells Metrolife.
“So far, we have made around 10,000 rakhis and on an average these women make 40-50 rakhis in a day. The remuneration is decent as they are able to spend more on milk and household expenses,” she adds.

Bhattad says that these rakhis represent an alternative to the current exploitative system. “It is not at all just a commodity, but an idea and a hope for the future. Through this, we are trying to connect the producers, processors and consumers with each other,” she says.

“We are optimistic that once we all start seeing each other as partners instead of competitors trying for profit maximisation at each stage, we will collectively be able to come up with different alternatives for a socially equitable future,” she adds.