When people speak about climate change, the conversation often revolves around global temperature rise, melting glaciers, or rising sea levels. Those are indeed important, no doubt; But working in the hills of Uttarakhand shifts you from that wide-eyed perspective towards realities more grounded. Here, climate change is not an abstract concept discussed in reports and […]
Author: christopherjoy1
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Reflections from Bhuj
As part of my fellowship programme, I undertook a three-day exposure visit to Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan (KMVS) in Bhuj, Gujarat. The entire journey right from leaving the NGO and reaching back however took an entire week. The purpose of this visit was to observe how a long-standing grassroots organization designs and sustains community-led interventions […]
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‘Carrying’ Change
Working in the hills of Uttarakhand has consistently reinforced one lesson: no intervention here is complete without negotiating with geography. The installation of millet processing machines in Parwari village was one such experience. A process that highlighted not only the labor-intensiveness of traditional millet processing but also the physical effort required simply to introduce change. […]
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Perched in the Hills
As this is one of my first blogs, it is important to state that I am not familiar in writing them and hence this will feel like a sort of excerpt from my journal describing the initial days as I began this fellowship journey. Here we go– It would be right to say that the journey […]
This blog is a comparison on the friction existing in getting community interventions done in the plains versus the hills, primarily in terms of geography. I’m currently in Uttarakhand, working with INHERE, my NGO, on increasing millet productivity and its self consumption amongst the local communities. At the same time, being a native of Kerala […]
As my project was primarily about increasing millet productivity, I was under the impression that millets were staple food crops which were fairly common in Uttarakhand and that my task was just to render assistance or actions that would further their availability within households. However, the situation was drastically different than what I had presumed. […]
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