Asia (Page 2,424)

Varsha Sharma has been through some turbulent years on her small farm in the mountainous state of Himachal Pradesh, in northern India.

For more than a century her family have been rice farmers, but erratic rainfall and water being diverted for industry have made cultivating rice more difficult.

Seven years ago she switched to a hybrid rice variety and to growing apples, but that just caused fresh problems.

The hybrid rice variety promised increased production, but needed a lot of additives, which she says damaged the soil.

“We destroyed our soils by adding chemicals and fertilizers,” she says.

So in 2018 she switched again, this time experimenting with red rice, a variety which has a long history in Himachal Pradesh, but has dwindled as farmers have switched to modern varieties.

Red rice has attractive qualities. It is hardy and grows well without fertiliser and other chemicals. Research also shows it has nutritional benefits over white rice.

But perhaps for farmers the biggest attraction is that it sells well.

“Red rice fetches a good price, ranging between $3 and $4 per kilo in the retail market, as it completely organic. This has helped many farmers like me,” says Ms Sharma.

The government of Himachal Pradesh wants to expand the production of red rice, increasing its area under cultivation to 4,000 hectares (10,000 acres).

Red rice is not the only traditional variety being promoted.

In West Bengal, the largest rice producing state in India, almost half of its arable land is under rice cultivation.

It is home to more than 5,000 varieties of rice, but the majority are no longer grown.

“They [farmers] are only thinking about increased production, hence are switching to hybrid varieties,” says Anjan Kumar Sinha, the founder of the Socio-Environmental Welfare Society (ARSWS), which promotes conservation and the restoration of biodiversity.

He says that farming hybrid rice varieties can be expensive.

“When hybrid seeds are used, the demand for pesticide increases and the costs go up in an unsustainable way.

“Indigenous rice seed varieties have adapted to local ecologies and can resist drought and floods. We have varieties of rice seeds in India which can grow without water,” says Mr Sinha.

Farmers who join his organisation get a kilo of seeds free, enough to produce up to 60kg of rice. In return the farmers have to return a kilo of seeds.

“These varieties may play a vital role in sustainable agriculture in drought prone regions,” he adds.

Rice is widely consumed and grown in India and it is the world’s biggest exporter of the grain.

But in July, to tame surging domestic prices after heavy rains hurt crops, the Indian government banned the export of non-basmati white rice.

This came after Russia withdrew from a deal guaranteeing the safe passage of Ukrainian grain, putting more pressure on global food supplies.

Shankar Patnaik, who is also a farmer and seed conservationist, says that farmers “became greedy” and started growing rice from hybrid seeds to boost production.

“We used lot of urea and fertilizers which destroyed our soil. Also now very few farmers are using traditional seeds to grow rice,” he says.

Mr Patnaik has a collection of 500 rice varieties and is experimenting with many of them on his 14 acres of land.

“There are several indigenous rice varieties that can have higher yields but their potential is not fully explored. Even without application of chemical fertilizers one can get a good yield. But generally, people consider these as low yielding varieties and don’t pay much attention,” says Mr Patnaik.

As well as experimenting with varieties, Mr Patnaik is working on growing methods that need less water.

In particular he uses the alternate wetting and drying (AWD) method. In that technique famers flood fields, allow them to drain for a few days, and then flood them again.

This is one of the processes promoted by India’s Centre for Sustainable Agriculture (CSA), an organisation that works with farmers to make farming more sustainable.

“Rice is highly water-consuming crop. It’s grown in stagnant water and consumes about 5,000 litres if water per kg of rice,” says GV Ramanjaneyulu, executive director of the CSA.

He says bacteria in rice ponds emit methane, and flooding damages the soil structure, and can make it more salty.

He says there are several ways of growing rice with less water, but at the moment they need more support.

“There are no proper campaigns or training on these methods and no incentive for farmers to make a shift,” says Mr Ramanjaneyulu.

“Many of the current incentive systems like fertilizer subsidy, free power, canal irrigation, minimum support price and procurement, all work against the interest of farmers to shift towards more sustainable production,” he adds.

More technology of business:

One farmer who has embraced a new technique is Prema Devi from Farsali Malde, a village in the northern state of Uttarakhand.

“Most of the people from the village are farmers but with major climatic changes we started facing a lot of problems. Our crops got destroyed because of unseasonal rains or scarcity of water,” she says.

So, in 2021 she started to reduce the number of rice seeds she planted.

Rice saplings are grown in nursery beds and are transferred to main field after 12 to 14 days, where they are planted six to eight inches apart.

“The spacing between each plant gives them more oxygen, and minimises the competition between plants for nutrients and sunlight,” says Ms Devi.

She says the system has doubled her rice production to 100kg a year.

“It was not easy for us to believe that a simple change in technique was all we needed,” she says.

A crucial new law that aims to protect the personal data of Indians will dilute another landmark legislation that brought much-needed transparency into government functioning, experts say.

Until last week, India did not have a law to regulate how the personal information of individuals is collected, stored and processed. The Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, which was passed in parliament, fulfils that long-standing demand.

But privacy experts have raised serious concerns, pointing out that the law does not protect citizens from surveillance and that it gives excessive power to the federal government in terms of application.

One major criticism is the change the legislation makes to the landmark right to information (RTI) law, which allows people to access data from the government. Since it was passed in 2005 – after years of campaigning – millions of Indians have used the RTI law to ask questions and demand information from government departments and officials.

But the new legislation changes a provision of the RTI law to exempt “personal information” from being disclosed – this will affect a majority of the information currently sought under it.

“Everything that people have been using the RTI law for – to hold governments accountable, to fight corruption [etc.] – has somewhere an element of personal information,” says Anjali Bhardwaj, co-convenor of the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information, which was critical in getting the RTI law passed in 2005.

Madan Lokur, a former Supreme Court judge, says that the amendment “will emasculate the RTI to a large extent”.

While the application of the RTI law was never perfect – information was often denied on flimsy grounds and there have been several attempts by successive governments to dilute it – activists fear the latest change will make answers almost impossible to access.

The RTI law covers a wide ambit of organisations, including all departments formed under the Constitution or any government law or notification. Even organisations that are substantially financed by any government, even indirectly, are covered.

The RTI Act’s default position is that all information should be made available to citizens when requested, barring a few exceptions such as national security.

One of the clauses, which is under contention, says that if the information is of a personal nature and does not relate to any “public activity” or would cause an “unwarranted invasion” of an individual’s privacy, then the officer can deny the request – unless they find that it should be made available in “larger public interest”.

A 2012 committee on privacy law headed by Justice AP Shah had recommended that disclosures under the RTI Act should not constitute an infringement of privacy.

The new data protection law overrides this clause. It merely says that any information that “relates to personal information” can be denied – which could include any answer that identifies an individual.

“Earlier there was a filter that personal information should not have a relationship with any public activity or unwarranted invasion of privacy,” says Shailesh Gandhi, a former Central Information Commissioner who was responsible for deciding on complaints under the RTI Act.

Mr Gandhi says that to ensure that the law was easily implemented, it also spelt out that if information cannot be denied to a legislature, it should not be denied to an individual as well.

But now there is a blanket ban on personal information, which Mr Gandhi says is problematic, as “you could relate any information to a person one way or the other”.

The data protection law also says that non-compliance with it could attract hefty monetary fines, going up to 2.5bn rupees ($30.1m; £23.7m). This can discourage officers from disclosing answers which could be related to personal information.

“Even if they impose a [lower fine], which officer would take the risk [of disclosing personal information in public interest]?” Mr Gandhi asks.

Federal minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has said in an interview that the change in the law takes into account a landmark 2017 Supreme Court ruling on privacy “which said personal data can be processed if it passes the test of legality, legitimacy, and proportionality” and that it won’t affect the RTI.

Activists fear the change will affect their ability to seek information that has helped check corruption and ensure the delivery of basic rights.

“For instance, under the National Food Security Act, to check if there is corruption and someone does not get their rations, then people try to access information about fair-price shops and their sales registers to find out who was sold ration,” Ms Bhardwaj says. This helps check for pilferages in the ration given by the government’s public distribution system.

She also points out that Dalit (formerly known as untouchables) students have used the law to ask colleges to provide data about the admission process if they were not allotted a place even when they had the required marks.

Without this information, “the RTI Act would not keep a check on corruption and [this would] reduce transparency”, Mr Gandhi says.

He points to an instance during his tenure where a person got a copy of the degrees of doctors appointed at a government hospital. “After going through them, they found out that there were several people who held fake degrees,” he says.

Such answers could become unavailable under the new law, he believes, since they would disclose the personal information of individuals.

Even now, officials deny many RTI requests by just saying that the information is personal, Mr Gandhi says. He now expects these denials to increase.

The change doesn’t affect a section in the RTI law that says that says that even if the information falls under any of the exceptions (such as personal information), an officer could still allow access to it if the public interest “outweighs the harms to the protected interests”.

But this flips the burden on people seeking the information.

“A person seeking information under RTI does not have to justify why they are seeking the information,” Ms Bhardwaj says. “But now, I will have to prove that there is a public interest and that its non-disclosure has larger harms to the protected interest.”

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