Editor's Note: The planet we inherited as children is not the planet we will someday bid goodbye to. The orchestral call of cicadas in the evenings, the coinciding arrival of the monsoon with the start of the school year, and the predictability of natural cycles—things we thought to be unchanging—are now at risk. An altered climate, declining biodiversity and warming oceans aren’t distant realities presented in news headlines; they affect us all in seen and unseen ways. In ‘Converging Currents’, marine conservationist and science communicator Phalguni Ranjan explores how the fine threads connecting people and nature are transforming with a changing planet.
Few materials have transformed human civilisation as profoundly as plastic: lightweight, durable, inexpensive, and endlessly versatile. It's in the thin film coating fruits and vegetables in supermarkets, the bottle holding our water, the keyboard beneath our fingers, the fibres in our clothes, the dashboard of our cars, our spectacle frames, and the medical devices that save lives every day.
It is woven into modern existence so intricately that it has become indispensable. And that is precisely what makes plastic so fascinating, and just as problematic.
Plastic originated as an alternative to natural materials like ivory, tortoiseshell, and shellac; this new, flexible synthetic polymer was considered remarkably useful, especially as industrialisation increased the demand for durable and affordable substitutes.
The 1860s saw the invention of Parkesine, a hard but flexible semi-synthetic plastic, and then celluloid, which gained commercial success as a substitute for ivory in products like piano keys, combs, and other objects.
Then, in 1907, Belgian-American chemist Leo Baekeland invented Bakelite, the first fully synthetic plastic. Durable, heat-resistant, and electrically insulating, it found widespread industrial and household use, laying the foundation for the modern plastics industry. Incidentally, many pan handles today are still made of Bakelite.
The 1930s saw the development of polymers such as polyvinyl chloride (PVC), polyethylene (PE), polystyrene, and nylon, expanding plastic's applications across textiles, construction, and consumer goods. World War II accelerated plastic production, as synthetic materials replaced scarce natural resources in military equipment, packaging, and communication technologies. After the war, these innovations transitioned into everyday life, with plastics becoming central to mass consumer culture, democratising everyday products like dinnerware, that were once made of ivory and horn and considered luxuries. Synthetics like nylon revolutionised women’s fashion by replacing fragile silk with durable, affordable hosiery.
In 1940, Fortune Magazine described the early years of the plastics industry as "something like the world on the first day of creation"; a limitless frontier where chemists could seemingly invent entirely new materials. Plastics were celebrated for their colours, and their ability to transform ordinary household objects into symbols of modern living. Manufacturers advertised what plastic replaced rather than the material itself, and by becoming ubiquitous, plastics became invisible.
In the following decades, plastic production continued to rise rapidly, accompanied by the growth of disposable packaging and single-use products. It rose from approximately 2 million tonnes in the 1950s to 436 million tonnes in 2023.
At the same time, environmental awareness began to emerge, with early concerns about litter and pollution evolving into broader recognition of plastic's long-term ecological impacts.
Manufacturers advertised what plastic replaced rather than the material itself, and by becoming ubiquitous, plastics became invisible.
By the 2000s, plastics had become indispensable to modern life, even as their persistence in the environment and accumulation in ecosystems raised urgent questions about sustainability and waste management. Environmentalists showed how ‘biodegradable plastics’ didn’t really degrade in real-world conditions. Marine samples collected in 2019 found plastics dating back to the 1960s.
The irony here is impossible to ignore: the very qualities that made plastic revolutionary—durability, affordability, longevity, and versatility—are why it has now become one of humanity's most enduring environmental challenges.
Plastic has become the backbone of the food and beverage industry, as well as agriculture: it now lines irrigation systems, covers crops, preserves freshness and nutrients through supply chains, prevents contamination, extends shelf life, reduces food waste and losses, and enables global supply chains that deliver exotic fruits, seafood, and even relief materials across continents.
Without plastic, modern food distribution systems might not exist on the scale they do today. Agricultural value chains use around 12.5 million tonnes of plastic annually, and food packaging comes up to a whopping 37.3 million tonnes. The food packaging market in 2025 was valued at over $420 billion, projected to touch $599 billion by 2033.
By 2023, the world was already producing over 430 million tonnes of plastic annually, a significant portion of which leaked into the environment. This comes up to roughly 52 kg of plastic produced by every single one of the 8.3 billion people on this planet, annually—which means that each of us generates a kilo of waste every week. Multiply that by the many more years we’ll live, and you get an even more alarming lifetime total.
Also read: Bugging out: Why declining insect populations in India spell doom for agriculture
Unlike organic waste, plastic does not biodegrade or integrate into the soil. Instead, it fragments under sunlight, oceanic waves, and weather into progressively smaller particles: microplastics (smaller than 5 mm) and nanoplastics (smaller than 1 mm). These particles have now been found virtually everywhere, from deep oceans and Arctic sea ice to mountain snow, agricultural soils, rivers, and the air we breathe.
Without plastic, modern food distribution systems might not exist on the scale they do today.
But plastic is no longer just an environmental issue; it is increasingly becoming a biological one.
Marine organisms, from plankton and fish to turtles and seabirds, all ingest plastic directly or through contaminated prey, carrying it through entire food webs—webs that lead back to humans. Microplastics have now been detected in human blood, lungs, placentas, breast milk, liver, kidneys, and brain tissue. While scientists are still investigating their long-term health effects, studies suggest they may trigger inflammation and can have toxic effects at the cellular and tissue level.
Each year, millions of tonnes of plastic enter marine environments, where turtles mistake bags for jellyfish, and seabirds feed plastic fragments to their chicks. Abandoned fishing gear or ghost nets continue trapping marine life, coral reefs are smothered by debris, and hermit crabs occupy plastic caps instead of shells.
Plastics created decades ago are still around, and while they may have originated on land, many have ended up in the oceans.
Which raises an uncomfortable question: what exactly are we leaving behind?
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) recommends a hierarchical 6R framework—Refuse, Redesign, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Recover—to move from a linear to a circular economy. The hierarchy prioritises avoiding unnecessary plastics and keeping products in use for as long as possible before recycling them.
However, recycling is not the solution many think it is. In 2019, only 9% of global plastic waste was recycled; 50% of it ended up in landfills, 19% was incinerated, and 22% was mismanaged, allowing around 22 million tonnes to leak into the environment. Many plastics can only be recycled a limited number of times before their quality degrades, ultimately going into landfills again.
Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is a policy approach that shifts accountability from consumers alone to the companies that manufacture and market plastic packaging. India’s Guidelines on Extended Producers Responsibility aim to do just that: the producers, importers, and brand owners are required to collect and process the plastic packaging they introduce into the market through deposit-refund systems, buyback schemes, or other strategies. When companies cannot realistically manage this on their own, they can outsource EPR to qualified third parties called Producer Responsibility Organisations (PRO).
However, the success of these measures depends on collective choice, effective implementation, transparent monitoring, and meaningful integration of India’s vast informal waste sector.
Also read: Fish and seasonality: How year-round demand and extraction hurt our seas
India’s situation probably reflects that of every developing country. We entered the plastic age much later than nations that were already industrialised, but plastic became integral quite rapidly after 1991’s economic liberalisation. Single-use sachets, introduced in the 1980s, soon became popular for their convenience and affordability. By the 1990s and 2000s, this low-cost packaging had expanded to consumer goods for ‘one serving’ portions, from coffee to oil to ketchup and pickle. These one-serve packets made consumer goods more accessible and affordable for rural populations, and companies capitalised on that.
Now, it is one of India’s most persistent challenges as sachets, with their mixed materials and small pieces, cannot be recycled, and these often leak out of the waste management chain into the environment.
Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is a policy approach that shifts accountability from consumers alone to the companies that manufacture and market plastic packaging.
I have childhood memories of walking to a dairy with my grandfather to buy milk, which was poured into our large, stainless-steel milk cans. The same dairy sold fresh paneer, and fresh curd set in large steel trays—nothing was packaged—and the grocery store nearby sold cold drinks in returnable glass bottles.
I don’t remember when everything changed, but packets and plastic bottles became the norm. Admittedly, some of these options were more hygienic and made food easier to transport, with fewer chances of mid-chain adulteration or contamination. But it all came at a cost.
We cannot eliminate plastic altogether, but we can attempt to use it intelligently, where it is genuinely indispensable, and reduce the unnecessary single-use applications that drive modern consumption. Our vegetables do not need extra packaging, nor do we need plastic carry bags for everything we purchase. We definitely do not need to use single-use sachets of face packs and cosmetic creams when reusable containers fit travel bags easily, and you can’t really go wrong with a reusable stainless steel water bottle.
Many of us aware of the problem have the privilege to choose better; but are we truly exercising that privilege in a way that matters? Shampoo and detergent sachets may be an affordable necessity for some, but not small packs of cosmetic skin creams and hair conditioner.
We are leaving behind trillions of microscopic particles already embedded in oceans, soils, freshwater systems, wildlife, food, and living tissues. Long after today's products have been forgotten and discarded, their microscopic remnants might still be circulating through ecosystems and living bodies, where they definitely don’t belong.
We cannot eliminate plastic altogether, but we can attempt to use it intelligently, where it is genuinely indispensable, and reduce the unnecessary single-use applications that drive modern consumption.
For context: a plastic bottle can take around 450 years to break down, a fishing line 600, plastic bags can take 20 years, and your takeaway containers and coffee cups hang around for at least 50 years. These eventually break down, continuing to live on in the environment for decades more. They are never truly gone.
But let’s hit pause here. None of this means plastic is inherently evil. On the contrary, the invention has enabled major advancements across several fields.
The problem lies in our usage, in the lack of accountability of big corporations, and policies that do not translate into action. All the plastic we produce today is likely to outlive us in some form. The tragedy is not that plastic was invented, but that we built a disposable culture around a material that was designed to last.
Cover art by Pratik Bhide
Also read: In an age of food abundance, why does ‘hidden hunger’ hold India back?
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Welcome to the Good Food Movement’s Climate Crisis Dictionary—your online guide to environmental phenomena and the science behind them.
Sponge City (noun)
Coined in: 2003
Coined by: Chinese landscape architect and urban planner Kongjian Yu (While it was formally introduced by Yu as an urban planning model in his home country, the concept draws inspiration from many water harvesting techniques around the world, like India’s stepwells and johads, and Water Sensitive Urban Design in Australia)
TLDR: Restoring our cities’ naturally ‘spongy’ blue-green infrastructure (like lakes, rivers, soil and mangroves) and creating more absorbent landscapes can help store, filter and reuse stormwater, and mitigate flood risk.
By June 19, 2026, the seven lake reservoirs that supply drinking water to Mumbai had fallen to just 9.34% of their combined capacity. In other words, Mumbai had 40 days of water left. This prompted domestic and industrial water cuts across the metropolitan region.
Yet, when the first rains arrived in the last week of June after a long wait, Mumbai flooded overnight. Shrinking wetland cover and turbocharged concretisation mean the city can now scarcely absorb rainwater, which darts away as run-off.
Like Mumbai, India's other cities, too, are oscillating between floods and chronic water shortages. Globally, floods account for 35–40% of weather-related disaster occurrences, as per data from the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. By the middle of this century, 4 out of every 5 people affected by a flooding-related disaster will live in Asia.
But why are cities more prone to flooding today, and why are they taking longer to recover from floods? Their surface area is covered with hard, impermeable surfaces. Just like our skin, our cities need pores. Asphalt and concrete seal those pores shut. Paved areas prevent rainwater from sinking into the ground.
A 2022 study conducted by the World Resources Institute–that examined India’s ten most populated cities–demonstrated that built-up area (land covered by human-made structures as opposed to open land) expanded by 52% between 2000 and 2015, with 44% of new development occurring on high or very high groundwater recharge zones—areas where rainwater seeps into the earth, replenishing groundwater reserves. This diverted nearly 300 billion litres of water annually away from aquifers, which could have met 20% of the water demand generated by a growing urban population.
The frequency and intensity of flood events in India make the image of Noah's Ark feel less like legend and more a modern parable. In this environment, sponge cities are emerging as a nature-based intervention of learning to live with water rather than fighting against it. Modern cities borrow water from the future, sponge cities try to pay it back.
As Kongjian Yu says, “When water has space, it slows down.” Conventional urban planning has long treated rainwater as a nuisance to be speedily redirected, especially away from the more gentrified areas of the city. Gutters, storm drains and concrete channels are designed to rush water away from where it falls. But this approach can simply move the problem downstream to other parts of the city, and especially increase flood risk elsewhere, like for informal settlements in low-lying areas.
Modern cities borrow water from the future, sponge cities try to pay it back.
Sponge cities, on the other hand, are rooted in the ancient wisdom of traditional water use and harvesting techniques. Cities have various natural drainage systems like lakes, waterways, open soil and vegetation, and marshlands. A space redesigned as a sponge city, such as playgrounds or parking lots, works with these aspects of the land to slow, absorb, filter and hold, and reuse stormwater rather than channeling it away through grey infrastructure like pipes and concrete channels.
Their framing as an urban development model was first integrated as part of China’s nationwide sustainability policy in 2013-14. Cities across the world, including Shanghai, Copenhagen and Auckland are also investing in nature-based engineering like permeable pavements, and building ponds and rain gardens that store excess rainfall in underground storage tanks and tunnels. By temporarily storing excess rainfall, cities can release it gradually once rivers and existing drainage systems have enough capacity to safely carry it.
In India, urban nature-based design and landscaping firm Sponge Collaborative has worked with the Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC) to restore a degraded wetland in Porur as the Dr. M. S. Swaminathan Wetland Eco Park, after the city experienced devastating floods in December 2015. Reflecting on the lessons learnt from working with this highly successful project, co-founder Manushi Jain says that identifying a location for a park is a data-driven approach, and not an arbitrary process of converting parks at random. What was the site’s historical ecology, and can that natural character be restored? Assessing its drainage patterns, soil type, hydrology and lithology (physical characteristics of the rocks) are as important. At Porur, rain is not treated as a nuisance, but invited to linger. Stormwater enters a chain of ponds, where gravity settles out any large particles and impurities. Native reeds and wetland plants cleanse the water and fix nitrogen and phosphorus. The restored wetlands and ponds hold this rain before releasing it downstream.
Sponge parks can thus also act like a city’s ‘savings account.’
Since its opening in 2025, the M. S. Swaminathan Park has reportedly managed over 20 million litres of stormwater during the height of monsoon; it has also been able to manage over 90% of stormwater runoff generated on-site rather than discharging it into the city's drains. In storing about 30 million litres of rainwater, it has eased the pressure on conventional drainage and mitigated flood risk in the city. Sponge parks can thus also act like a city’s ‘savings account.’
Thermal imaging has also mapped the area to be 10-15°C cooler than its surrounding built area.
More from our Climate Crisis Dictionary: Urban heat islands: Sweaty cities made of rising skyscrapers, vanishing trees
Can sponge cities be imagined in India? What would they look like in the face of the country’s environmental governance? India has enthusiastically experimented with this model, with Chennai being the most visible testing ground; the GCC constructed 57 sponge parks across Chennai in 2023-24 alone. Others have mushroomed in cities like Mumbai, Kochi and Ahmedabad. However, the limitations of constructing sponge parks at scale have been stark. Large funds are siphoned away, only for construction to involve quick fixes. Pond bunds have been raised with cement and plastic, which risk polluting the aquifer. Stormwater drains have been linked directly with ponds, risking an intermingling with sewage.
We’re used to building concrete boxes as rainwater harvesting systems, says Jain. Governments believe that ‘landscape’ shouldn’t cost much and should maintain itself. Administrative red tape, departments functioning in silos, the nature of the sponge city not being standardised or included in policy, and political motivations to pseudo-adapt sustainable solutions at scale only result in flawed solutions and implementation.
There is no cookie cutter mechanism of designing a sponge park. It’s important to look at site-specific conditions—whether it has rocky, clayey or sandy soils, compacted ground, different aquifers and drainage patterns—and then decide on optimal interventions (like improving soil porosity and selecting appropriate vegetation).
These early experiments raise a larger question: what does an aspiring sponge city look like?
Sponge cities are not a hark back to what once was, but champion a sensitive development. The aim is to enhance the natural capacities of a region. What if we were to restore Bengaluru’s historic kaluves, a centuries-old network of interconnected man-made lakes and storm-water canals, which are now carriers of sewage? Or preserve Mumbai’s vast marshlands and mangroves, often deemed wasteland and up for grabs in the land reclamation battle, which have historically protected against sea level rise and the fierce monsoon? Dr. Hita Unnikrishnan, Sustainable Development Studies professor at University of Warwick, says that the focus of sponge cities should be on restoring what already exists, in a socially sensitive manner, before applying newer solutions.
“This is not just important from the perspective of reducing urban flooding and facilitating adequate drainage, but can also foster local biodiversity, improve local microclimate, as well provide water that recharges cities’ shallow aquifers,” she explains. “This will reduce dependency on deep underground reserves of groundwater—the depletion of which is one of the reasons regions like Bengaluru are constantly on the verge of running out of water supply.” Only when this isn’t possible, solutions that are in tandem with the character of the site can be engineered, she says.
Ultimately, even nature-based solutions have their limitations— including heavy investment in long-term sustainable returns (a newer position for India’s instant gratification-charged bureaucracy). In an extreme weather event, like a cloudburst, or a 25-year return storm event, even sponge cities may reach their threshold and collapse. China's experience illustrates that sponge cities are not a silver bullet—and work best in shepherding moderate rainfall, not eliminating flood risk altogether.
India is yet to standardise what the meaning and implementation of sponge cities would look like, which significantly complicates things.
In already built-up neighbourhoods, they can be created incrementally by replacing impermeable surfaces with permeable pavements, converting parking lots into rain gardens, installing bioswales along roads, creating green roofs, or redesigning public spaces to temporarily store stormwater. The idea is not always to create entirely new landscapes, but to make existing urban infrastructure work more like a sponge.
One of the biggest challenges was getting engineers and contractors to embrace unfamiliar materials and construction methods instead of defaulting to concrete, Jain says. Her team spent months on site, teaching contractors how to work with new materials. The hidden success of designing a sponge park was that engineers themselves understandood the value of nature-based solutions. Small steps on the ground propel change.
But India is yet to standardise what the meaning and implementation of sponge cities would look like, which significantly complicates things. Our cities are highly built-up, with fragmented land ownership and competing development pressures. Sponge cities also have their limitations: it might be difficult to retrofit existing neighbourhoods given the model’s initial expense. No less effortful is customising each sponge park, extending care and consideration for local micro-complexities and conditions. If sponge cities are going to be the next big buzzword in climate adaptation strategies, then it is very important that they steer clear of panacea approaches—what has worked elsewhere is not likely to guarantee the same success when transplanted into other contexts, Dr. Unnikrishnan says.
Another thing to consciously ensure is that sponge cities work especially for the most climate-vulnerable groups and not exacerbate existing inequalities. It’s easy for them to translate into interventions in certain neighbourhoods being prioritised over others. From what history tells us, this would then lead to further forms of gentrification. Neighbourhoods (and cities) that are economically well off, financially profitable and important to India’s global image may be singled out, which would also mean that an entire city might not function as a sponge city, but rather might give rise to ‘islands of sponges’ where change is concentrated, creating an illusion of climate resilience while the rest of the city still suffers climate risks.
Successful sponge parks are built with people, says Jain. Much depends on the people who live alongside them. Involving the community and making the sponge park a biodiversity haven as well as a social amenity is vital. Do people in the neighbourhood have a place of recreation; or are there schools and hospitals that could be flooded? Solutions shouldn’t be top-down but make use of this ecological knowledge suffused in that region, and make the most vulnerable members part of the planning process, says Dr. Unnikrishnan. That participatory approach not only leads to better designs, but also creates a sense of ownership, strengthens long-term stewardship and maintenance—and acknowledges that this is not another construction initiative, but a co-creation with people whose histories actually play out here.
Illustrated by Jishnu Bandyopadhyay
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Editor’s note: Urban farmer Simran Moorjani is the founder of Simbiosis, a regenerative farm on the outskirts of Mumbai, where she grows tomatoes and salad leaves while maintaining a symbiotic relationship with the land. In this column, she reflects on the realities of farming—sometimes with humour, sometimes with candour, always with curiosity.
One (among many) unexpected realisations I’ve had about farming is the persistent way in which it compels me to think about more than myself—about the microbes in the soil that aren’t visible to my eyes, the earthworms I keep trying to spot, the caterpillar chomping on a leaf that I hope turns into a butterfly, the combinations of leaves that I grow that work best for a salad, the leftovers that are being wasted in my bowl, the load that this handful of waste will put on my city’s landfills, the methane that they generate into the air. These thoughts—interconnected in an overwhelming sort of way—leave me feeling breathless, quite like that sentence just did.
It’s easier to set the thoughts aside than to confront them. But one of my favourite essays, called ‘Why Bother?’ by Micheal Pollan, makes a case for why we shouldn’t. It addresses how, on a personal scale, any change we make towards living a more “sustainable” life can be puny when compared to the scale of the problem. Sometimes I think about the turtle with a plastic straw stuck in its nose, and sometimes, I think about how much better my iced latte would taste if I didn’t have to change out a paper straw four times over. And is my ruined coffee experience really making a difference in a world where bombs are dropped at an unbelievable frequency?
But Pollan also speaks of hope, and of reducing our dependence on capitalist economies by finding one pursuit that is free of charge; for example, growing our own food. “Rip out your lawn, if you have one, and if you don’t–if you live in a high-rise, or have a yard shrouded in shade–look into getting a plot in a community garden. Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do–to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind,” he writes.
Unfortunately, the reality of most cities and metros in India doesn’t serve such a pursuit, since the citizen-to-open space ratio is far too low, and access to land comes at a grave cost. May I suggest a slightly different approach? One that fits more neatly into urban Indian schedules and the pace of city life?
In a world overtaken by quick commerce platforms and delivery apps, there’s great value in knowing more about your food, how it reaches you, and where it is grown. This is not an easy transition or way of living; it calls for planning meals ahead of time, going to farmers’ markets, and shopping in person. In a food economy increasingly focused on efficiency and standardisation, you’d be daring—and “inconveniencing”—yourself if you decided to eat with the seasons. This means resisting the urge to buy mangoes before the summer hits, and being skeptical of strawberries on sale in July.
In a food economy increasingly focused on efficiency and standardisation, you’d be daring—and “inconveniencing”—yourself if you decided to eat with the seasons.
All of these everyday decisions, whether big or small, add up to answer one question: “How can I eat in a way that isn’t just good for me, but is good for the planet, too?” As a cultivator and consumer, I’d argue that knowing your farmer is the best way to get started. It’s the surest way to know what is the freshest produce now, and what you can look forward to in the weeks to come. In fact, if the opportunity presents itself, consider spending a day with a farmer to see where your food comes from. We don’t bite, I promise! Most small-scale farmers are happy to host buyers or curious consumers, to show off the work we’re doing and share a meal.
A visit to Gorus Forest Farm on the outskirts of Pune was full of revelations to me. When I think of coffee, I instinctively think of the southern half of India—the states of Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. But here, in the Western Ghats of Maharashtra, under the dense canopy of native trees, grow strong plants of arabica coffee. We walked around the farm guided by Ashwin Paranjpe, who is also an educator, as he plucked different wild leaves for us to try, or pointed at different species of chillies he grows. It ended with copious cups of coffee, grown, roasted, and brewed right there.
Also read: Tomato truths: What this novice farmer learnt and unlearnt about the fruit
During a recent online session on heirloom rice by chef and researcher Anumitra Ghosh Dastidar of Edible Archives, a food research project and restaurant in Goa, I learnt about the wealth of paddy varieties that India was home to—over 1,10,000 of them. Tragically, Ghosh Dastidar observed, 90% of them have been lost to time, disuse or other reasons.
Much of this has to do with the adoption of high-yielding varieties (HYVs) of grains like rice and wheat in the years following Independence, when the hunger of a new nation had to be quelled and dependence on foreign aid had to be eliminated. Following the Green Revolution, Indian agriculture assumed an industrial form and scale, embracing the use of chemical inputs like pesticides and fertilisers. And food has never quite been the same.
When I first began experimenting with farming, I noticed my choices as a consumer shifting.
Still, initiatives like Edible Archives document and showcase India's rice, using food as a powerful tool for preserving agricultural biodiversity. Ghosh Dastidar combines a PhD in Theoretical Linguistics with formal culinary training. At the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018-2019, she showcased nearly 50 heirloom varieties, inviting visitors to engage with the sheer diversity of grains.
OOO Farms is another collective whose impact spans across 63 villages in Maharashtra and Gujarat, and they remain committed to working the old way. In their work with over 2,200 farmers from tribal communities, they focus on safeguarding indigenous practices and promoting the cultivation of native rice, wheat, dal and millets. Ancestral wisdom drives their ability to nurture microclimates and biodiversity, and their bottom line is nutrition per acre rather than the typical, “optimised” yield per acre. Every year, they organise the Wild Food Festival in Mumbai—a means to learn about foods you won’t typically find at the market. It’s also an opportunity to see the OOO seed bank in all its glory, and to shop for some of their produce in person.
When I first began experimenting with farming, I noticed my choices as a consumer shifting. I had greater respect for the food I was eating, for how it had been grown, when I could put a face to the person who harvested it. Even composting the peels of this produce felt more joyful, as I thought of the nutrients from their land someday nourishing my land. This shift in consumption is also not just limited to the food I eat; it has trickled down into many different facets of my life. Outfits feel more ceremonious when they’re made by designers who believe in conscious clothing, be it in the materials they employ, or the dyes they use to colour them, or the wages they pay to their teams. Skincare feels better when I can pronounce all the ingredients on the back of the label.
The mainstreaming of hybridised vegetables over hyperlocal, traditional grains and produce—another convenience of modern life—has its own consequences. Our diets become formulaic, and our pantries become limited. In the process, the curiosity to seek out unglamourous ingredients is lost; I’ve seen this up close, as someone who chooses to grow heirloom tomatoes the organic way.
To be friends with farmers is to acquaint yourself with these ingredients and how to actually use them. Lately, I’ve been looking up different ways to cook with Gondhoraj lemons, and testing the correct amount of time needed to boil Ajara Ghansal—a GI-tagged short grain rice local to Maharashtra—to perfection.
Knowing your farmer is to also embrace the imperfections in the fruits of their labour.
If you get on the good side of your farmer, they may even offer you things from their secret stash. This is exactly how I got my hands on Termitomyces mushrooms, farmed, quite literally, by termites. Despite humanity’s best efforts, it simply cannot be grown by our hands. They emerge at the end of the monsoon at Vrindavan Farm near Mumbai, and I was lucky to be there at the time to try them. I also came across some of the nicest potatoes grown by Anil ji, who is otherwise a strawberry farmer; he generously sent a few taters along with my berry order.
Knowing your farmer is to also embrace the imperfections in the fruits of their labour. Food was never meant to look “perfect”, it is the human desire for standardisation that makes two tomatoes or heads of cauliflower look and taste identical. If a spinach leaf has a couple of holes in it, that means it’s probably not been sprayed with pesticides. It means the same piece of produce has fed us and a little critter on a farm—a critter, using only its instincts, came to this very leaf, and couldn’t resist taking a bite of it. How lucky we are to share the spinach with it.
At a time when food safety is being hotly debated in India, from the quality of paneer to contaminants in spice powders, it’s only sensible to reduce the number of people between you and your food; subtract the intermediaries, go directly to the source! You could even turn this quest into the guiding force of your travels. Go to Chikmagalur in Karnataka to find where the perfect cup of coffee comes from, or to Nagaland in search of the spiciest chillies.
Also read: Tomato truths: Growing your own food is a radical, rewarding thing
To show respect for a farmer’s work is not simply to get to know them; it is also compensating them justly for their toil in the fields and their battles against the weather and pests. Maybe this will nudge the farmer's child to spend their life being a steward of the land, too, instead of migrating to the city in the hope of better prospects.
To switch from the ease and familiarity of what we know and are used to, to becoming the patron of small, sustainable farmers is a hard switch. But the best things in life often are.
Convenience comes at a cost, whether it is compromised flavour, lower quality, or a decline in the very health of the planet. And though these costs may not be visible to us, we’re not immune to them either. To switch from the ease and familiarity of what we know and are used to, to becoming the patron of small, sustainable farmers is a hard switch. But the best things in life often are.
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Cover Art by Pearl D'Souza
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Every morning, Hajra Begum visits her saffron fields in Lethpora, in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pulwama district. The 56-year-old religiously plucks out the weeds from the earth that may threaten the growth of the precious spice. Lately, she has monitored another intruder in the fields: a porcupine.
Begum is one among many farmers worried about the fate of this age-old crop. Kashmir's saffron belt Pampore and nearby areas have seen a sharp increase in porcupine incursions. Experts claim that the destruction of the large rodent’s natural habitat by cement factories and mining sites has forced them to move towards the plains.
The land lost to porcupines eats further into the holdings of saffron cultivators.
These farmers have watched their fields rapidly shrink due to climate change. Prof. Mir Ghulam Hassan, Chief Scientist at the Saffron Research Centre (IIKSTC), Dussu, says, “We have been witnessing rain deficits and snowless winters that are affecting saffron production… This past winter, too, there was very little snowfall. There’s a high possibility of lower production again.” These weather events specifically damage saffron corms—round, onion-like bulbs that grow under the surface of the soil, and store the energy that the Crocus sativus plant needs.
According to the 2011 Census, nearly 16,000 families in the area depended on saffron cultivation for their livelihoods–a sector that employed over 11,000 women in Jammu and Kashmir.
Along with extreme weather events, it is fluctuations in climate, too, that have a bearing on the crop. “Abrupt, heavy rainfall is followed by a sharp increase in temperature in recent years. These weather variations create favourable conditions for the growth of fungi on saffron corms, and cause them to rot. Farmers often do not realise the damage until the harvest season, when the fungi have already destroyed the crop,” Prof. Hassan explains.
“In the past, we had more than two hectares of land under saffron cultivation. I used to earn over Rs 8–9 lakh annually. Now, only four kanals (0.20 hectares) of that land remain,” Begum rues. Until a few decades ago, saffron farming was the main source of income for Begum‘s family. In 2003, her husband was diagnosed with kidney failure, and the responsibility of supporting the family fell on Begum. “I was able to educate my four children and afford medical care for my husband because of my saffron fields. Now, breaking even on production costs is difficult,” she says.
According to the 2011 Census, nearly 16,000 families in the area depended on saffron cultivation for their livelihoods–a sector that employed over 11,000 women in Jammu and Kashmir. But cultivation has been in decline since the turn of the century, prompting farmers to shift to other profitable crops like apples. And though apples have provided a safety net, the women who were dependent on saffron have lost out on their individual incomes.
Interestingly, the spice isn’t grown from a seed. This perennial crop slowly erupts from the corm, which the farmers dig up, divide, and replant directly into the soil. Before planting, the farmers plough their fields for a year or more, letting the soil loosen and absorb nutrients. The corms then go into the earth in July, until September–sometimes even the beginning of October–then lie dormant through the dry Kashmir summer.
As long as its lifespan is, so rare the revered spice born of it: each flower gives just three delicate crimson stigmas.
As the winds chill, in a small flowering window in October and November, the corms send up thin, purple flowers. Generally, the crop needs little irrigation, being sensitive to water; the rains from August to November are crucial to its growth. Manual irrigation is recommended post sprouting, right before flowering, and then right after.
A single saffron plant can keep producing for years: corms can be productive for up to 15 years. But as long as its lifespan is, so rare the revered spice born of it: each flower gives just three delicate crimson stigmas. These are then hand-plucked—making saffron one of the most laboriously harvested spices—and dried.
Traditionally, women have formed the backbone of Kashmir's saffron industry. A 2026 study by the Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology, Kashmir (SKUAST-K) found that women account for 70% of labour–planting the corms–65% of weeding activities, 80% of harvesting, and 75% of post-harvest processing in saffron cultivation.
The first de-weeding, which involves digging the entire field, starts in the first week of June. The second begins between August and September, just a few months before the saffron starts flowering. The women in the household work shoulder to shoulder with men.
Once the crop blooms in October through November, farmers bring their entire families to the fields to pluck the purple flowers. Farooq Ahmad, a 48-year-old, fifth-generation saffron grower, says that the production used to be so high that they either sought help from neighbours and returned the favour when their neighbours undertook harvest in their fields, or they would employ women from landless households (The wages for these labourers range from Rs. 500 to Rs. 700 per day). The same women also participated in the next phase of the harvest: carefully, tenderly picking the stigmas from the flowers—the orange threads that impart both colour and flavour to food. Ahmad says, “If we happen to employ labourers in the fields, we pay them in cash. Traditionally, we used to pay local women with saffron for their work, but that is now unimaginable."
In the face of few employment opportunities, saffron farming was the only source of livelihood for Shaheena (name changed upon request), a 50-year-old resident of Meej, a village that borders the Pampore town. Working in the fields as well as helping the farmers with plucking and post-processing usually provided her with work for over three months. In the winter, Shaheena would engage in carefully extracting the saffron stamens from the petals, known locally as paet—the pollen-bearing, yellow male reproductive parts—which fetched women like her between Rs. 50 and Rs. 100 per 10 gm. The bright paet strands are used in Ayurvedic medicines, and even as natural yellow dyes. Shaheena recalls, “I used to earn Rs. 400–500 a day working in the fields.”
The work in the saffron fields enabled her to take care of her and her children’s expenses.
She owns a very small piece of farmland with her husband, who was a daily wage worker; here, they cultivate vegetables for their own sustenance. The work in the saffron fields enabled her to take care of her and her children’s expenses. “Now, there is no work left for me. The farmers mostly do it all by themselves, or they use motor tillers to save on labour costs,” she explains.
Now, Shaheena mostly stays at home. “I have two sons who work as masons; they take care of all my needs,” she says.
Jammu and Kashmir is reported to have received only 49.8% of its normal precipitation between October 2024 and February 2025. During the corresponding period from October 2025 to February 2026, precipitation stood at just 45.6% of normal levels. “Thirty years ago, farmers used to give more huss posh—the share of saffron produce given to the women in the families after the peak bloom—than the total production many farmers can achieve today,” observes Ahmad, as he monitors labourers working in his field. Last year, his production—a total of only 30 gm—declined by 80%, in contrast to quantities of 300 to 400 gm in the past. “The crop failed due to drought-like conditions,” Ahmad explains, “There is no alternative irrigation facility available to farmers.”
The impact is also felt by local trade networks that women once occupied. Shakeela Banu, 45, a resident of Khrew near Pampore, has been running a saffron firm for the past two decades. She goes door to door, purchasing saffron directly from farming families. One of the few women in the spice’s trade business, Banu occupied a unique position, as a solid confidante for female farmers, and a source of hope in times of distress and need.
“I used to buy all the saffron from the women in one season,” Banu says, wryly. “Not a kg or two; I used to buy 20-25 kg from over 70 to 80 women,” she adds. In the golden days of her business, she recalls buying at least 2 kg every day and selling it in the market. “The business was lucrative. I was able to build a house and send my children to private schools.”
In present times, she can scarcely source 500 gm from farmers in an entire month. “None of the women I used to buy from have enough saffron to sell for in order to earn a disposable income,” Shakeela says. Tragically, villagers speaking to this reporter estimated that only four out of 500 families in Khrew continue to farm saffron.
Naseema, another resident of Khrew, remembers the time spent in her family’s saffron fields. “It used to take us days to collect the flowers. The process itself was a social activity that allowed me to meet friends whose fields bordered ours,” the 46-year-old says.
“None of the women I used to buy from have enough saffron to sell for in order to earn a disposable income”
All of their land is now barren. Her family followed new farming practices as reportedly advised by the Department of Agriculture under the National Saffron Mission; this included sowing seeds 6-8 inches deep into the soil, instead of the typical logic of burying them a few inches deeper. They observed the more intense impact of the heat wave on these shallowly sown seeds, in addition to crop failure owing to delayed rain. “During the first season, more flowers bloomed than normal, but in the second year, we found our land ruined… few saffron flowers here and there, and then nothing,” Naseema says.
When the yield was more generous, Naseema could expect to earn Rs 50,000 and Rs 70,000 for a little over a kilo of paet. The yellow-coloured stamen comprised a major chunk of income for women like her—an income that has entirely vanished. “Since the saffron production is very little, the farmers keep both the saffron strands as well as the paet for themselves,” Banu says.
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In 2010, the central government launched the National Saffron Mission to encourage growers to pursue standardised saffron farming, aimed at increasing yields. More than Rs. 400 crore was sanctioned under the scheme, including provisions for financial assistance and irrigation infrastructure.
In 2020, Kashmiri saffron was granted a Geographical Indication (GI) tag to strengthen its market identity. A spice park, India International Kashmir Saffron Trading Centre (IIKSTC), was constructed at Dussu to aid farmers with post-production. The facility is reportedly equipped to process, dry, grade, pack and e-auction the spice.
In 2020, Kashmiri saffron was granted a Geographical Indication (GI) tag to strengthen its market identity.
In 2022, the Department of Agriculture issued a notification banning the sale of saffron corms outside the union territory. Suhail Inamullah, Technical Officer at the Directorate of Agriculture, Jammu and Kashmir, explains that this ban was aimed at keeping the prices of seeds in check, ensuring that they remain available and accessible to farmers.
Amid disastrous climate events, the mass exit of farmers from saffron farming, and the lack of robust data, figures concerning land under cultivation and production remain disputed.
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“A 100 kg of saffron corms now cost between Rs. 1.5 lakh and Rs. 2 lakh. No farmer can afford seed at that price,” says Abdul Majeed Wani, President of the Jammu & Kashmir Saffron Growers Association. The rise in price is evidenced by the fact that farmers used to buy the same amount of corms for one-tenth the cost in the past; this steep rise is attributed to a decrease in availability of corms, as well as the increased demand from indoor units across India, which employ aeroponic or soilless systems agriculture techniques to grow the spice, typically outside the Valley where the weather conditions aren’t otherwise feasible.
Wani advocates for the development of corm nurseries by the government, so that farmers who want to revive cultivation can access planting material at affordable prices.
Despite restrictions, growers say corms continue to leave the Valley through road transport networks. “The responsibility also lies with farmers. It is difficult to stop illegal exports when growers can earn significant profits through illicit means,” the Directorate of Agriculture’s Suhail Inamullah says.
Amid uncertain climate conditions, rising production costs, and weak policy support, many women still hold on to the hope that Kashmir’s red gold, and their livelihoods, can survive.
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Edited by Anushka Mukherjee and Neerja Deodhar
Andrea Pinto, a librarian in Mumbai, felt as if she was “possessed by an alien” when she started experiencing menopause at 55. Besieged by aches and pains, fatigue, bouts of crying and insomnia, she hardly recognised herself anymore.
Pinto’s experience is not an exception: despite the outlandish symptoms it arrives with, there’s little conversation about this drastic bodily change, rues gynaecologist Dr. Tanaaz Bhatt. It is not merely a transition from a reproductive to a non-reproductive phase, as it also has deep social and emotional impacts. “It's like you've never felt this way before, ever in your life. Everybody pays so much emphasis to puberty and pregnancy. But no one talks about perimenopause or menopause,” says Dr. Bhatt, who practices in Mumbai.
While in the West, women hit menopause around 52 to 54 years of age, in India, the age is typically between 45 to 50.
The menopausal population in India was projected to reach 103 million by 2026. Studies also show that Indian women experience menopause earlier. While in the West, women hit menopause around 52 to 54 years of age, in India, the age is typically between 45 to 50, says Dr. Bhatt.
Menopause sets in when a woman has had 12 months of no menstruation, including any spotting. Endocrinologist Dr. Roshani Sanghani explains that this happens when the secretion of two hormones from the ovaries—oestrogen and progesterone—drops to menopausal levels.
But before menopause comes the tumultuous period of perimenopause, when there is a gradual and variable decline in the ovarian hormones. The pituitary gland pumps more FSH (follicle-stimulating hormone) into the system, to try to get the ovaries to respond more, leading to fluctuations. The age of perimenopause can vary, and Dr. Sanghani advises tracking symptoms to check if you are perimenopausal.
There are some women who experience premature menopause, too, between 30 and 35.
Women could be perimenopausal even when they’re observing what looks like a regular, monthly period.
Dr. Sanghani says about perimenopause, “Female hormones don't fall in a straight line. They start fluctuating wildly, going low some months, high some months, which makes it difficult to predict or even catch that a woman is going into perimenopause, because every month does not feel the same.”
This means that women could be perimenopausal even when they’re observing what looks like a regular, monthly period–and this could go on for 5 to 8 years.
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Nearly all organs in our bodies have oestrogen receptors. Oestrogen, like all hormones, is a chemical messenger. Released into the bloodstream it travels to various organs which have a protein called oestrogen receptors. It binds to the receptor, and prompts a particular action. Oestrogen governs our moods, bone health, cardiovascular health, digestive systems, memory, and even energy levels. When oestrogen secretion is in a flux, every aspect of life is impacted, making it difficult to navigate the choppy seas of perimenopause.
Women can develop a range of symptoms, including ‘a menopause belly’. Dr. Bhatt says, “Even though a woman exercises or she eats the same food she has had all her life in an effort to be healthy, she may put on a lot of weight.” She explains that this is a result of erratic metabolism, which leads to the loss of muscle mass in the body. With a decreased ability to burn calories naturally, menopausing women are more likely to gain weight, despite exercising.
With a decreased ability to burn calories naturally, menopausing women are more likely to gain weight, despite exercising.
Hormonal fluctuation can lead to crying spells, mood swings, irritability, anger, recurrent urinary tract infections, bladder issues, joint pains, ringing in the ear (tinnitus), vertigo, impaired decision-making, change in heat or cold tolerance, and even change in cognition. A woman may enter a room, or open a cupboard, only to pause and wonder why she did that. This feeling is commonly known as brain fog.
“It feels like the body is slowly disintegrating along with the mind, and you're not in control,” says Ujalaa Chaudhuri, a 45-year old media professional from Mumbai, who began experiencing perimenopausal symptoms a few months ago. Her menstrual bleeding began seesawing between heavy and light, she started to feel sudden flashes of rage and mood swings. Sleep has become elusive, with insomnia and anxiety occupying her nights and days. She also experiences tingling in her feet, and stiffness in her joints.
Pinto also went through myriad symptoms. Her tolerance for spice went down drastically, and acidity became a frequent occurrence. She found herself unable to stay home by herself for long periods, and different parts of her body started paining. She, too, suffered from insomnia, like Chaudhuri.
On the other hand, Dr. Charuta Mandke, a 49-year-old ophthalmologist in Mumbai–who recently took an online test to examine her experience–is not experiencing severe perimenopausal symptoms.
That is the tricky part about menopause and perimenopause—symptoms can vary widely, and so can their severity. Dr. Sanghani says that one starts noticing these changes during perimenopause, but they need to be looked at as a whole, instead of assessing them piecemeal. She illustrates this through an example: a woman may go to an ENT specialist for tinnitus and vertigo if she experiences them in her early 40s. But an ENT may not make note of the other symptoms, which could otherwise lead to a diagnosis of perimenopause. “It's about looking at a cluster of symptoms and the patient as a whole,” she adds. She suggests that women keep a symptom diary, so the doctor can take a holistic view of their experiences. Dr. Bhatt also urges that women see a gynaecologist regularly after they turn 35.
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There are clinical options which can help women during this stormy period. A treatment which has gained widespread application is the Menopausal Hormonal Treatment (MHT), formerly called HRT. It affords the protection that oestrogen and progesterone offer even after menopause. For a long time, both doctors and patients were wary of this treatment. A study conducted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US as a part of the Women’s Health Initiative trial, warned that MHT could lead to breast cancer, endometrial cancer, strokes, and other conditions. The study ended in 2002. “But now many studies are coming up, which have shown beyond a doubt that HRT can help,” says Dr. Bhatt.
In administering MHT, the depleting hormones in the body are replaced by external, bioidentical hormones. Oestrogen may be taken orally or applied topically (directly to the skin, body, or vaginal area). Dr. Sanghani adds that women who have not undergone hysterectomies need to take progesterone along with the oestrogen. MHT typically costs upwards of Rs. 1,200 to 2,000 a month in India–this is for the hormones alone.
The treatment is tailored to the individual patient’s conditions, including starting with getting tested to determine if it is safe and appropriate for the patient. It is crucial to discuss the possible risks and side effects with the doctor before making a decision. It should be taken only under medical guidance, stresses Dr. Mandke, who is considering MHT for herself.
In administering MHT, the depleting hormones in the body are replaced by external, bioidentical hormones.
Dr. Sanghani adds that we now have long-term data of women who've been on the treatment for 10 to 20 years, and there's been no signal to show that it's potentially dangerous. In fact, the FDA has already removed the black box warning (the most stringent safety notice the U.S. Food and Drug Administration requires a prescription drug to state) from MHT, so that doctors now prescribe it with more confidence.
Shaista Vaishnav, an advertising professional, noticed a change in her menstrual pattern when she was 36. She went into perimenopause by 38. Initially, her doctor put her on birth control pills, but also suggested she see a gynaecologist who was an expert in perimenopause and menopause—who further recommended MHT. She has been on MHT for around eight months now, using an oestrogen gel and an orally administered progesterone tablet.
But before she began this treatment, she had in-depth conversations with her doctor, read extensively, and even completed short courses on the subject. Her doctor told her about potential risks—blood clots, and the possibility of a stroke for smokers or people with a sedentary lifestyle. She was also asked to get a yearly sonography and mammography done. Though aware of these risks, she opted for it as her doctor advised that for her, the benefits outweigh the risks, especially due to her early menopause.
But not everyone chooses MHT, and nor can everyone afford to. Pinto was sure she didn't want to seek medical interventions such as MHT or anti-depressants to treat her symptoms, insteading choosing modalities like naturopathy and homeopathy. In her case, Pinto started experiencing menopausal symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic, which compounded its effects. What helped was a book called The Change by Germaine Greer, which listed the symptoms she was experiencing–accurately–and made her feel seen and comforted. This was especially important because the older women she had spoken to had dismissed her concerns. She also comforted herself with art, reading, crossword puzzles, and by talking to friends and family.
Melody D’Souza’s perimenopause, too, coincided with a particularly stressful event in her life. It brought on drastic weight loss, hair fall, body aches, and allergies. She also chose lifestyle changes to cope with it, cutting out white sugar completely as it gave her extreme highs alternating with crashes. Next, she stopped stimulants like tea, coffee and other caffeinated foods. She also diversified her diet, adding different kinds of proteins, millets, and fermented foods. For joint and muscle relief, she practised fascia release techniques, which work on connective tissue.
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Doctors warn of bone loss and weakening muscles during perimenopause and menopause. Dr. Bhatt cautions that MHT is not enough without regular exercise and a healthy diet. “Muscles are the new brain,” she adds. Strength training is strongly recommended to prevent muscle loss. Experts are increasingly using the term Musculoskeletal Syndrome of Menopause (MSM) to describe these symptoms. A 2024 review found that over 70% of women experience musculoskeletal symptoms during the menopause transition, with 25% disabled by them. Dr. Bhatt puts the risk of osteoporosis in post-menopausal women even higher, at one in two women.
An oft-neglected part of this period of sea change is mental health. “All women need to be told how to prepare for this much before it even starts,” says Dr. Syeda Ruksheda, a Mumbai-based psychiatrist.
A 2024 review found that over 70% of women experience musculoskeletal symptoms during the menopause transition, with 25% disabled by them.
She says that the oestrogen dip can lead to psychiatric symptoms: for instance, a pre-existing condition such as borderline anxiety can get exaggerated. Even women with no underlying conditions may develop symptoms, most commonly of depression and anxiety, necessitating intervention, she adds. PMS symptoms also get exaggerated during perimenopause.
She emphasises adopting a healthy lifestyle with adequate sleep, a nutritious diet, and stress management. She also advises women not to ignore symptoms and get them tested, lest they get amplified and affect their quality of life.
The role of family and friends cannot be stressed enough. The menopausal woman is undergoing changes such as tooth and hair loss, pigmentation, weight gain, and even reduced libido and painful intercourse. The family needs to be aware of this, so that they can empathise with her instead of being dismissive, and ensure she gets enough rest. Perhaps the most important part of this journey is acceptance. As Chaudhuri says, “I think there's so much taboo and shame still about these conversations… in truth, there is nothing to be ashamed of.” This milestone needs to be not just accepted, but celebrated.
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Alappuzha is famed for its verdant scenery of lakes and lagoons, perennially drawing heavy tourist footfalls to Kerala. Only 15 km from the district’s headquarters is a village that has earned widespread attention and acclaim of its own, despite having neither beaches nor backwaters.
Here, the front yard of a typical household is dotted with a diverse vegetable bed—featuring steadily growing okra, or bitter gourds hanging off a trellis. It’s not uncommon to cross paths with residents who have won state awards in recognition of their efforts in sustainable agriculture; many are full-fledged farmers by profession. Customers from near and far-off areas purchase vegetables or their seeds here, with the complete faith that not a trace of anything harmful will have found itself on any crop grown in this panchayat.
During the period between 1994-95, when organic farming had yet to become a catchphrase, Kanjikuzhy achieved the feat of becoming Kerala’s first vegetable-sufficient village, growing every crop using an approach that shunned chemical fertilisers and pesticides.
The village, with close to 9,000 households across 18 wards, has imbibed a culture of farming at home, even if it may only be a vegetable or two, even if they may only have a small plot of land. Farming does not entail a commercial intent for everyone here. Their enthusiasm for it stems from a collective desire to ensure that the food that makes it to their plates is safe to consume. It is to do away with the dependency on a market where produce often carries the residue of chemicals.
Their enthusiasm for it stems from a collective desire to ensure that the food that makes it to their plates is safe to consume.
Once upon a time, the pursuit of farming was an inconceivable idea for the people of Kanjikuzhy. The sandy, dry texture of the village’s soil had proven itself incompatible with agriculture. Although farming was not absent, it was limited to families which were already pursuing it for generations. The majority of the village’s population was engaged in coir-related occupations. But this had to change in the 90s, when the coir economy began to decline. Kanjikuzhy needed to find new sources of livelihood. The panchayat saw a solution in undertaking a goal that was ridden with risks—lead the village towards becoming entirely agrarian.
Under president P. Swathanthryam’s leadership, the panchayat announced the Janakeeya Pachakari Krishi (meaning, vegetable cultivation by the public) program in 1994. This involved the formation of neighbourhood clusters which went door to door and distributed booklets explaining how farming could be possible in the region. Under the program, the panchayat distributed a variety of seeds and organic fertilisers to residents.
The public initially responded with scepticism. For one, they had no experience with the profession. And the soil in Kanjikuzhy lacked the capacity to retain moisture. This meant constantly watering the land—a physically laborious exercise before mechanised methods like drip irrigation were adopted. There were nagging doubts as to whether farming in such a topography would bear worthwhile results.
It is the prompt availability of resources and advice that gradually encouraged more and more people here to take up farming.
“It was very tough in the beginning. People had the perception that only those from a traditional farming background were capable of it,” says G. Udayappan, a farmer and the convener of the Kanjikuzhy Karshika Karmasena, a support group set up by the panchayat to oversee and advise farmers in the village. They educated residents about the potential for farming by nourishing the soil with the right fertilisers. About 25% of the population agreed to participate, sowing the seeds provided by the village body on a designated date. The neighbourhood clusters made regular follow-up visits to the participating households to check on the progress of the crops.
“The Karmasena (task force) was set up because the farmers raised the need for labour. They had the funds and the land, but no workers to help them out,” says Udayappan. The support group deploys volunteers to households requesting assistance with preparing the soil or constructing raised beds. A farmer can also reach out to the Karmasena if they notice signs of a disease on a crop. The group’s members will suggest antidotes that will work. It is the prompt availability of resources and advice that gradually encouraged more and more people here to take up farming.
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Udayappan’s daily routine involves making the rounds of the village on his two-wheeler, stopping by a number of homes to check on the health of the crops. And when he is not on the road, he can be found in the Karmasena's office, its entrance stacked with bundles of fertilisers. “We are currently using bone meal, neem cake, fish remains, vermicompost and cocopeat,” Udayappan says.
The panchayat also set up four outlets exclusively for the sale of the produce grown in Kanjikuzhy. “The vegetables cultivated here are sold at the prices quoted by the farmers and not the rates set by retailers,” says Udayappan. “For example, if the market price for green chillies is Rs. 50, we sell it for Rs. 100 here. At first, the customer will find it hard to accept the idea of spending Rs. 100 on green chillies. But he is sure to come back and buy them again,” he says.
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The vegetables cultivated here are sold at the prices quoted by the farmers and not the rates set by retailers.
This year, the panchayat set aside a budget of Rs. 5 lakh for seed preparation. “We prepared three and a half lakh seeds of different vegetables and distributed them across households. You can walk into any house here and find vegetables growing. The panchayat supports the residents to cultivate them, even if they are only for their personal use,” Udayappan explains.
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A major catalyst in Kanjikuzhy’s success is that its farming activities are anchored by a celebratory spirit. The panchayat’s Facebook page is replete with images of residents, including children, posing with the produce they have grown. Farming is an expression of happiness and pride, and this is not a sentiment that emerged in the era of social media. When the panchayat took off with its organic farming initiatives in the mid-90s, it hosted events that rewarded the best of efforts and experiments in the fields. In one such competition to encourage vegetable cultivation, the gold medal was awarded to K. P. Subhakesan, one of the busiest farmers in Kanjikuzhy today. The medal sits among a number of state and national honours in Subhakesan’s home. His quiet demeanour is in stark contrast to his fame, reflected in his many framed photographs with Kerala’s political leaders and movie stars.
Subhakesan shot to prominence in the early stage of the panchayat’s push towards organic farming. Sometime in 1995, he developed the ‘Kanjikuzhy payar’—a variety of long beans produced from the cross pollination of Lima beans and a local variety named Vellayani. A single pod is 36-37 inches long and weighs 80 gm. “The beans are soft. It is a resilient crop, so it can be grown during any season,” says Subhakesan as he stands under trellises of the beans in a plot owned by the Steel Industrials Kerala Limited (SILK), a public sector unit. In 2019, the 15-acre barren plot was entrusted to Subhakesan with the objective of providing safe, organic produce to terminally ill patients supported by the KK Kumaran Pain and Palliative Care Society in Kanjikuzhy. He has transformed the plot into a farm with more than 10 varieties of fruits and vegetables.
A portion of the plot is dedicated to watermelon cultivation. Subhakesan taps the exterior of each of them, drawing attention towards the difference in the sound. “Did you hear that? It means the fruit is ripe,” he says. He slices open a couple of the watermelons; they were not red as one would expect. One was yellow, and the other revealed an orange hue.
“I started farming on two cents of land. When I was in school, we were growing vegetables in our kitchen garden,” says Subhakesan. He is now taking care of farming activities across 21 acres. He also has a shop adjoining his home which stocks seeds of native vegetable varieties and an array of materials needed to run a farm. “I am not saying this out of arrogance, but I had turned down a government job to choose farming instead. It gives me great satisfaction to be able to provide vegetables of good quality to people,” Subhakesan shares.
Kerala has had a high dependency on the neighbouring states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka to source vegetables, including staples like onions and tomatoes. In recent years, there has been a growing sense of alarm that this dependency is attached with the risk of consumption of pesticide-laden produce. The Kerala government itself took cognisance of this, writing to the Tamil Nadu government in 2015 about the presence of pesticides in the vegetables exported from the state. Since 2016, the government has expressed intentions to lead Kerala towards becoming entirely self-sufficient in vegetable production, announcing schemes to be executed at the local body level. Kanjikuzhy stands as an example of how a proactive panchayat can lead a village towards this collective goal.
Different personal circumstances convinced Kanjikuzhy’s residents to choose farming. M. Sekharan was drowning in debt incurred from failed business decisions when the village was at the juncture of transforming into an agrarian mini-economy. He turned to farming on the advice of the former panchayat president Swathanthryam. “I repaid all my debt in three-four years,” says Sekharan, who at 85 is still tending to amaranth and banana plants, as much as his health permits.
And then there is Sasikala, who moved to Kanjikuzhy after marrying a coir factory worker. “As we grow vegetables suitable for each season, the panchayat and the Krishi Bhavan hold classes to guide us on how to go about their cultivation,” says Sasikala. The entrance to her home is lush with flowers, besides the many vegetables growing in her backyard. She sells them to neighbourhood outlets or accepts orders through a WhatsApp group. Sasikala beams bright while sharing instances when she was featured in the media. “We are known to the outside world because of our panchayat,” she says.
Sasikala’s husband passed away 26 years ago, and her children are settled elsewhere. Farming is not just an independent source of income for her but is also a task that keeps her busy in a house where she is left all to herself.
“In Kanjikuzhy, in every single house, be it in a pot or a bucket, something or the other is grown. This is what makes the village special,” says Mini Vijayan, a retired school principal who is now completely occupied by the goats, chickens and crops on her farm. But in her view, Kanjikuzhy’s self-sufficiency is also its weakness. “Since everyone grows what they need, they don’t have to purchase vegetables from the market. So there is little scope for commercial profit from farming here,” she says. Since tending to the crops takes up several hours of her day, there is no time to travel outside the village to sell her produce. The Gandhi Smaraka Grama Seva Kendram, a non-profit organisation located near Kanjikuzhy, comes to her farm to collect the harvested vegetables. This, she says, is a helpful intervention.
Many from elsewhere in Kerala and beyond have visited Kanjikuzhy for hands-on training in its fields, once dismissed as barren.
M. Santhosh Kumar, the current president of the Kanjikuzhy panchayat, says that they are carrying forward Swathanthryam’s vision for a community of self-reliant farmers.
They are perceived as authorities on the subject, with Subhakesan being regularly invited by educational institutions to offer lectures on organic farming. Many from elsewhere in Kerala and beyond have visited Kanjikuzhy for hands-on training in its fields, once dismissed as barren.
In Santhosh Kumar’s words, a person who does not engage in any farming in Kanjikuzhy feels a sense of void. When the panchayat initiated the vegetable cultivation programme three decades ago, it was not just Kanjikuzhy’s economy that underwent a conversion. It was the temperament of an entire village that changed for good.
Also read: Why Karimeen, Kerala's favourite, is a fish out of water
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As a young nation carved from an old civilisation, India made the choice to assert its independence not by rejecting modern medicine, but by mastering it. This decision kicked off the country's legacy as a pharmaceutical powerhouse. As the supplier of over 20% of generic drugs globally, India has firmly established itself as the 'Pharmacy of the World'.
But this distinction comes at a steep price: Hyderabad, home to most of India's pharmaceutical factories, suffers from extensive antibiotic and heavy metal contamination in its water—affecting fish, cattle, crops, and the health of locals.
Concurrently, unregulated access to antibiotics across the country—in hospitals, clinics, and roadside pharmacies, as well as in the dairy and poultry industries—expose citizens to low levels of exposure constantly, thus feeding antimicrobial resistance (AMR), the stage when disease-causing bacteria stop responding to antibiotics.
Two academics from Australia, who have studied India extensively, found that the country’s AMR crisis has largely been studied from the scientific perspective. They decided to take a more holistic approach, one that accounts for the historical context (like the rise of India's pharmaceutical industry), and the people at the heart of the crisis.
The result of this exploration is the book, 'A World of Resistance', by authors Assa Doron and Alex Broom. Doron is an anthropology professor at the Australian National University, and has studied Indian society for over two decades. Broom is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Sydney, who studies how systems shape people's experience of illness and care.
In this conversation with the Good Food Movement, author Assa Doron reflects on the systems, rather than people, that contribute to antimicrobial resistance in India.
Drawing from your study of healthcare systems in other South Asian countries, Prof. Broom and you observe that India’s neighbours, such as Sri Lanka or Nepal, perform better than it in some aspects of healthcare and sanitation. What are the specific vulnerabilities that the Indian healthcare system is plagued by, that fuel improper antibiotic consumption? How does this compare to other countries in the subcontinent?
I wouldn't say that they perform better, but I think they are useful comparisons. The picture is mixed: the vulnerabilities are tied to different gaps or questions of surveillance, informal sales, and so on. Nepal is a different story because of its smaller scale with different patterns of access. I guess in a smaller, more centralised health system, there may be more room for control. In India, that scale, that fragmentation, makes antibiotics extraordinarily available, but also extraordinarily hard to govern.
India becomes more vulnerable because of scale and intensity—the antibiotic system is much larger.
India becomes more vulnerable because of scale and intensity—the antibiotic system is much larger. The public health system is fragmented and commercially dense. You've got millions of informal and semi-formal points of access. Just think of all those stores that double up as pharmacies. Similarly with infrastructure gaps—the magnitude of sanitation and infection prevention gaps is heavily concentrated in India.
It's not like India is uniquely irresponsible, but it's an outlier insofar as antibiotics sit at the intersections of so many systems at once.
Also read: Why India’s wastewater is a haven for superbugs that outdo medicines
Intriguingly, you write that people are more aware about the harms of antibiotic usage in poultry production than they are about AMR through improper antibiotic intake. But why are people more wary of a medicated chicken than they are of what will happen if they take a strip of azithromycin without a prescription?
In some ways, it's about seeing what you're eating. Often, food, or rather ingredients, can feel ‘hidden’, and this makes people worry. Antibiotics in chicken are invisible and beyond their control, whereas when you take azithromycin, it's a decision you actively make, sometimes with the advice of the pharmacist, sometimes with the advice of the doctor. Industrial food producers are seen as being far away, more distant. There is less distrust in the pharmacist or the doctor. It's an immediate risk versus an abstract risk.
While the book acknowledges that there are many imperfections within the healthcare system, a majority of antibiotic usage in India is attributed to the livestock and animal husbandry sectors. Do you think that streamlining and reducing antibiotic usage in food production is a more urgent need than regulating how medicines are prescribed?
Animal agriculture is perhaps the most urgent sector structurally speaking, because antibiotics are used at scale, often sub-therapeutically, or preventatively, and they're tied to food production at large. But it's not unique to India. It is estimated that between 60% to 70% of antibiotics used worldwide is in the animal sector, not human consumption.
The animal husbandry sector is a major driver of antibiotic use globally, so it deserves serious attention, but I wouldn’t want to exclude the human aspect.
But I think human medicine remains a critical site for regulating antibiotics, and the failure of life-and-death treatments. The question is, can we really separate the two? I'm not sure. The animal husbandry sector is a major driver of antibiotic use globally, so it deserves serious attention, but I wouldn’t want to exclude the human aspect.
What was the most challenging part about reporting for the book?
Resisting a simple ‘villain story’. It would have been really easy to say, patients misuse antibiotics, doctors overprescribe, pharmacists sell too freely and the farmers behave irresponsibly, right? Add to that the regulators who constantly fail to provide oversight.
Now some of this is true, but I don't think it’s enough to understand the story. And for us the task was to show how each of these actors is making decisions inside conditions that they didn't create. So we looked at overcrowded hospitals, weak primary care, and work under conditions of job insecurity, especially for people at the lower echelons of society.
For us the task was to show how each of these actors is making decisions inside conditions that they didn't create
Poor sanitation and access to water persist alongside intense market competition and the pressures to produce cheap food and cheap medicines for India. The challenge before us was both analytical and ethical. How to describe these harmful practices without blaming the people who are often trapped inside them?
A recurring refrain through the book is to not blame any single actor—patient, pharmacy or poultry farmer—for what has been a systemic failure. While systemic fixes are most urgent, does this argument not risk undoing progress on AMR awareness and generating a citizen-led demand for responsible antibiotic usage?
Individual responsibility does not disappear. Antibiotics must be used more carefully in hospitals, in pharmacies, in farms and households. But blame is often a poor way to explain what is going on.
If we simply blame patients, we ignore why people need a quick cure—because they can't miss work. If we start blaming the doctor, we might ignore the overcrowded clinics and diagnostic uncertainty. If we start blaming the pharmacist, then we ignore the absence of access to primary care. If you go to the farmers, again, we risk ignoring the economic pressures to produce cheap meat, shrimp and fish for exports.
Blame is often a poor way to explain what is going on.
Our argument is not against responsible antibiotic use. It's against a narrow moral story where the problem is reduced to the ignorance of careless individuals.
Responsible use will only work if people have real alternatives, whether it's fair farming or better access to vaccination, or better systems of sanitation, infection control and primary care. All of these together will coalesce to provide a far more robust bedrock for the highlighting of individual responsibilities and antibiotic use.
Also read: Typhoid lurks in India’s water. Why are antibiotics failing to stop it?
Ravinder Kumar knows exactly what ammonium sulphate is. A retired railwayman in his late sixties, he farms his ancestral, five-acre land in Ghargoha, a hamlet in Bihar’s Gaya district. Even when he put in the hours at his full-time job, the farming never stopped. Few farmers or sellers in the area can describe fertilisers as precisely as he does.
The fertilisers Kumar and the farmers around him actually use are urea, potash, zinc, and sometimes, Di-Ammonium Phosphate (DAP). Ammonium sulphate is not on that list. But he knows it well enough to still feed it to the soil.
“Like urea, ammonium sulphate also has nitrogen. Just less of it,” he says over the phone in early June, taking a break from the kendu leaf harvest in the nearby Gurpa forest. “And it doesn’t hurt the yield much.”
Then, he pauses and adds, “It is expensive, though. So fewer people use it here.” He isn’t sure of the current price of ammonium sulphate; it’s been a few years since he last purchased it.
He buys his urea at Rs. 8 per kg from a shop nearby; the price is a little higher than the government rate, which stands at roughly Rs. 6. But it is the convenience of a closer shop that costs him the difference. To pay the government price at a licensed khaad bhandar or krishi kendra, he would have to travel to Paharpur or Tankuppa, more than 15 km away.
Ammonium sulphate (AS) retails, before subsidy, at Rs. 1,100 to Rs. 1,200 for a 50-kg bag (Rs. 22-24 per kg), against a subsidised 45-kg bag of urea at Rs. 266.50 (under Rs. 6 per kg). But during the kharif season of 2025, widespread urea shortage was reported from across states. Soon after, in the following rabi season (2025-26), the government, perhaps to address this scarcity, “decided to include Ammonium Sulphate (both domestic as well as imported)” under the Nutrient Based Subsidy scheme.
The government also began promoting it as a stand-in for urea. The subsidy on the main grade of ammonium sulphate (20.5 per cent nitrogen and 23 per cent sulphur) was set at Rs. 9,479 a tonne, about Rs. 474 off a 50-kg bag, pulling the retail price down to Rs. 700 per 50-kg bag (Rs. 14 per kg). Even then, it remains more than twice the price of subsidised urea, which carries 46 per cent nitrogen.
Where soils lack sulphur, studies have found ammonium sulphate can match or outperform urea and use nitrogen more efficiently.
The push became more pronounced a few months later, amid the West Asia war that began in February 2026. The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) wrote to states in May 2026, asking them to use ammonium sulphate instead of urea for paddy in the upcoming kharif season.
In a release dated June 14, 2026, the Department of Fertilizers said it had ridden out the West Asia crisis, with its shortage of natural gas and shipping delays around the Strait of Hormuz, while keeping urea at Rs. 266.50 per bag—even as the global price climbed above Rs. 4,100. The same release noted that ammonium sulphate usage had risen by nearly 60,000 tonnes. Yet over the same years, the government has also built six new urea plants and is opening two more, expanding the supply of the very fertiliser that it is, elsewhere, asking farmers to use less of, and wean from.
But what is ammonium sulphate, and what can it do? As the name suggests, it is a compound of ammonium and sulphate, carrying about 21 per cent nitrogen and 23 per cent sulphur. In India, it is made mostly as a by-product of other industries, unlike urea, which is made from natural gas and contains 46 per cent nitrogen.
The Fertiliser Association of India’s policy record lists ammonium sulphate as a caprolactam-grade by-product of plants run by Gujarat State Fertilizers and Chemicals (GSFC) and Fertilisers And Chemicals Travancore Limited (FACT). This industrial origin might explain why it has drawn fresh attention during a gas crisis. However, it is interesting to note that in soil, urea and ammonium sulphate work similarly: urea has to break down into ammonium first. Ammonium sulphate supplies that ammonium directly. After that, soil microbes convert it into nitrate, which the plant then absorbs. But urea provides only nitrogen, while ammonium sulphate also provides sulphur.
Devi says that moving farmers off the familiar white granules has been a losing battle, “again and again.”
Academic field trials don’t crown a clear winner. Where soils lack sulphur, studies have found ammonium sulphate can match or outperform urea and use nitrogen more efficiently. Where sulphur is already adequate, the two tend to perform about the same, and in some soils, urea gives steadier results.
The push for ammonium sulphate seems to be the need of the hour. But one wonders if it can really replace urea–even in part.
Compared to his neighbours, Kumar uses less fertiliser. His fields also receive applications of cow dung. He also consumes most of what he grows, unlike many of his peers, who depend on a substantial yield because farming is their only source of income. But even so, Kumar is not willing to pay more than he must for fertiliser.
As of our conversation in early June, news of the short supply of urea had yet to reach his fields. “If farmers, including me, don’t find urea, they make do with whatever is available. What option do we really have?” he asks. Other alternatives only create a greater dent in the pocket. To him, anything other than urea is a fallback he would resort to only if he had absolutely no choice.
Also read: India’s urea usage reveals the vulnerability of its food systems
More than 200 km away from Gurpa, in Jharkhand’s Gumla, seed and fertiliser seller Rajni Devi confirms what Kumar’s economics imply, from the other side of the counter.
In her two decades of running a licensed shop–a business she married into, and for which she earned a diploma in agri-inputs–she has watched farmers refuse to use anything but urea.
“They’ll ask from outside, ‘urea hai?’ (do you have urea?) The moment you say no, they walk off to the next shop. As a result, none of your other products gets sold either,” she says over the phone, between customers. “If they do come in, they’ll add DAP, and a few other things.”
It is worth noting that India’s fertiliser journey began with SSP and ammonium sulphate, long before urea entered the picture.I
Neither Kumar nor Devi had heard of the push for ammonium sulphate as an alternative to urea. But Devi says that moving farmers off the familiar white granules has been a losing battle, “again and again.”
It is not that the alternatives never sell. She and sellers like her have been called to government meetings, locally, about alternatives like nano urea, the liquid fertiliser that IFFCO launched in 2021 and has promoted ever since as a substitute for the conventional kind. A 500 ml bottle of nano urea is priced at around Rs 225 at cooperative societies. But she has watched those alternatives sit on her shelves.
“Some better-informed farmers do buy it. They’ve seen videos on YouTube and Instagram, and they know it might be the better option,” Devi explains. “But that number is small. Maybe two in ten.” For the rest, she says, “no method works.”
For decades, Indian farmers have sworn by urea. And why wouldn't they? At Rs. 266.50 for a 45-kg bag (last revised in 2018), it is the cheapest fertiliser available—kept that way by a government subsidy. Over time, that has only deepened the over-dependence on it.
A comprehensive study published in Regional Environmental Change in 2025, by Tek B. Sapkota and Bijay-Singh, traces how decades of fertiliser policy in India have pushed farmers toward an unhealthy dependence on it. As per their analysis, by 2022-23, urea made up over 81 per cent of all nitrogen applied; farmers in many states such as Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh, and Telangana are reported to be using 50-70 per cent more nitrogen than needed. Phosphorus and potassium (P and K) were being persistently under-applied because they were more expensive. For context, the recommended ratio of application of NPK to the soil is 4:2:1. An imbalance in this ratio has resulted in declining soil health and diminishing returns from fertilisers over time.
People working in the agriculture domain know this too well.
Rishi Mishra, an agricultural expert who works with small-holder farmers in the Panna region of MP, says that until about a decade-and-a-half ago, a mix of diammonium phosphate and single superphosphate was used by farmers widely. “Together, they would cover the soil’s need for nitrogen, phosphorus, sulphur and calcium,” he explains, adding that policy changes over the years made urea more lucrative, and everything else took a backseat. Even diversification itself remained urea-centric—neem-coated urea, nano urea, sulphur-coated urea gold–so that everything continues to be planned around urea. This only leaves further nutrient shortage in soils, more in some regions than others.
A 2021 study in Scientific Reports, a Nature journal, mapped the extent of nutrient shortage in India. Carried out under the ICAR’s All India Coordinated Research Project (AICRP) on Micro- and Secondary-Nutrients, the team analysed 2,42,827 soil samples from 615 districts and found 58.6 per cent of them (acute deficient + deficient + latent deficiency) to be short of sulphur, the worst shortage of any nutrient it measured.
Bihar, where Kumar farms, fared worse than the national average. More than 60 per cent of its soils came up short of sulphur. It was one of 13 states, Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh among them, where the deficiency crossed that mark.
The best way forward is to bring a region’s own indigenous knowledge of its land back into practice, instead of leaning on any one fertiliser to do the work.
The study traces the shortage partly to the rising use of NPK fertilisers that carry little or no sulphur or micronutrients, and to the dwindling use of organic manure: nutrients taken out and not put back in in any manner.
Ammonium sulphate could help fix a part of that soil degradation problem–at least the sulphur part of it, believes soil scientist Arvind Kumar Shukla, the lead author of the 2021 paper.
Shukla is currently the Vice-Chancellor of the Rajmata Vijayaraje Scindia Krishi Vishwavidyalaya in Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh. Formerly, he was the coordinator for the AICRP-Micro and Secondary Nutrients and Pollutant Elements in Soils and Plants at Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) - Indian Institute of Soil Science, Bhopal. Shukla began the exhaustive work of figuring out sulphur deficiency back in 1998, along with other soil scientists, in the soils of Uttar Pradesh, particularly in the Indo-Gangetic plain.
“At that time, we tried to understand how sulphur deficiency came about. One of the important reasons we could attribute it to was the use of high-analysis fertilisers like urea, diammonium phosphate (DAP) and muriate of potash (MoP),” explains Shukla. Earlier, he adds, farmers were using ammonium sulphate, which automatically provided 24 per cent sulphur to the soil along with nitrogen. And for phosphorus, instead of DAP, “we were using single superphosphate (SSP), which also contains around 12 per cent sulphur.”
It is worth noting that India’s fertiliser journey began with SSP and ammonium sulphate, long before urea entered the picture. In 1906, E.I.D Parry established India's first single superphosphate plant in Ranipet, Tamil Nadu, and ammonium sulphate production as a by-product of steelmaking began in 1933. Synthetic ammonium sulphate production followed in 1941, and the Fertilisers and Chemicals Travancore (FACT) plant began producing it in 1947.
India makes only a fraction of what a real switch would demand today. The bulk of domestic ammonium sulphate is produced, as mentioned, by GSFC and FACT–and much of it is a by-product of making other chemicals. GSFC’s capacity is about 4.59 lakh tonnes a year and FACT’s about 2.25 lakh tonnes, a combined total of under seven lakh tonnes.
According to the Department of Fertilizers’ 2023-24 annual report, FACT was already running its plant above its rated capacity, producing about 2.4 lakh tonnes. GSFC added a new line in Vadodara in early 2024; even so, the shortfall is met by imports, which have been climbing fast, growing at around 45 per cent a year between 2020 and 2024, and coming mostly from China. In April 2026, the government also floated a tender to import three lakh tonnes of ammonium sulphate.
“Earlier, sulphur was reaching the soil inadvertently,” says Shukla. “Now, we are devoid of these fertilisers. We use high-analysis fertilisers that contain one nutrient in a very high amount. Nitrogen in urea is 46 per cent, and phosphorus in DAP is 46 per cent. And they don’t contain any sulphur. Although several sulphur-containing fertilisers, including SSP, gypsum and bentonite sulphur, are available, the quantity used is meagre,” remarks Shukla, who also thinks changing cropping patterns have aggravated the problem.
“Instead of one crop, we are now taking two or three. Moreover, we are also bringing a sizeable area under vegetable and fruit production. The expansion of intensive agriculture, including horticulture and oilseed cultivation, has increased sulphur demand and nutrient removal from soils.”
Also read: What's lurking in our food?
Not everyone is convinced ammonium sulphate suits every crop, paddy in particular. Dr Virender Singh Lather, former principal scientist at ICAR, warned in a recent New Indian Express report that a high dose of sulphur could turn harmful in waterlogged soils, putting paddy fields at risk.
The concern is grounded in established science. In flooded fields, soil microbes can convert sulphate into hydrogen sulphide, a gas that damages rice roots and reduces the plant’s ability to take up water and nutrients. According to the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), the global authority on rice agronomy, this sulphide toxicity is “associated with low-Iron (Fe) soils” and can show up in sandy, degraded, acidic or poorly drained fields. Where soils hold enough iron, it locks away the sulphide harmlessly, and the danger narrows quite a bit.
Shukla is not persuaded that it is a general problem. To him, urea and ammonium sulphate end up feeding the plant in much the same way. Urea breaks down into ammonium in the soil, ammonium sulphate supplies that ammonium directly, and in both cases, soil microbes convert it into the nitrate the plant absorbs.
IRRI also notes that the problem “is not very common in rice” and tends to be of little economic significance. In other words, whether added sulphur helps or harms a paddy field depends heavily on the soil it goes into.
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It is always a welcome step to diversify when it comes to fertiliser, believes Shweta Saini, an agricultural economist and the co-founder of the Delhi-based Arcus Policy Research. “But soil health should be the ideal way to identify the dosages for different geographies,” she says, underlining that policy and infrastructure should be designed with the soil as the central focus.
Mishra and Saini also agree that pushing a fertiliser is not enough on its own. The government, they argue, needs to put systems in place to ensure that inputs are matched to what each soil actually needs, rather than recommended in a blanket fashion across regions.
“Just pushing another fertiliser on paper won’t work. It has to be economically accessible,” says Saini, adding that the government has to take cognisance of and change the policy accordingly. “You cannot continue to have urea so cheap; it has to be corrected.”
Mishra goes a step further. The best way forward, he says, is to bring a region’s own indigenous knowledge of its land back into practice, instead of leaning on any one fertiliser to do the work.
For now, though, the ground reality is something else. Since June 8, as reported by The Indian Express, farmers across Punjab and Haryana have held repeated protests over a shortage of urea.
Also read: The grave personal cost of pesticide use
Snipping off the corner of a new milk packet and tossing it into a dustbin may seem like a harmless, everyday act. So does throwing away plastic takeaway containers with leftover food still inside them, or bundling together vegetable peels, plastic wrappers and sanitary waste into a single garbage bag. The seemingly harmless, no-consequence nature of these actions is not an isolated thing; once the assorted mix of waste leaves our doorsteps and disappears into garbage collection vehicles, it is easy to assume that it has become somebody else's responsibility.
For years, this was the mindset at 17th B Lane, in Bengaluru's JP Nagar 2nd Phase. As in any urban Indian neighbourhood, the street's waste problem was not created overnight: residents (living in independent homes) who missed the call of municipal waste collection trucks in the early mornings began dumping their household trash on the side of the road. It accumulated gradually, through dozens of everyday decisions made inside the 70 homes that line the lane. Over time, these roadside ‘dumpyards’ became an excuse to not hand over garbage to waste collectors. By 2018, the consequences had grown into a mound that was impossible to ignore.
The average resident generates about 300 gm daily, amounting to roughly 1.2 kg for a family of four.
While most residents in the locality looked to the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), the city’s municipal governing body, for a solution, a small group of homemakers took it as a chance to introspect: if the waste was being generated in their homes, they reasoned, shouldn't the solution begin there too? To this end, they formed a group named ‘Women of Wisdom (WoW)’ in 2018.
Yet, the challenge they were taking on was not a simple one. In 2018, Bengaluru generated around 4,500 metric tonnes of waste every day. This figure has increased to around 5,500 metric tonnes in 2026, of which nearly 58.5 % comes from households. The average resident generates about 300 gm daily, amounting to roughly 1.2 kg for a family of four. Around 60% of this is biodegradable wet waste, 25% is dry waste such as plastics and recyclables, and the remaining 15% comprises inert materials, including silt and stones.
"We did not aim for a lot initially. We just wanted to take care of the 1.2 kg of waste we generated in our own homes," says Shwetha Urs, President of WoW.
Looking back, it sounds like a modest goal. But this focused objective foretold what WoW was to accomplish in the months to come.
When eight women of the 17th B Lane started meeting frequently, others assumed it was nothing more than a huddle for gossip. The women laugh about this assumption in retrospect. "Like many streets in Bengaluru, ours is home to families from different parts of the country. Despite our cultural differences, we all grew up knowing our neighbours. We wanted to bring back that sense of connection and use it to address civic issues affecting our street," says Shwetha.
The most pressing of these issues was one that the residents encountered every single day: used sanitary pads and diapers were frequently discarded in public spaces. Garbage left out in the open attracted stray dogs, leading to safety concerns, particularly for children and elderly residents. For Shwetha and her team, this accumulation of waste became the starting point to addressing other problems—of public space, civic responsibility and community participation.
Before proposing solutions, however, they wanted to understand the problem better. To begin with, Shwetha and a few others spent two days auditing waste at the ward's dry waste collection centre in 2018. The experience was eye-opening. "After trying to segregate mixed waste, in an effort to understand the different categories, we fell sick for two weeks. It made us think about the people who handle waste every day for a living," she recalls. More importantly, it showed them how little most residents knew about what happened to their waste after it left their homes.
Some people mistook us for salespersons and shut their doors on us. Others were irritated by our persistence.
The same year, they launched a campaign with the distribution of pamphlets explaining three-way segregation into wet, dry and reject waste (sanitary waste, sharp objects, construction debris), going door to door to 70 households. Residents were encouraged to put the pamphlets on refrigerator doors or other visible spots in their households so that segregation would become a daily habit rather than an occasional effort.
"Some people mistook us for salespersons and shut their doors on us. Others were irritated by our persistence," Shwetha says. They worked closely with sanitation workers, asking them to identify households that continued to hand over mixed waste. In every such instance, members of the group would visit the home in question and explain the importance of segregation.
Not everyone appreciated this intervention. "Many people were offended by our involvement," Shwetha says.
Realising that awareness alone would not be enough, the group sought support from the BBMP’s health inspectors. “We requested ward officials to simply enforce preexisting laws and assured them that we would support them on behalf of the community. Until we approached them, we were also unsure if government officials would work alongside the public. But they were very cooperative,” notes Shwetha. Soon, sanitation workers stopped collecting mixed waste from the street altogether.
The residents did not take this well. But the presence of BBMP officials during the collection hours, along with WoW’s team members and sanitation workers, made them comply.
Also read: ‘What river?’: How Mumbai’s neglected Mithi punishes those who live on its banks
“The residents used to call the waste collectors ‘kasa’, which means waste. It was very inhumane. To bring about a change in their attitudes, we made sure all the residents know the names of the collectors and only call them by their respective names,” Shwetha says.
After WoW’s early street-level interventions, it took nearly six months for segregation to become a regular practice.
Manohar, a waste collector with the BBMP, notes that every morning, when they whistle to call Bengaluru’s residents to take out their garbage, they’re told to segregate it, but hardly anyone listens. “Only a few like the people in this street understand our troubles,” he says.
In 2018, only about 40% of households were following the practice of three-way waste segregation. Today, that figure stands at nearly 90%, according to Shwetha and BBMP officials.
Also read: Trash threatens to swallow Chennai up. This citizens’ initiative won’t allow it
Segregation was only the start. As more households started separating waste correctly, the volume of collected wet waste increased substantially. The women soon found themselves facing another question: if they had managed to segregate waste at source, could they also process it within the neighbourhood?
They attended workshops and met with communities across Bengaluru, such as the Solid Waste Management Round Table (SWMRT), SwachaGraha Kalika Kendra, Hasiru Dala, and The Indian Ploggers Army, who were already pioneers in community waste management. “Lucikly, we did not have to go elsewhere to learn; the city has more than enough role models,” says Shwetha.
If they had managed to segregate waste at source, could they also process it within the neighbourhood?
From the learnings imparted by these groups, WoW concluded that lane-level composting was the most practical solution. The BBMP-appointed waste collectors were then trained in the layering techniques required for composting.
During the summer and festive seasons, the street generates nearly 30 kg of wet waste each day. On a regular day, the figure is closer to 20 kg. With a monthly processing capacity of 750 kg, the composting system produces around 300 kg of manure every month. “Residents use it in terrace gardens, and some of it is sold to farmers on the outskirts of Bengaluru,” says Swathi, a core WoW member.
This composting journey, however, was not without setbacks. "When we tested the compost during the early stages, we found traces of lead, despite careful segregation," notes Swathi.
The women began investigating the source of this contamination. Eventually, they discovered an unexpected culprit: many residents lined kitchen counters with newspapers while chopping vegetables, and then disposed of the paper along with the wet waste. The lead-based ink from the newspapers had found its way into the compost. Once the issue was identified, residents were advised not to throw newspapers along with the wet waste, thus resolving the problem.
Also read: Can composting be the solution to expanding landfills in cities like Bengaluru?
As the composting initiative matured, the group's focus gradually expanded. They started organising health camps for sanitation workers, conducting repair workshops, and campaigning against single-use plastic in nearby temples and markets. They run a rental cutlery bank, which residents can dip into during family functions, instead of buying plastic alternatives. "To reduce the use of disposable plastic decorations during celebrations, we collect leftover fabric from tailors and turn it into decorative materials," says Malini Nijagal, the Vice-President of WoW.
They also expanded their outlook beyond the lane and started Whatsapp groups for all 17 blocks in ward 177, with volunteers from each street. WoW now has 18 core members.
Perhaps the most visible symbol of the neighbourhood's transformation is a place that once represented the problem itself—a roadside dumping site, next to a dilapidated building. No matter how often it was cleaned, people continued to dump mixed waste there.
Rather than clearing the site over and over, the women decided to tackle the root cause. Along with the BBMP, they came up with a detailed plan to renovate the building. One part was reimagined as a ‘Vishranthi Kendra’, a centre providing shelter, a changing room, and a toilet for the sanitation workers. The other part became ‘Namma Hasiru Gnana Kalika Kendra’ (Our Green Knowledge Learning Centre), where school children, residents, and institutions can learn about sustainable practices.
The transformation of 17th B Lane began not with a government scheme or a major investment, but with decisions made inside kitchens and homes. Every segregated vegetable peel, every rinsed milk packet and every household that chose responsibility over convenience reshaped not only the street's waste management system, but also its civic culture.
Waste collectors were recognised as skilled workers whose labour made the neighbourhood's change possible.
In the process, residents' interactions with sanitation workers changed, too. Waste collectors were recognised as skilled workers whose labour made the neighbourhood's change possible. By bringing together residents, sanitation workers and BBMP officials into the same conversation, these women replaced a transactional relationship with one built on dignity, trust and shared responsibility.
Edited by Neerja Deodhar and Aathira Konikkara
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