Some 55km from Pantnagar, at the Nanakmatta Public School, students talk about fruits and vegetables they have heard of, but never seen. There is the mention of anua—a brown, round, juicy fruit; rampyare—a vegetable used mainly for livestock; mainphal—a fruit that was crushed and mixed in water to wash clothes with. And then there is the putpura—a wild mushroom, shaped like a small, fat potato that peeps from under the sal trees. It tasted of almond and musk, the students have heard from their elders.
Kanishka Rana, a class 12 student, said her paternal grandmother, Chitra Devi, told her that there was a time putpura was available widely in the forests near the villages. “With the forests gone, putpura is lost to us. Now only those who go deep into the forest, find them. I can still remember that taste, but I know that I will never be able to eat it again,” Chitra Devi told her granddaughter.
A yearning for lost fruits and vegetables is not just nostalgia. Study after study has spelt out that a decrease in the consumption of coarse grains, fruits and vegetables causes a deficiency of micronutrients such as iron, zinc, calcium, vitamin A, folate and riboflavin causing anaemia, blindness and infertility.
Pantnagar in Uttarakhand's Udham Singh Nagar (USN) district is home to India's first agricultural university named after Govind Ballabh Pant. The G.B. Pant University of Agriculture and Technology is still the seed basket to many Indian states. The introduction of the Green Revolution started changing that. Things got worse after Uttarakhand was carved out of Uttar Pradesh in 2000. Till 2002, the university was spread over 16,000 acres. Of this, 9,000 acres went to the State Industrial Development Corporation of Uttarakhand (SIDCUL) for developing an integrated industrial estate. As a young state, industry was a must for Uttarakhand's development. With SIDCUL came subsidies and easy clearances, drawing industries away from UP. It was hailed as a great success. But no one at the university knows for sure how the industries have impacted the soil and air quality, and thus, the quality of the seeds it produces.
More than two decades later, there is a major concern about the disappearance of the immense diversity of food that once grew there. The Green Revolution was a necessity because the diversity alone was not sufficient to feed the population of the area as barely any agriculture was possible over a 3,000m altitude. But the functional extinction of native crops was the price that it extracted. The industries exacerbated it.
Other states have suffered similarly, with some estimates pegging at over a lakh varieties of rice that were lost, a few years into the Green Revolution. Varieties that had taken thousands of years to evolve died out because of the emphasis on monoculture and high-yielding varieties that responded well to chemical fertilisers.
The soil in Pantnagar is among the best in the world. It is highly fertile because of a dense saturation of calcium, magnesium, potassium and sodium, which play a key role in plant growth. It was formed over years in a land subsumed by grasslands which nourished the soil with organic matter. “Even if you a throw a seed randomly in this soil, it will grow,” said Navneet Pareek, head of the department of soil science at the G.B. Pant University. “Growing millets in this soil does no justice to its potential; for those can be grown in poor soil as well.” Pareek is not oblivious to the ill-effects of the SIDCUL. Falling water table, smoke from factories and effluents dumped into drains are all serious concerns.
“With the Green Revolution, farmers started using more fertilisers. The need is to adopt integrated nutrient management, combining fertilisers with organic matter, such that the needs of the crop are met. A plant does not distinguish between organic and inorganic fertiliser, but the key is that it gets what it needs at different stages of its life cycle, and in just the right quantity,” Pareek said.
Then there is a pan-India disaster. Before the start of the Green Revolution, the country’s population had just one mineral deficiency, nitrogen. Now, with a limited food basket, the number has risen to nine, with iron and calcium being the most prominent. Harendra Malik, additional chief medical officer of USN, said conditioning also played a part in food habits. “Earlier people spent a lot of time in the sun, which is no longer the case. Now, vitamin D deficiency is common. Iodine deficiency is also endemic. As we move away from the cultivation of food, our relationship with it changes. We prioritise the convenience of fast/processed food over locally suited foods.”
In the hamlet of Bigra Bagh, 74km from Pantnagar, Chandrakali Singh, a Tharu tribal, said her world had turned upside down. “When we were children, our roti was made of chickpeas. Our plates were colourful with a different vegetable each day. There was an abundance of papaya. Now those tastes are dead.”
The traditional method of seed storage for the Tharus were cylindrical structures of wet mud stuffed with neem leaves to keep pests away. Now Singh stores seeds in plastic sacks of urea. “Now this is what we see, this is what we do. The past is lost,” she said.
And so are its flavours.
