HUMAN PRACTICES CARRY THE POWER TO CREATE AN IMPACT IN THE WORLD!

Problem Statement #

IISER Bhopal is lo­cated in the rural heart of Bhopal, sur­rounded by lush green agri­cul­tural fields. Stubble burn­ing is a reg­u­lar sight be­tween March and May every year. The vil­lage is usu­ally in flames. The heat gen­er­ated adds to the ris­ing sum­mer tem­per­a­ture of 40o C and burn­ing was at its peak. This causes skin ir­ri­ta­tion, dif­fi­culty In breath­ing, and burn­ing of the eye. During the night time, the de­po­si­tion of ashes on sev­eral build­ings, ve­hi­cles, and plants was spot­ted. As this is also a well-doc­u­mented na­tional prob­lem, we wanted to spot­light the prob­lem.

As part of our hu­man prac­tices, we fol­lowed var­i­ous method­olo­gies of mon­i­tor­ing and eval­u­a­tion. Stakeholder en­gage­ment is a ma­jor com­po­nent of hu­man prac­tices. It gives a bet­ter in­sight into the ground re­al­i­ties and cre­ates aware­ness. The de­tails of the same are tab­u­lated be­low:

Interviews and Surveys #

Interview of Village Sarpanch #

To dis­cuss the is­sue of stub­ble burn­ing our team vis­ited the Sarpanch (Village head) of a nearby vil­lage named Barkheda Salam and Bakania, Mr. Anup Singh and Mr. Jitendra Nagar.

Village BARKHEDA-SALAM, BHOPAL, MADHYA PRADESH by Whole Team #

During this in­ter­ac­tion we came to know that Stubble burn­ing has been a prac­tice for a long time as it is the quick­est and eas­i­est way to pre­pare fields for the next crop­ping cy­cle. they have no­ticed that com­mu­ni­ties liv­ing around the field de­velop cer­tain res­pi­ra­tory is­sues. A de­cline in the fer­til­ity of the soil. Many peo­ple from the vil­lage burn stub­ble, some mulch, and oth­ers use it as fod­der. After the in­ter­ac­tion we de­cided to char­ac­ter­ize the soil af­ter var­i­ous prac­tices. We col­lected soil sam­ples from sev­eral dif­fer­ently treated fields for the same.

Link to Soil test

Village BAKANIYA, BHOPAL, MADHYA PRADESH by Whole Team #

Mr. Jitendra Nagar has set an ex­am­ple for the vil­lage by prac­tic­ing mulching and in­spir­ing oth­ers to not burn stub­ble as it cause harm to the en­vi­ron­ment.He claimed that his fam­ily was prac­tic­ing stub­ble burn­ing for many years but they no­ticed that the soil was los­ing its fer­til­ity and the crop yield was also de­creas­ing. They felt that this was due to the death of earth­worms and soil mi­crobes.

Interview at Village Purba Barjala, State: Tripura #

Survey: Beas, Punjab #

Interview with Parishad Mr. Vikas Meena #

Our team in­vited the Municipal of­fi­cer of Bhopal city, Madhya Pradesh, to gather in­for­ma­tion about the amount of waste cre­ated on a reg­u­lar ba­sis and among that how much is agri­cul­tural waste and plas­tic waste, re­spec­tively.

Interview with the non-farm­ing com­mu­nity from Bhauri, Bhopal #

Broadly, three dif­fer­ent re­sponses were noted:

1. No prob­lem with stub­ble burn­ing and plas­tic ac­cu­mu­la­tion.
2. Neutral views of stub­ble burn­ing and plas­tic ac­cu­mu­la­tion
3. A wish for cleaner and pol­lu­tion-free sur­round­ings.

See all our in­ter­views here

STUB-BURN sur­vey #

A sur­vey was con­ducted for the whole IISER Bhopal com­mu­nity, in­clud­ing stu­dents, work­ers and pro­fes­sors. The in­di­vid­u­als were from the non-farm­ing com­mu­nity.

Farmers’ Survey in Collaboration with Unnat Bharatiya Abhiyan(UBA) #

Our team, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with with the Unnat Bharat Abhiyan(UBA) con­ducted a Farmers sur­vey in the vil­lages Barkheda Salam and Bhauri. We sur­veyed 29 farm­ers to un­der­stand their farm­ing prac­tices and also ex­plained our so­lu­tion to them. We also no­ticed that farm­ers with big­ger fields showed to burn stub­ble more than those with smaller fields Some data gath­ered from the sur­vey is shown be­low:

Integrated Human Practices #

During the course of our pro­ject, we in­ter­acted with var­i­ous stake­hold­ers and ex­perts who made sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions to our pro­ject. This helped us im­prove var­i­ous as­pects of Human Practices, Dry Lab and Wet lab and broad­ened the im­pact of our pro­ject.

Read more about our meet­ings and in­cor­po­ra­tions

Access HP note­book here