Interview: Tree banking project in Kerala’s Wayanad prime example of community effort reaping results

The executive director of NGO Thanal, Jayakumar C elucidates the different challenges of promoting tree planting in rural and urban areas, and in making the Meenangadi panchayat carbon neutralWayanad, Kerala: When the pandemic struck, there was a worry in Meenangadi, in Kerala’s Wayanad district, that their pioneering “tree banking” initiative would hit a roadblock. On the contrary, the project launched by NGO Thanal and the Meenangadi panchayat in 2016 gathered even more momentum.As a part of its series on ‘The Promise of Commons’, 101Reporters had earlier reported on how Thanal came up with a model to assess Wayanad’s excess 11,412 tonnes of carbon dioxide production. Soon, as an initiative to turn Meenangadi carbon neutral, the panchayat launched a project on planting trees in the region. In return, farmers would be incentivised for not cutting the trees down.Executive Director of Thanal Jayakumar C told 101Reporters that though there were initial challenges when the lockdown started, local support soon helped put the project back on track. With schools being shut, children were at home — this meant there were more volunteers to lend a hand to their vision. Also, with transport having come to a standstill, it became strenuous for the Forest Department to deliver saplings on time, but they soon found a solution — a record number of saplings were procured through the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), the country’s rural livelihood scheme that provides 100 days of work to rural households.“We saw more progress than we expected, with the local community taking up ownership as well as plantation drives, especially through MGNREGA. We planted around 4 lakh saplings, of which around 2.8 lakh were through efforts under MGNREGA; local residents planted a lakh of them on their own,” said Jayakumar. The vision behind the project is to achieve carbon neutrality. While Thanal had decided to evaluate the emissions in 2020, the deadline was pushed to 2023, with the pandemic slowing down the process. To calculate emissions, Thanal follows the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) model, which means it looks at the cumulative emissions of the panchayat. “Nearly 60% to 65% of the original agenda has been accomplished. In terms of work progressing, there’s been tremendous progress from when we started,” said Jayakumar.While the exact figures are not available, travel restrictions significantly lowered emissions in the panchayat in the past two years. “In Meenangadi, one of the major contributors (of carbon emissions) is transport. So when transport came to a standstill, there was a huge emission reduction… While we may have been carbon neutral had we looked at emissions in the past few years, but with the easing of restrictions, we are not,” he added.While the Meenangadi model may be deemed successful in its attempt to keep a check on the climate crisis, its scalability remains a challenge, especially when we move away from rural communities. "In a rural area like Meenangadi, there’s the advantage of bringing in a nature-based solution model, but it’s a whole other situation while considering solutions for urban areas with higher carbon emissions. One needs to look for more technical solutions when an urban setting is involved," Jayakumar emphasised.“When you move from a rural to an urban area, your demands are higher because urban settings have higher emissions. Say, for example, in Meenangadi, none of the 8,000 families have a car. But in Kochi, almost every household will have one or two cars. Plus, Kochi would not have any area available to plant 4 lakh trees like Meenangadi!”Moreover, other difficulties lie in getting influential businesspersons engaged in a conversation on the subject.“There are not many shopping complexes in rural areas, and the energy consumption is much lower. In Meenangadi, most people survive on smaller livelihoods, and conversations are possible. The homestays promoting tourism are willing to set up solar rooftop water heaters, so their guests get hot water from solar energy. However, the situation is complex in Kochi. When we reach out to a big retailer, we can’t even get the owner to meet us because he has already invested in crores,” said Jayakumar."But the fact that the Meenangadi panchayat is extremely progressive has helped shape the model, and that the community is a politically conscious one is a big plus," he added. Another bonus is women’s participation through the Kerala government’s self-help group in the area, Kudumbashree.A sustainable waste management system in place and sizable coffee plantations and paddy production were other factors that helped boost the project. “With Meenangadi chosen as a current model, there’s a possibility of one local government collaborating with other local governments. Then the government of India will have major savings,” said Jayakumar.But this does not mean there are no obstacles in Thanal’s path. Limited resources in the area is a major concern, but the panchayat has been looking for support from various quarters to make up for the gap.“With limited resources in rural regions, the panchayat has also been looking for support under the Corporate Social Responsibility schemes. There’s also support from Kerala’s National Institute of Rural Development as well as volunteer programmes. Thanal is also working closely with the panchayat and supports it as much as it can. There’s voluntary activism and community acceptance, which helps drive the initiative, including support from Kudumbashree. There’s support from local shopkeepers, as well, who have accepted the idea of carbon neutrality,” said Jayakumar.There are other bureaucratic and technical challenges when it comes to streamlining the finances for the project.“Even though the government provided the startup money to plant trees, the panchayat can only use the interest from the deposit the state made. There are bureaucratic processes even though this is an approved project. It’s not that they are purposely delaying it, but there are some genuine problems with the current rules and regulations.” “There are technical obstacles, as well. The panchayat has not been able to get revolving money. More administrative processes need to be up to date in terms of reforms. Financial flow is crucial,” he stressed.The other major challenge that Thanal’s initiative ran into initially was fighting unfounded beliefs and negative campaigns. “How do you educate people on something that they are not familiar with? Look at rural India. They are not familiar with legislation processes. How do we talk to them about the IPCC and disasters affecting humanity? This is a huge challenge.”“At the same time, there’s also an opportunity because many coffee plantations had low productivity, so they were experiencing a crisis. When they experience such a crisis, it becomes easier to connect the issue with their experience. Like at the beginning of the project, nobody understood they could not grow two crops of paddy in a year due to climate change. Now they understand that there’s a clear climate change impact,” Jayakumar pointed out.However, one of the big thrusts behind the project is that it was piloted by the state government with a grant for the tree-banking project. This has translated into the state closely tracking Meenangadi’s development and taking lessons from it to replicate the model in other parts of Kerala. When the project started, both the state and panchayat were led by the Left Democratic Front.“In the last elections, the Congress-led coalition came to power at the panchayat. Fortunately, the Left state government and the Congress-led panchayat have been collaborating quite well,” he remarked.Jayakumar is confident of the long-term benefits of Thanal’s project. To drive more change at the ground, Thanal has now started a climate literacy programme, where more than 50 social media posters will be shared at the panchayat.All photos: Sourced via ThanalThis article is a part of a 101Reporters' series on The Promise Of Commons. In this series, we will explore how judicious management of shared public resources can help the ecosystem as well as the communities inhabiting it.

Unable to find work under MGNREGA, women pushed to fringes in West Bengal

Scant funds and lack of work under the scheme have marginalised women further in West Bengal, even though they remain its biggest beneficiaries of the rural livelihood programme.North 24 Parganas: It was a while back in 2021 that Sarifa Bibi in her late 50s had last managed to purchase substantial groceries for her family, pay the electricity bill, and buy a sari for herself and a shawl for her 17-year-old daughter, Aliknoor. This was when she had managed to secure 29 days of work under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). With the financial year now drawing to a close, Sarifa now realises she is far from completing 100 days of work — the minimum number of days of paid labour that the scheme guarantees per household. The desperation is clear in Sarifa’s voice, as she speaks to 101Reporters from her home in Habaspur village. Their family had been forced to seek a loan of Rs 9,000, at a steep interest of Rs 3,500, to buy a smartphone for Aliknoor’s online classes and to get ultrasonography for Aliknoor, who ultimately had to give up attending tuitions due to pending fees. “We are starving. There is no work,” lamented Sarifa, who supports her husband, three of her four children and a grandchild. Sarifa Bibi's house in Habaspur village, where she can barely make ends meet with lack of work in the area. Sarifa (left) has taken a loan of Rs 9,000 with a steep credit rate to buy a smartphone for her 17-year-old daughter (right). Photo Credits - Ritwika MitraA women-centric scheme to no availA labour law passed in 2005, MGNREGA aims to provide at least 100 days of work per household in rural India every financial year. The Act requires that women comprise at least one-third of the beneficiaries, which are families whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work. In reality, women make up the bulk of MGNREGA allottees across India — in Kerala it's as high as 90 per cent and in West Bengal, at least half of MGNREGA person-days go to women. The women person-days during the year 2021-22 was 46.58 per cent of the total in the state, and in North 24 Parganas in particular, the figure was at 51.67 per cent for the same year. Maya Sardar, Pampa Sardar and Subhashi Sardar (left to right) talk about how work under MGNREGA gave them temporary relief but the target of 100 days seems unachievable due to political apathy. Photo credits - Ritwika MitraThree women — Pampa Sardar, Maya Sardar and Subhashi Sardar — from Rajendrapur in Basirhat 2 block admit the mild relief MGNREGA brought them after they received work for over 30 days under the scheme a few years ago.“Earlier, we were completely dependent on our husbands,” said Maya Sardar, whose husband is a daily-wage earner, while their son relocated to Tamil Nadu in search of work. “As a family, we had no extra income and were always in debt at the local ration shop. But that changed in 2019, when we started working and earning under the scheme. If our husbands bought rice, we’d buy vegetables. We could even think of spending a little on ourselves.”However, while working papers indicate much higher women’s participation under MGNREGA in the past 15 years than the mandated 33 percent, this figure was at a five-year low in 2020-2021, at 53.07 per cent. These numbers from the Ministry of Rural Development allude to a rather worrying trend of feminisation of poverty. Inadequate fundingEconomists and activists told 101Reporters that the Centre’s allocation of Rs 73,000 crore to MGNREGA in the Union Budget for 2022 — of which over Rs 18,350 crore was pending from the previous years — was far from the amount required for the smooth implementation of the scheme. This inadequacy is a systemic blow to the very backbone of MGNREGA at the grassroots. Accusing the central government of “systematically underfunding” MGNREGA, development economist Jayati Ghosh emphasised that this had been “leading to further exclusion of women and an even greater rise in poverty and hunger”.“It’s also a macroeconomic disaster, further eroding mass consumption demand,” added Ghosh, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts in the US. “To meet the promise of 100 days of work for the households already registered, the allocation needs to be at least four times higher than the current Rs 73,000 crore.”She further pointed out that women, in particular, tend to be excluded from job opportunities when they are scarce. “There was a higher proportion of women under MGNREGA earlier because it offered lower wages than market rates. So fewer men were interested in these jobs back then. But now, amid widespread economic distress and lack of other livelihood opportunities, men are seeking out even MGNREGA jobs,” she explained. The current rate of wages in West Bengal, for 2021-22, stands at Rs 213 per day. Lack of transparency, arbitrary job allocationOver two dozen women from the villages of Hasnabad block in North 24 Parganas spoke to 101Reporters about the dearth of employment opportunities in the region. Besides inadequate funding, lack of transparency in the allocation of jobs, too, plays a significant factor in the deepening rural crisis that has marginalised women even further.Ranjan Kumar Mondal, an MGNREGA booth supervisor, said that once a scheme is launched, supervisors like him fill up and submit the application forms to the panchayat office, and that workers are often chosen from among those who were enlisted earlier. In some cases, people are informally notified about available work in the area, and their names are passed on to the panchayat. However, the norms laid down dictate that workers be able to directly approach the panchayat offices. Instead, supervisors fill out the forms themselves and submit the lists to the panchayat once the work is allocated. This lack of transparency leaves a significant proportion of people unemployed.Moreover, members of the Paschimbanga Khetmajoor Samity (PBKMS) — an independent trade union in West Bengal that promotes the rights of agricultural workers to decent wages, work and food — highlighted the arbitrary manner in which local administrations often allocate jobs, which ultimately fails to meet the demand for work.“When we demand accountability from them, there are only excuses,” said Suchitra Halder, a senior activist of the PBKMS. “The lack of political will and rivalries among parties are the primary reasons why work does not take off in these areas.”Anuradha Talwar, a state committee member of the PBKMS, added: “The biggest problem in the coming year is going to be the fallout from the current government’s huge reduction in the MGNREGA budget. It will affect the availability of work, and in West Bengal, women are going to be the worst hit. Men are going back to migration.”Given how particularly challenging the past three years have been due to the pandemic and cyclones Amphan and Yaas, Talwar warned of soaring rural distress and added, “MGNREGA will no longer be an option for people to rely on.”Migration in search of employmentIn Murarisaha village, at least seven women spoke to 101Reporters about the enormous loans — ranging between Rs 30,000 and Rs 1.4 lakh — their families had taken to survive during the Covid-19 lockdowns. Several male members of their households had been forced to migrate to other states in search of employment. Each of these women had a similar question: how would they make ends meet if all their family members remained at home? Although they had job cards, there was no work in the area for them, leaving them struggling to find a way to pay off their mounting debts.Women in Murarisaha talk about the huge loans that their families are steeped in. Photo Credits - Ritwika Mitra“Why would people leave their villages if work was made available there?” questioned Dipali Tanti, a mother of three whose husband earns around Rs 9,000 per month from working at an aquaculture company in Mumbai. “Our husbands have had to migrate, and we are left alone with our children. There is no point in demanding work as we know there is none.”Another local resident, Konica Sardar, echoed Tanti’s concerns, wondering how they would pay back the two loans (Rs 1 lakh and Rs 40,000) her family had sought to survive. “My husband left to work in an embroidery factory in Tamil Nadu. In a few days, my brother-in-law will leave, too,” said the 19-year-old, as she picked up her 2-year-old daughter to feed her. MGNREGA remains supply-drivenRavi Srivastava, director of the Centre for Employment Studies, Institute for Human Development, said that though MGNREGA was supposed to be a demand-driven scheme, it remains supply-driven. “The budget allocated to MGNREGA gives a strong signal to the labour plans and their implementation at the ground level,” he explained. “A slow budget translates to wage delays. This budget is not sensitive to the massive unemployment that persists. The idea that the budget would be raised with a rise in demand is not practical.” “If you are at the grassroots, you will find that the rozgar sevak will make it known to people that they can work when a scheme opens up and funds are available. People do not come looking for MGNREGA jobs because they know there are none, until the rozgar sevak signals that there are, and this happens only when there’s an easing of fund flow,” Srivastava added. The panchayat appoints these rozgar sevaks, and supervisors at worksites are called mates. These rozgar sevaks and mates are responsible for distributing job slips.