Thursday, January 26, 2012

Development in Context


After the trauma of Cyclone Thane, gears shifted and that included the direction of communications projects. Auroville Village Action Group was mainly concerned with the water situation of the region prior to the cyclone as there was a phenomenon of people damaging the water pumps by motorizing them in order to get larger volumes of water much faster. The problem is that with the constant power outages in the region, the pumps did not work whenever there was no electricity and consequently no one had access to water.

This is an illustration of the lack of understanding of low level technologies which are better suited under certain conditions as opposed to modern technologies which are not meant for the infrastructure or perhaps lack of infrastructure into which they are introduced.

Post cyclone, even though the focus had shifted from water to disaster relief, the same mismatch of technology and situation emerged in the communication project I undertook. The government handed out free television sets to all the village households which all have electricity. The reason they did this was so that they could communicate with the people
at the grass roots level. News of the cyclone reached the villagers through their television sets but no information was given on what a cyclone is or does or how to respond to it.

When I visited the villages post cyclone, none of the televisions worked any longer because without the knowledge to unplug electrical appliances during a cyclone, most of them short circuited or were crushed by larger falling objects. The project I embarked on was to bridge the communication gap that exists between the government and the villagers. Language was a barrier as I don’t speak Tamil and even if I did, many of the villagers are illiterate, hence my form of communication was aimed at simplicity and accessibility. I used a language that is self explanatory: pictures.

After focus group discussions with the village women in Poothrai, Navarkulam and Vasanthapuram, the villagers came up with ways to keep safe during a cyclone after having lived through the experience, which I then put into pictures.

The two way communication between the people on the ground is often emphasized in relation to development communications, but I think the two-way exchange should go beyond communication and extend to implementation of the tools and vehicles used to effect change in order to truly be actors of change. Considering the context into which technologies are introduced, whether formally or informally, is key for development to be meaningful. Lack of consideration results in the technologies becoming enemies of progress, as is the case with the electrical motors on the water pumps.

Sunday, January 1, 2012

Rethinking Sustainability Practices


I decided to spend Christmas in India this year in a town called Auroville in the Tamil Nadu region. On the 30th of December the area was hit by category one cyclone called Thane. Despite the natural disaster, being in Auroville is an experience like no other because it totally changes your perception on constructs of waste and in applicable, everyday situations. I have been impressed and amazed at the concept of zero waste and how it is put into practice in a ‘waste not, want not’ way.

However, there are some leakages in the way people actually live sustainably, for example: we visited the Bhudda Garden, which is a vegetable garden that aims to make Auroville self sustaining by growing and supplying all organic produce. One of the problems the Bhudda garden faces is that people in Auroville are accustomed to the kind of fruits and vegetables that their diets were comprised of before coming to Auroville and as a result those are the fruits and vegetables they want. These however, are not indigenous to the region and so the things that can be grown may go to waste as there is not a large market for them.

On the 30th and 31th of December the entire Tamil Nadu region was hit by a category 1 cyclone called Thane. The effects were devastating and it is my observation that the places most severely hit in my immediate proximity are the ones that chose to build sustainably such as the Bamboo Center. A young man named Diego who was visiting our media mentor, Puxan, walked for hours in the rain on Friday morning to the Tibetan Pavilion to ask for shelter because he was staying at the Bamboo Center and the roof of his room was blown away and the collapse of the remainder of the structure soon followed. Everything at the center, infrastructure wise, was made from Bamboo because it is renewable and strong but most importantly it is a sustainable building material.

Incidentally, the last two talks we received before the natural disaster were about water management and beach erosion. Water in the region is a scarce resource which has now been aggravated by Cyclone Thane. Being that Auroville was founded by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, the society is embodied by a spiritual aspect which is bound to sustainability. However, the spirituality aspect has in one instance stood in the way of sustainability in the creative water solutions. I posed the question as to why sewerage water is not recycled and used for drinking as is the case in my home country, Namibia, which also has water shortages as the country is predominantly desert. The answer given was that because researchers have found that water retains memory drinking water that has sewer memories would be ungainly for the well being of its drinkers.

I feel as though sustainability appears to be occurring and is based on selectivity such as in the case of the vegetables whereby people will eat sustainably by eating vegetables, but it is ineffective because it demands unsustainable production based on the type of vegetables people in the area prefer. Additionally, some sustainable options are not implemented because they are incompatible with the perceptions in the minds of people as is the case with the creative solution for water which ends up being an enemy of progress. Finally, using sustainable building material may not be the best way to be sustainable because should disaster hit, nothing remains. The conundrum is how to be sustainable in an inclusive and progressive manner? There seems to be some dissonance between sustainability methodology, Sri Aurobindo said that all problems of existence are problems of harmony.