Susila Dharma Britain

stephanie

ANISHA

Anisha (which means from darkness to light) was founded in 1994 in Bangalore, southern India. The charity works in two areas, one is concerned with helping neglected children and women who live on the streets and in the slums of central Bangalore and the other is concerned with helping marginalised farmers and landless coolies and their families in a poor rural district 180 km south of Bangalore. Current Susila Dharma Britain funding supports the project to transform 500 acres of conventional agricultural land to organic farming, initiate and encourage kitchen gardens to provide nutritional security for200 families and encourage use of herbal medicines.

An involuntary consequence of the so-called ‘green revolution’ with its use of high-yield grain varieties and chemical fertilizers and pesticides has been an impoverishment of eco-systems and an increase in production costs especially in agriculturally poor regions.

Small and marginalised farmers which make up 70% of the rural population have not been able to manage. The new technologies need as a rule irrigated land and are not suitable for dry land agriculture. Chemical fertilizers, which produce good results in irrigated land, lead in dry lands to soil degradation and thereby to food insecurity and greater poverty. Traditional agricultural practices are dying out and there is an ever greater dependency on external factors.

This situation has been further aggravated by new laws (e.g. the land reform act of 1995). It is now permissible to buy formerly protected land of the Dalit caste and the land is being bought up by large commercial companies who then use the land for export cash crops at the expense of food crops.

Due to insufficient yields and poorly organised marketing it is becoming more and more difficult for the marginal farmers to feed their families from their land and they are being forced to look for alternative forms of income. This often leads to migration into city slums or to the men being absent for several months in faraway quarries or working as coolies.

The goal of the current project is to achieve a substantial improvement in the living conditions of the population in the project area and achieve food and nutritional security of small and marginalized farmers, landless labourers and their families.

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