I have spent the last few months comparing the impact of the millet renewal in four rural areas in South Karnataka for my PhD in geography at the University of Paris Nanterre. These geographic zones have in common the historical production of finger millet but they vary in their agricultural history, their access to irrigation and to markets, among others characteristics. I’d like to understand how farmers are responding to the increased promotion and demand for millets in Karnataka. Does the new minimum support price at government mandis support or encourage the small-scale dryland farmer who grows ragi? Will the new demand modify the way millet is grown, exchanged, and eaten by villagers? In any case, my work thus far has led me to question the government’s promotional slogan “millet is good for you, good for the farmer, and good for the environment”.

Remote sensing with satellite multispectral imagery is a powerful tool to monitor land cover and environment and enable to do a lot… even during COVID lock-downs. The SEDRIC project (see previous newsletters) has been using as much remote sensing as possible to compensate the impossible missions in COVID time. After the re-opening of the boundary (unfortunately after the end of the project) such work has (finally) been confronted to field observations. Such observation can reveal surprises. In Southern Sri Lanka most of habitations are scattered and under a very dense and high tree cover therefore completely hidden to satellites. Only after field observation the land cover maps have been able to distinguish forests and “home garden” localities and such distinction bring a new understanding to land cover changes.
 

Under the project entitled “Study of Climate driven effects on Indian forests through long term monitoring” funded by Indian council of forestry research and education (ICFRE, MoEF, Govt. of India), a field mission was conducted for about 150 days (23rd Dec, 2021- 26th May, 2022) at Uppangala, Pushpagiri wildlife sanctuary, Karnataka. During the mission, around 37000 trees with a threshold of 1 cm dbh (diameter at breast height) within the 10 ha permanent plot were inventoried and tagged; monthly phenological changes in plant communities (about 600 individuals representing 95 species) were documented. A scenic event of mast flowering observed in Vateria indica. This phenomenon is an evolutionary strategy of Dipterocarps that is believed to satiate predators ensuring greater seedling survival. In addition, sixty litter traps were established in the permanent plot to understand litter productivity of Uppangala. The procured data will enable the team to develop newer insight into the functioning and dynamics of the tropical forest and will eventually strengthen the data repository from the past three decades of Uppangala. The rich amounts of data coupled with climate information (temperature, humidity and rainfall collected on a daily basis) are likely to yield a plethora of scientific information regarding the functioning of a tropical wet evergreen forest.
The team members include doctoral students Devika Menon and Debabrata Behera, as well as IFP staff Dr. N. Ayyappan and N. Barathan.

The EAP 1309 project titled Numbers in Business: Documenting Chettiar Mercantile Account Keeping Practices in 19th-20th century South India began in October 2021. The project aims to digitise the family archives of the Mrs. Valli Muthiah. The archives hold palm leaf manuscripts and paper materials dating from late nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century. Digitisation and metadata creation work began in December 2021, followed by delays caused by Omicron (third wave in India) until early February 2022. Thus far about 450 odd items have been digitized amounting to over 73,000 images, this translates to 30% of materials that constitute the archive. Metadata creation is simultaneously undertaken and once the digitisation phase is over, more manpower will be made available to complete metadata creation to deliver them on time. The first interim report was submitted in May 2022. Under the supervision of Dr. Senthil Babu of the Dept. of Social Sciences, the project is coordinated by Dr. Prakash Venkatesan as Principal Investigator and managed by Gopinath Sricandane. For further Information, please send an email to gopinath.s@ifpindia.org

As part of the ongoing project on the Social History of Vernacular Mathematical Practices, we are creating a digital historical atlas of meteorology in south India from the 8th to the 16th centuries. In order to visualize the relation between units of measurements found in inscriptions and the actual devices of measures used in the past, we document the objects of measurement from various museums and private collections in the state of Tamil Nadu. As part of this work, scholars Prakash and Gopinath Sricandane visited government museums in Madurai, Ramanathapuram, and Cuddalore, digitized the iron tape used to measure land, weighing stones of ancient and modern measurements, various varieties of marakkāl, a volume measure. This will help the users of the Atlas to associate measuring practices of land, grain and gold with actual instruments they used.

Field work was undertaken in the Kaveri Delta region in April, in the districts of Tiruvarur, Nagapattinam and Thanjavur. The objectives of this field visits were to trace the emergence of the checkered board pattern of land alignment during the medieval Chola period in Kaveri Delta region, which gave rise to the systemic taxation methods. This is being done by taking the land measurements recorded in temple inscriptions of the time and re-measuring the land that is mentioned in the inscription using the same scale. Through this exercise we believe that we would be able to unravel how measurement and the manipulation of that helped in extracting revenue and building up a new political class in the medieval Chola period. The other objective was to trace the resistance of tenant farmers against increased taxation, and the settlements made between the land owner and the tenants. This was done by visiting the temples where the records of this uprising are found in inscriptions, and the inscriptions were read together with Prof. Subburayalu, historian and Mr. Rajagopal, epigraphist. This effort had people from various areas of expertise such as photographers, journalists, students and research scholars from different disciplines.

I am studying the relationship between texts, practice and practitioners in the artisanal traditions of south India as part of the programme in the Social History of Vernacular Mathematical Practices in South India, at the IFP. We are documenting the various stages of different artisanal practices such as sculptors of stone, wood and metal. We had a series of introductory meetings with the stone sculptors of Mahabalipuram, followed by organized interviews with the artisans of two workshops, where we are doing audio, photographic and video documentation. We hope to make a short film as well on the computational practices at the workshop of the sculptors, and among various other artisans.

To better understand these emergent dynamics in fisheries trade, we observed the changing relations between fishing techniques and post harvest processes in the Cuddalore coast for the last two years. One species that dominates the market is the oil sardine. Having already documented the procedures and techniques associated with its harvest, there was need for understanding the patterns of its supply chain and consumption.It is estimated that almost 95 percent of Oil sardine caught in Cuddalore are supplied to the markets in Kerala. So, we wanted to follow the journey of the oil sardines from the shores of Cuddalore to the food plates in Kerala. We met fishers, fish merchants and consumers in the districts of Malappuram, Kozhikode and Wayanad, and gathered their perspectives and narratives. Such information is crucial in explaining market dynamics in Kerala. Oil sardine occupies a major part in the consumption of sea food in Kerala. Being one of the delicacies of the landscape, its affordability and nutritive value are key to its dominant presence in the market. It’s not to be forgotten that oil sardine was once available in the coast of Kerala but got depleted due to the introduction of mechanized fishing practices, which did not consider the consequences of overfishing. Now sardines travel across the coasts through organized value chains, meeting the protein needs of the people of Kerala.

For almost two years now, the fishercoast team at the IFP has been studying the role of shrimp farms in the transformation of the coast and the well being of its people. We have been focusing on the impact of these farms on the local communities and the ecological changes in the villages of Pichavaram and TS Pettai, both in the Cuddalore district of south India. The periodic release of effluents into the backwaters and its impact on the mangroves in the protected area has been an abiding concern for us. The legal- ecological and livelihood issues of the communities and the farms are entangled in different ways creating varied consequences for each. The spatial dimensions of this changing relationship then becomes important to our study. With the facilitation of Mr. Saravanan from the Coastal Resource Center, Chennai we organized an on-field training session in GIS in order to ground truth our own findings over the last two years. We tracked the entire stretch of shrimp farms using Global Positioning System (GPS) using an application called Openstreet Maps and then embossed it on to an already existing authorized Coastal Zone management Plan map constituted under the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) 2018 notification. We were surprised by the results which showed us that most of the shrimp farms were constructed on the regulated CRZ 1B area which restricts any activity as it is considered within the 50 meters mangrove buffer zone.