Sattvik: Food for thought, policy & action

The action research on exploring market-based mediation for generating opportunities for knowledge and resource rich but economically disadvantaged people has generated several new alternatives.

For the ongoing Sattvik food festival at Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, we realised that women groups from over 15 districts of Gujarat tried to commercialise their products and cooked traditional foods.

However, they may not be able to compete well with professionals or more experienced entrepreneurs. Colleagues at SRISTI tried many ways to move customers in their direction. Further, several mentors gave tips to these inexperienced entrepreneurs to attract consumers with their stalls. What better way of teaching entrepreneurship than by direct encounter with customers.

There were four different stalls from Jammu and Kashmir providing consumers a choice of quality, variety and prices. The organic farmers had displayed far more value-added products this time compared to the previous edition of the Sattvik festival. This is an extremely encouraging sign. It is a pity that policy thrust towards in situ value addition is extremely weak in the country. There are very few incentives for technology providers and seekers to take risk and provide choices of different food processing technologies to the farmers and tribal people.

Our failures include (a) inability to convince policymakers to look at innovative potential solutions for the purpose, (b) find any permanent location in Ahmedabad for providing consumers round-the-year supply of healthy and diverse food products and other materials and (c) a multimedia multi-language exhibition of innovations. But, sooner or later, consumers and philanthropist will have to come together to provide such outlets to the producers or put pressure on policymakers to do so.

There is an exhibition of innovators organised on the occasion by National Innovation Foundation (NIF) to stimulate interest among children as well as other innovators and entrepreneurs to explore synergy.

A clearing house has been organised at 7.00 pm today where value-added products dealing in food, energy, transport, utilities, among other factors will be showcased to potential entrepreneurs and companies as well as designers and fabricators to get involved in building a fair, transparent, profitable and sustainable value chain.

This time, creative communities from Manipur have introduced healthy dishes including endemic lichens, nutritive mushrooms and other herbs not found anywhere else. Similarly, conservators of biodiversity moving with yaks between 12,000-18,000 feet from Arunachal Pradesh have brought products made of different kinds of yak hairs and handloom bags. Recipes from Assam, Rajasthan, Bihar, Jharkhand and many other regions are being offered to those who want to learn new ways of combining taste, diversity, nutrition, and aesthetics.

There are many young artists of Ahmedabad showing their creative works to connoisseurs of cultural diversity. Ram Dev bhai, a seasoned sculptor who has been mentor to many, and engraver Dilip bhai who has designed an exact miniature replica of different facets of Taj Mahal besides copper wearable dresses for women. Salom bhai has designed an intricate Taj and motorcycles out of matchsticks.

A bamboo windmill originally designed by Mehtar Husain and Mushtaq Ahmed in Assam for Rs5,000 was modified by a local entrepreneur for salt workers. Already 25 such wind mills have been installed near Pipavav and
another 25 will be in place shortly.

SRISTI and other members of Honey Bee Network also honoured eight grassroot change agents about whom I will write next week. What is remarkable is that many primary school teachers, though working in government schools, are creating new benchmarks of
performance and social connect.

Sattvik is a celebration of healthy food not just for the palate but also the mind. Whether the policymakers will pay attention is a moot point so long as consumers can vote not just for healthy consumption but also for volunteering to support transformation of rural livelihood. Healthy soil, healthy crop and animals and healthy food are the only path to sustainable future. We are waiting for many more volunteers, entrepreneurs and other contributors to enlarge this mission with empathy and efficiency, excellence and equity and conserving environment through participative
education.    

The author is a professor at IIMA