My Experience at the Nilgiris Field Learning Center

Figure 1: Me (right) and my research partner Mahanathi (left) enjoying some ragi cool before fieldwork on a hot, sunny morning.

Bridget Conlon

May 22, 2017

In the months leading up to my semester at the Nilgiris Field Learning Center (NFLC), I had all sorts of expectations, but at the same time, I knew that I could not predict how the experience would impact me. In my head, the experience I was about to begin was rather straightforward: I will be living and learning with a group of Cornell students and local indigenous students from the Nilgiris. We will spend 7 weeks learning about local livelihoods, ecology, society, governance, etc., and then we will break up into research teams. I will learn to think in new ways and I will be exposed to new issues and new solutions. It will be an incredible experience. In the few days prior to departure, I packed my bags with very few clothes, some notebooks, my laptop, a million bottles of sunscreen and hand sanitizer, some practical shoes, and a sleeping bag. I looked at google images of Kotagiri and looked over my Tamil language sheets, practicing how to say simple phrases (Conjam tea kidaikuma?- Can I have a little tea?). Winter break passed by all to quickly and I did not feel rested up enough to begin yet another semester. Truthfully, I did not feel ready to go, but I don’t think any amount of preparation would have made me feel prepared.

After a long, long journey, I was finally sitting in the warm air of the Coimbatore airport with the rest of my batch (our word for cohort). At that point, I could not have known how close we all would become. Still, I was extremely comforted by the familiar faces. As we began driving toward the hills, my head turned from left to right as I tried to take in everything we drove past. Nothing I saw was shocking, but everything I saw was new. I didn’t understand the women performing physical labor in elaborate saris, or why men just stood at the side of the road watching cars go by. The smells were new, the buildings were new, the faces were new, and the landscape was new. Everything looked so dry. I wondered— Where do people grow food? Where do they get their water? How do people survive here? My excitement level rose once I could see the Nilgiris. I’m going up there, I thought. As we ascended, the air got cooler and the landscape changed. At that point, I already knew I was going to like living in the Nilgiris.

We arrived at Keystone around 4:00 pm that Friday and were immediately summoned to afternoon tea. We wasted no time before diving into orientation, and the next day, we were left alone to get to know our local peers, the Keystone students. I remember when we learned each other’s names for the first time. They had just as difficult a time pronouncing our names as we did theirs, and communication was really difficult. Nevertheless, there was a jolly feeling in the atmosphere. On Monday, we began our classes that would comprise the first 7 weeks of the NFLC experience.

During the first 7 weeks, I got acquainted with local cultures, societal norms, wildlife, ecology, resources, livelihoods, and governance in the Nilgiris. Before classes each morning, we did a crossing boundary exercise (CBE) with the Keystone students that familiarized us with an aspect of their culture/communities and vice versa. CBEs served an opportunity for us to learn more Tamil vocabulary, and for the Keystone students to learn more English vocabulary. We also had formal lessons in Tamil. Each week we had a different instructor (or two), along with guest lecturers from Keystone and other organizations, who introduced us to a specific topic related to the Nilgiris. Weekly field trips related to the week’s topic were a key component to our learning during weeks 1-7. Through assigned readings, lectures, CBEs, and field trips, we were exposed to multiple angles of pressing issues in the Nilgiris, and we were given the tools to analyze and cultivate our own perspectives. At the end of each week, I wrote a paper that compiled what I had learned that week and integrated it into what I already knew. Weekly

papers served as a place for me to reflect on myself as a student and a teacher, to discuss things I found overwhelming or confusing, and to articulate any new questions.

After spring break, at the start of week 9, we began the research phase of the NFLC. I was placed on the Infant and Young Child Feeding (IYCF) team and paired with a Keystone student named Mahanathi (see figure 1). Our research focused on what babies are fed at specific age groups between 0-24 months, the challenges associated with caring for and feeding babies, and social support systems for mothers. We spent 4 weeks conducting interviews with mothers and health workers in 3 Irula1 villages in the Nilgiris. My first fieldwork experience was deeply enriched by my partnership with Mahanathi. She is from the Irula tribe, and her inherent knowledge of local norms and practices added tremendously to the depth of our research and my own understanding. Mahanathi and I we able to communicate very basic ideas with each other, but for our research, we had translation assistance from a young woman named Sujithra, who was an irreplaceable part of our team.

During the classroom phase and the research phase, so much of what I saw every day connected back to the courses I had taken at Cornell. Agriculture was all around me. From the window in my residence at the Keystone Foundation, I could see women working for daily wages as tea pickers. For most of my time there, the tea plantations were underproducing due to the major drought, which meant that women had to work significantly longer hours to meet their daily quota of tea leaves (40 kilos). Some women plucked their fingers raw, but could not wear gloves because gloves made for inefficient tea plucking. I began to make connections about how deeply the tea industry is entwined with the legacy of colonialism in India, and I could see with my own eyes how people are still very much negatively affected by colonialism (see figure 1).

I saw other industrial agriculture operations including vegetable farms, a vegetable distribution center, one flower farm (see figure 2), and countless banana and coconut plantations (in the plains). At the flower farm, we met a number of migrant workers from West Bengal who travelled there to earn about $75/month. They brought their babies with them, and the whole family was exposed to fungicides and insecticides that were sprayed every day inside enclosed greenhouses. Pesticides and fertilizers are used very liberally in vegetable production as well, and some of my Keystone peers complained about the water quality in their own villages due to pesticide/fertilizer contamination. Overall, I found that people in the villages had very negative feelings about chemical use in agriculture, but they were forced out of necessity to purchase the produce anyhow.

The drought has negatively impacted food sovereignty for people in many Irula villages. In the villages where my research team conducted our fieldwork, mothers told us that they used to grow millets and vegetables near the village, but could not anymore because of the drought. Ration rice long ago replaced millet as the main staple, but some people still grew millets. Now millet cultivation is very difficult because of drought and elephants. Elephants come and raid millet fields (which are intercropped with corn, amaranthus, pigeon pea, mustard, chilies, and sunflower). Now, people must go to the market to buy ragi powder2 and

1 The Irulas are among many of the scheduled tribes (STs), or indigenous groups, of the Nilgiris. Other STs include the Todas, Kotas, and Kurumbas.

vegetables, which are grown with high amounts of chemical pesticides.3 There is some space in the villages where people could potentially have kitchen gardens, but we noticed that nobody has kitchen gardens. Last year’s IYCF team noted that people did not have kitchen gardens around their homes because monkeys would eat everything, so there was no use.

Although there is a lack of vegetables and grains grown in and around villages, there are many fruit trees, coffee trees, and silk cotton trees. Additionally, people in the villages harvest an array of non-timber forest products (NTFPs). There are many jackfruit trees in the villages (see figure 4). People consume a lot of jackfruit and sell jackfruits for about 40 rupees/fruit. Earning a seasonal living from jackfruit appeared to be difficult, however, despite the high price and large quantity of jackfruits. I would see men carrying jackfruits up long dirt roads, probably to earn less than 120 rupees (~ 2 dollars) for their day’s efforts. Most people do not own vehicles, and busses come to the villages infrequently. Thus, people are often forced to walk with their produce if they want to sell it. I also saw plenty of banana trees, tamarind trees, and guava trees.

For some products like silk cotton, coffee, and spices, merchants visit the villages at different times throughout the year to purchase in large quantities. Silk cotton is used to make bedding and clothing, and can be found as homemade beds in rural villages or as scarves in expensive shops (see figure 5). Most of the villages we went to had an abundance of coffee (arabica and robusta varieties), which people dry in cement courtyards outside of their homes (see figure 6). It is becoming less common for people to harvest NTFPs as agroforestry grows in prominence. Moreover, invasive plants like Lantana camara are replacing native species, which creates another disincentive to collect NTFPs.

In some of the villages I visited, people have animals that provide their families with income and a regular source of protein. Many families have goats, and some families breed goats to sell for extra income (see figure 7). Chickens are also very common, and people eat chicken and eggs. I saw how practical it is for families to have their own livestock and poultry right by their homes.

Seeing these mixed agroforestry/livestock/NTFP systems, I was reminded of work I did for my courses at Cornell. I remembered how difficult it was for me to define “the agricultural system” of Northern Laos for my semester-long project in Tropical Cropping Systems (IARD 4140). All of the information I had acquired was from the internet, and I remember thinking that it would be so much easier to understand the agricultural system if I could only just be there. I see how difficult it would be to get an accurate picture of the food system in the Nilgiris without seeing all of the various components with my own eyes (i.e. industrial farms, small farms, subsistence crops, livestock, transportation infrastructure, grocery stores, and marketplaces).

During my time at the NFLC, I learned about the challenges of development work and what it’s like to be in an NGO setting. Keystone was very open with us and brought us to communities where development initiatives had failed. We could see that Keystone has a 2 Ragi powder is used to make ragi cool, a porridge fed to babies starting at the age of 3 months, on average (see figure 3). 3 A grandmother in the village told us that mothers are becoming sick because there are so many pesticides on the food they consume. She said that when they used to grow their own vegetables, people were healthier.

profoundly positive impact in tribal communities of the Nilgiris overall, and we were able to talk with many village people about their perceptions of Keystone as an entity and their experiences being part of development initiatives. It was a privilege to have this personal contact with people from the NGO and the communities that are impacted.

During fieldwork, my research team experienced challenges of our own. I had not predicted how difficult it would be to ask women for their precious time. Of the mothers I interviewed, most were tired, some were very busy, and some were very poor. I was asking for about 1 hour of their time with nothing concrete to offer them in return, and I felt guilty about it. I began to feel that research was extractive, and I wished we could give people money for their time. However, in debriefs with our peers, faculty, and Keystone research anchors, I came to terms with the fact that there is no perfect way to do research. Giving people money poses new problems for communities—namely the unfairness of giving certain people money and not others. In order to show appreciation, I thanked women many times for the time they gave us, and that seemed to be enough for most of them. We also invited all of the women we interviewed to our final presentation. A number of the mothers came, and there was a large turnout of community members from all of the NFLC research villages. We were told later by our Keystone mentors that the village people were very happy with the fact that young people from local tribes had the opportunity to do research about their own communities. I was glad that we were able to share our research directly with the people who had provided us with information.

All in all, I had an incredibly positive experience at the NFLC. I enrolled in the program for my final semester at Cornell, and I did not know what I would do after graduation. My experiences at the NFLC have inspired me to pursue international development work in the future. I want to continue learning and researching, and I plan to return to India next January (hopefully for an internship of some sort). Having had this experience, I cannot imagine my life had I never gone to Kotagiri. I feel so fortunate to have had this opportunity.