AHMEDABAD: Bavla in Ahmedabad district was once known for its paddy cultivation and thriving rice mills as the region used to send the processed crop outside. In about two decades, out of 120-odd rice mills, only 20 are functional today and they primarily produce puffed rice.
Kanti Makwana, director of Bavla-based NGO
Dharti Charitable Trust, said that the region also had cultivation of red rice (locally known as vari chokha) along with about six other variants of paddy.
“We also used to spot greenish rice which used to grow on its own in waterlogged areas around the farms. Now that unique crop is gone as are traditional crops, locally known as cheno, banti and kodri. The crops are getting more and more homogenized,” he said.
As the world will mark 25 years of Convention on Biodiversity on May 22, for Ahmedabad district, the day brings in a few joys and more worries. Organizations such as Dharti Charitable Trust have been charting the biodiversity of the region through People’s Biodiversity Register (
PBR), a project initiated by National Biodiversity Authority and local biodiversity boards.
A K Shrivastav, chairman of
Gujarat State Biodiversity Board (GSBB), said that the state comes second nationally in preparing PBRs with 1,164 registers prepared so far. Work on 600 more is in the pipeline.
“Our purpose is to evoke sense of ownership among the local residents and also to tap into traditional knowledge. Agricultural biodiversity is an important component,” he said.
The outcome of PBRs, however, is not clear. Sanju Sharma, state consultant, GSBB, said that PBRs are classified documents and thus they cannot reveal the data on crops, plants, animals, reptiles and so on which are recorded under the project. GSBB website mentions Gujarat to be home of 4,320 species of flora and 3,054 species of fauna but the data does not have any date specification.
“The entire ecosystem is delicately balanced. Loss of one component — be it animal, bird or vegetation — makes a major difference. On the basis of conversation with the local elders, we mapped the parts of Ahmedabad, Rajkot, Gir-Somnath, Kheda and
Morbi districts and got to know that flora and fauna that used to be visible two decades ago has now gone extinct or is difficult to spot,” said Makwana. His organization has so far prepared 67 PBRs in these regions.
(With inputs from Himanshu Kaushik)
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