WEBVTT

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We are what we eat,

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but how many of us know
what we are actually eating?

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How many of us know

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what food does to the environment
before it comes to our plate.

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How many of you know

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what food does to the farmer
who is producing that food?

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Do you know? Have you ever thought?

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How many of you think,
when you are eating food,

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about the farmer who has produced it

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or the fate of the farmer
who has produced it?

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These are some of the questions

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which grappled me
when I was studying agriculture.

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While doing my PhD in agriculture,

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I had a choice.

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Like every young boy in the 90s,

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I was also crazy about getting
into Indian Civil Service.

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I was reading about the Indian economy.

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I really understood
about the Indian economy

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by reading for an exam.

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Finally, by the time
I got into the services,

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I was selected for Indian Revenue Service.

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But I also had a choice of joining
as an Agricultural Research Scientist.

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It was a tough choice.

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I made my choice to join
as an Agricultural Research Scientist.

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I thought, I should continue
working with farmers.

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(Applause)

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But that didn't last long,
I'll come to that.

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Before I come to that,
let's understand: what is our food?

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What are we eating? How safe is our food?

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All of you saw this news, some time back.

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Pesticides residues
in soft drinks and bottled water.

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But forgotten the next day.

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Have you ever thought

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how pesticides residues got
into this bottled water or soft drinks?

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If bottled water and soft drinks
had pesticide residues,

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the water you used to make tea or coffee
also must be having.

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But we never worry about it.

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The news is short,
the next day we forget about it.

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At least this must be in your memory:
noodles having heavy metals.

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How many of you thought,

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how did these heavy metals
reach the noodles?

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If lead has to be added to the noodles,

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probably lead is more costly
than the noodles.

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Nobody will add it, but it came.
How did it come?

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If ingredients used
to make noodles had the lead,

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then the 'aata' which you used
to make your 'chapati'

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also must be having.

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Or the 'samosa' which you're eating
also must be having, right?

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But we don't connect the dots.

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Same story when we hear
about pesticide residues in vegetables.

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You all get horrified,
but forget it in the evening.

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We all think, if we buy food
at a good place,

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or eat it in a good hotel, it's safe.

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Food is only as safe as it is grown.

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End of pipe solutions don't work.

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The pesticides which are
used in agriculture,

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less than 1% actually kills the insects,
99% gets into the water,

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gets into the air,
and comes back into your food.

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We look at it very casually.

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Everything happening around us,
we look at it very casually.

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I'll give you an example.

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While having the lunch,
I saw people painting there.

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What is that? Spray paint.

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Where does it go?

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Part of it goes onto the board,
part of it into the air.

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You were all eating there.
It comes there.

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We are all educated,
we feel we can make connections.

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We never make them.

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We expect that the farmer
will make those connections

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and produce safe food for all of us.

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I think that's there is a disconnect

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between what we observe,
what we know, and how we act.

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It is a serious problem.

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It's not only about the pesticides.

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Do you know the eggs
that you buy in the market,

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what kind of eggs are you buying?

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They are haploid eggs.

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Haploid means they are produced
without male and female meeting together.

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That's why if you hatch the eggs,
they won't make chickens.

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But how they are produced?
They are produced by using estrogens.

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And what happens to those estrogens?

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When you eat those eggs
they'll come back to you.

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That's one reason today
the puberty in girls has advanced.

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The gynecological problems
in women have increased.

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The breast development
in men has increased.

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Last year's India Today's survey shows

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that the largest number
of plastic surgeries done in India

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are to remove breasts in men.

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You got into the situation where fruit,
which is supposed to be healthy,

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is creating all these problems.

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It's not just the pesticides,
or antibiotics, or growth hormones

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which are used in production,
but also how they are processed.

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You might have heard, last week,
10 days, doing rounds in all the media:

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artificially ripened fruits.

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But why are fruits ripened artificially?

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If all of you want
to eat fruits off-season:

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how do they do it?

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If you want mangoes in May,
how do you get mangoes?

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You have to cut unripened ones,
ripen it artificially, and sell it.

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Bananas which look uniformed yellow.

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What are they?
They are all carbon ripened.

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The apples, the shiny apples
which you see.

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What are they?
When were they produced?

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Where were they produced?
Do you know?

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California apples,
you get apples from California.

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Can you keep it fresh?
They are coated with wax.

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Go back to your home,
take an apple from your fridge.

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Just scratch it. You'll see the wax.

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We are eating all that.

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The watermelons which are red in color,

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they are injected with injections, color.

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They are injected with growth hormones.

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The milk which is sold,

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we have seen in news
of the last several years,

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the reports say,

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"The milk is contaminated
with synthetic milk."

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If you want to have milk
at 40 rupees a liter,

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that's what you get.

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We want food cheaper,

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and there is competition
between the companies.

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They pay low prices to the farmers.

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They also contaminate it
and then get away with that.

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All brands of milk sold in Hyderabad,

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is prone to have been
contaminated with synthetic milk.

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GM foods.

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How many of you know about this?
How many of you have heard about this?

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Bt Brinjal.

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I'll tell you simply what Bt Brinjal is.

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When pesticide is sprayed from outside,
it damages the environment.

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Like I said, 99% goes into the environment
only 1% kills the insect.

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So, scientists thought, "Why not
producing pesticide in the plant itself?"

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So the plant produces insecticides,

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so that whichever insect
eats the plant will die.

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But what happens to us?
Who eats that?

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So, there are several bio safety questions
in front of us which were never addressed.

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What you see here, yellow, white,
golden rice, which is going to come soon.

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Do you know why it was done?

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They say, vitamin A deficiency
is a serious problem,

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so we will produce vitamin A in the plant.

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If you eat that rice, you can have
as much as vitamin A as possible,

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but do you know vitamin A
is a fat soluble vitamin?

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It's not just enough to have vitamin A,
but you also need to have enough fat,

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but if you have enough fat in your food
you don't need golden rice.

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In 2005, we came across
a farmer in Guntur,

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who was cultivating Bt Bhendi.

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We were shocked.

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I said, "How did you get it?"

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He said, "The company gave me the seeds."

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We went to the company,
and they said, "We are doing a trial."

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We went to the government.

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The government said,
"Yeah, that's their seed."

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They said, "You are not permitted."

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It was taken off in 2005.

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2013, similarly we came across cotton,

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herbicide-tolerant cotton which is grown.

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No permissions.

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In 2009, when Bt brinjal was permitted,
there was a public discussion.

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It was the only time
there was a public discussion,

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to introduce whether we need
a food or not, and it was banned.

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Sometimes, some wise politicians
take better decisions.

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But otherwise we would have
been flooded with GM foods.

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Today there is case
pending in the supreme court,

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there is an expert committee
appointed by the supreme court

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which said, "We don't need this
for next the 10 years. Let's wait."

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There's a parliamentary standing committee
which also said, "We don't need it."

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But you don't know how they are
going to come into your plate.

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Food is not only useful energy,
but also good for your health.

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It can treat many of the diseases.
Food is a medicine.

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It can act as preventive medicine,
and can also act as a curative medicine.

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I know many people who are working on
treating autism with good food.

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Many problems which you are seeing

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- obesity, diabetes, blood pressure -
all are because of the food which you eat.

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You need to make a right choice
about your food.

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Second: what food does to the environment.

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Let's look at the ecological footprints.

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How many of you have seen rice fields?

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Almost all, right?

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What comes to your mind
when we think of rice fields?

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Full of water.

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How much water does it take
to produce an acre of rice?

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6 million liters.

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6 million liters per acre of rice.

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Which is equal to 100 families
annual consumption.

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One family of five members
eats about a kilogram of rice a day.

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Which is equivalent to
a tanker of water: 180 showers.

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All of us want to eat rice.

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You need more and more water
for the production of rice.

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Let's make a making calculation:

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how much one meal of rice in Hyderabad
costs to the environment?

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It's probably as big as a whole dam.

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We need to worry
about the ecological footprints.

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It's not just about the water,
about pesticides, about growth hormone.

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Everything.

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What agriculture leaves
before it comes to your plate?

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And not just that.
What does it do to the farmers?

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The more and more pesticides
you spray, insects get resistant.

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They don't work.

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First time you spray,
second time you spray,

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third time you spray,
fourth time you drink it.

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That's what we have seen
all along, farmer suicides.

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The fall out of such things
is increasing cost of cultivation,

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but the prices are not increasing.

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Production costs for one kilogram of rice,

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2,100 rupees
as per government calculations,

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but today the price is
on 1,400 rupees for farmers.

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Today a ton of sugarcane is 2,000 rupees.

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A ton of firewood is 4,000 rupees.

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How can farmers live?

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The policies are also lopsided.

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Today, the average income
of 83% of the farmers in this country

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is only 5,000 rupees.

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So farmers have lost
their economic independence.

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Not just economic independence,
but physical independence as well.

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These are photographs which we have taken

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of farmers standing
in queue for fertilizers.

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Standing in queue for seeds.

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Seeds which they can produce.

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Fertilizer which they can make
by composting,

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but they are not subsidized.

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If you buy it in a market,
they are subsidized.

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Lopsided policies from government.

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All these lead to farmer suicides.

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In last 20 years, 300,000 farmers
have committed suicide.

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Every day about 48.

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What is the point about just discussing
the dark side of the picture?

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How much and what can we do
to change the situation.

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Some of us working in agriculture
at various institutions came together,

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and we started an organization
called Center for Sustainable Agriculture,

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in 2004.

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We started working with farmers,
telling them how they can move away

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from the high external input
base agriculture

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to low external input based agriculture.

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It was not easy,

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but what we found is across the country
there were wonderful experiences.

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But all those experiences
were taught in ideological frameworks.

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They don't talk to each other.

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There are good things and bad things,

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if they would discuss with each other
it would have been good,

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but they never talk to each other.

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Mainstream institutions
never worried about them.

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So we brought all the practices together,

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evolved what we called
sustainable agricultural practices.

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The first success came in Kulukulla.

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Kulukulla is village in Kamang district
which became completely pesticide free.

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The village, which was spending
about 6 million per annum,

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they completely stopped using pesticides.

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(Applause)

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The Agriculture minister came
and said, "Wonderful. What do you want?"

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The farmers said, "Make
Andhra Pradesh pesticide free."

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He was amazed. He said,
"Certainly I'll do. But what do you want?"

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I said, "We are happy with what we have.
Just change all agricultural practices."

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He brought all the scientists
of the department of agriculture together

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to see and then make a change.

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They said, "Sir, this is one village.
We can't do it. It is not possible."

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Then came Enabavi.

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This is about 80 kilometers from here,
completely organic village.

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The last three years,

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more than 10,000 people
have visited the village

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to know how they are doing farming.

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But this also has not changed
anything under government.

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But consumers have changed.

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Many people have started
understanding what is good for them.

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This is an advertisement
which is The Hindu uses for itself.

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This is a village called Dorli.

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Dorli is in Vardha.

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After Telangana, you hear
lots of suicides from Vardha.

00:14:12.103 --> 00:14:14.483
In 2005, the village was put up for sale,

00:14:14.484 --> 00:14:16.303
farmers decided we can't do farming.

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They put up village for sale.

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We went there in 2006 and said,
"Can we start working together?"

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Today all of them have repaid their loans,

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all of them are back to farming.

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(Applause)

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It's possible. It's possible.

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All examples are in front of us.

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We also started working

00:14:34.167 --> 00:14:36.543
with the woman self-help groups
in Andhra Pradesh.

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These are cover stories
of "Down To Earth" magazine,

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which tracked the whole change.

00:14:40.631 --> 00:14:43.551
We started with 225 acres in 2005.

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Today its 3.5 million acres
in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana together,

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pesticide free.

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(Applause)

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50% of use of pesticide
in the state has come down.

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We were third in the country
in terms of per acre pesticide used,

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today we are 20th in the country.

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(Applause)

00:15:03.432 --> 00:15:06.599
This was part of a show
on Satyamev Jayate,

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some of you may have seen it.

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In this show we had
an interesting discussion.

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The other side was the largest
pesticide seller in this country.

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Towards the end Amir Khan asked me
a question, "I am fully convinced

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with what you're saying
and what you're doing.

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It is possible to do it India.

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But how do I convince
this man who is sitting here?"

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I said, "Ask his brother,

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His brother is the largest
organic exporter in this country."

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(Applause)

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And he said, "Yes."

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That shows that people see it as business.

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If pesticide sells, they sell pesticides,
if organic sells, they sell organic.

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You buy pesticides
or other organic pesticides

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or certificate from us saying
you haven't used any of these things.

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Farmers are made into consumers.

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But what are our consumers doing?

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Then what we did is

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we brought some consumers
in Hyderabad together

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to form a consumer cooperative
called Sahaja Aharam.

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We also brought all farmers together
to form farmers cooperative,

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so that they can market directly.

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Today we have 20 farmer cooperatives

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who produce organically
and directly sell in the market.

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While many of you worry
about organic food prices,

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the organic Sahaja Aharam prices
are 20% lower than the market prices,

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and 75% of what the consumer pays
goes to the farmers.

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In the regular market it is
just 20% which goes to the farmer.

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(Applause)

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What do I see from here?

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I see a ray of hope.

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It's possible.

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If all of us can join hands together,
we can make a change.

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But it's a long way to go
in terms of Government Policies.

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Still there is a serious crisis
in agriculture.

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Yesterday, you may have seen
about farmer's suicide.

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Today, this morning's newspaper,
you may have seen.

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Numbers of farmers are dying.

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It's a responsibility of all of us.

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Business as usual is not an option.

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We need to change as consumers,
we need change as farmers.

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We all need to come together
to pressurize government

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to make a change.

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Otherwise, the future is very, very bleak.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)