Eka Nari Sanghathan
= "A community led organization of indigenous single women farmers in Rayagada, named Eka Nari Sanghatha (ENS), has been working on concerns related to sustainable agriculture, gender, singleness, women’s health and collective well-being".
URL = https://ekanarisanghathan.blogspot.com/
Description
"A community led organization of indigenous single women farmers in Rayagada, named Eka Nari SanghathanFootnote31 (ENS), has been working on concerns related to sustainable agriculture, gender, singleness, women’s health and collective well-being. ENS was forged in 2013 by single women from Emaliguda village as a space to host relationships of care and companionship. Communitarian ethics, know-how and value systems driving adivasi life-world to which these women belong, have been the guiding-force of the Sanghathan. In an attempt towards redrawing gendered relationships and in transforming lives through collective living and caring, ENS has been engaging in collective management, cultivation and care of leased plots of land since 2017. The production, access, use, appropriation and distribution of the food crops is done collectively.
The benefits of ethical commoning in the Sanghathan, extend beyond the human members of ENS. The land is considered as much a companion of the collective as the women themselves. In this regard, constant efforts are being made to move away from extractive inorganic farming to ecologically sensitive and sustainable farm practices in order to care for the commons. In spite of growing emphasis on cash-crop cultivation and marketed hybrid seeds in the area, the Sanghathan takes responsibility to cultivate local seed varieties of food crops in order to ensure food security and sufficiency. Local food seed varieties are preserved and procured from local farmers in the area on the basis of seed exchange rather than monetary transactions Moreover, natural fertilizers and plant-based pesticides are used in place of inorganic chemicals to sustain healthy life of humans and earth others (Chitranshi 2019). This postcapitalist agricultural common, embodied, sustained and managed in the Sanghathan, reflects back on the question of food security extending it beyond the human-centred ideas of health and well-being. Debunking human-centred notions of food security and agricultural productivity, Tulsi Pulaka, an 80-year-old ENS member, emphasizes the importance of healthy and ethical relationships between human and more-than-human forms for imagining and sustaining common and shared futures.
She says,
- "What we get after farming on the land is ours. Does not matter how much we get. That is up to the land to decide. It depends on the care we give to the land. When we care for the land, it takes care of us in return. We do not ask how much, we thank “dharti penu” (the earth spirit) for what she has to offer. When we use chemicals for enhancing production, we poison the land as well as ourselves. Our health and well-being is tied to the health and well-being of the land. When we think too much about how much, we tend to move towards death-death of the land, death of ourselves… but when we feel grateful for what we get from our land, we choose life."
(https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41301-020-00267-9)