Alternative Pathways

Indian tea industry: A new management flavour, thanks to small growers by Faizal Khan October 02, 2021 https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/trends/features/indian-tea-industry-a-new-management-flavour-thanks-to-small-growers-7534081.html
Owned and operated by farmers, the Grassroots Tea Corporation could transform the lives of over 2.5 lakh small tea growers in India.

many of Assam's small tea growers who depended on the market's demand-supply dynamics today no longer need to lean on big tea factories for selling their crop. A new tea corporation where small growers are stakeholders, from cultivating to manufacturing to marketing, is changing the way the tea industry works.

In the new model, small growers - farmers who own between half-bigha (.3 acres) and ten bighas (3.3 acres) - collectively set up tea producer companies that buy their green leaf and process it into tea in its manufacturing units. The "made tea", or ready-to-brew tea, is then packaged and marketed by the corporation in wholesale and retail.

"The tea market is an entrenched system of auction houses, brokers and buyers at the national and global level. We thought there should be a system by which we should aggregate the product and sell in a professional manner," explains John. "A corporation becomes a common aggregator selling it under a common brand," John adds.

Sahodaya: an alternative but native ways of learning and living,

CHILDREN ARE GIVEN EDUCATION BY TAKING ONLY ONE KG OF RICE IN GAYA https://www.etvbharat.com/hindi/bihar/state/gaya/children-are-given-education-by-taking-only-one-kg-of-rice-in-gaya/bh20210905060101060   Sep 5, 2021  इस 'गुरुकुल' में पढ़ाई की फीस है मात्र एक किलो चावल, कुकिंग और फार्मिंग की भी दी जाती है शिक्षा ... इस आश्रम में बच्चों को अच्छी तरह पढ़ाई करवाई जाती है. बच्चों को शिक्षा के साथ ही खेती करना भी सिखाया जाता है. हमलोग खेती करने वाले लोग हैं, अगर बच्चा खेती में निपुण हो जाएगा तो हमारे लिए बड़ी बात है. वे कहती हैं कि यहां शिक्षा के बदले पैसे नहीं लिए जाते हैं, बल्कि अनाज लिया जाता है.

देखें तस्वीरें:  दिल्ली से M.Phil-PG कर पति-पत्नी गया के बीहड़ जंगल में चला रहे 'गुरुकुल'!  https://hindi.news18.com/photogallery/bihar/gaya-after-doing-m-phil-pg-from-delhi-husband-and-wife-are-running-gurukul-in-rugged-forest-brvj-3726207.html बिहार-झारखंड से सटे गया जिले के बाराचट्टी प्रखंड मुख्यालय से लगभग 6 किलोमीटर दूर स्थित काहूदाग पंचायत के कोहवरी गांव में सहोदय आश्रम चल रहा है. इस आश्रम को एक दंपती संचालित करते हैं. इस आश्रम में 30 बच्चों को आवसीय शिक्षा दी जाती है. यहां बच्चों के चहुंमुखी विकास के लिए पुराने जमाने की विधि, यानी ऋषि मुनियों द्वारा दी जाने वाली शिक्षा की तर्ज पर आज के बच्चों को शिक्षित किया जाता है. 

बीहड़ में घूमने वाले बच्चों को अपने पास रखकर कर रहे एक दम्पति शिक्षित । STREETBUZZ NEWS । https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZ29TwlRSMw  
Sep 5, 2021

 News18 Special https://youtu.be/tSG3aTY1fWU?t=723 

Bholabhai Live  https://youtu.be/zmTZY4cFVww?t=781 Aug 3, 2021   हंस दूध से पानी कैसे अलग करता है और क्या हीरे मोती खाता है ? || how to separate swan water from milk and other lessons .. These are self-learnt by the children of this school. 

Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/kohabari  

DO-NOTHING PARENTING https://jinankb.medium.com/?p=29dc25346fc 
Exploring the self-transformative potential of being with children

“Parenting” is a very new modern idea, being practiced by ‘the educated’. Modern parenting seems to be a stressful activity where parents don’t know how to look after their children. This is a critical crisis! 

Our natural learning system gets disabled in the process of ‘being taught’ which begins from our childhood. Not being trusted to evolve ourselves, takes away our inner self-worth to be.

https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190854584.013.298 Pimbert et al

Agroecology is increasingly viewed as an alternative to the corporate global industrial agri-food system.
Most scientists primarily focus on tweaking the industrial system by inventing “new” problem-solving approaches such as climate-smart agriculture (CSA) and sustainable agricultural intensification (SI), which are essentially “more of the same”. CSA and SI approaches selectively incorporate agroecological practices to improve efficiency in resource use in farming, while also often promoting an eclectic mix of inputs and processes. agroecological techniques end up conforming to the dominant agri-food regime and the logic of capitalist development (

In contrast , transnational social movements such as La Via Campesina, grassroot NGOs and critical agroecological scientists are mobilizing to strengthen agroecology as a process of bottom-up construction of decolonized knowledge and innovations that need to be supported—rather than led—by science and policy . They reject an agroecology promoting “input substitutions” that maintain dependency on corporate suppliers of external inputs and global commodity markets, and leave untouched the structural vulnerabilities:

Ecological: reorganizing the material basis of agri-food systems in the image of nature to reflect ecological processes and regenerate diversity (genetic, species, ecological), resilience, and sustainability—from farm plots to landscapes along the rural-urban continuum.

Economic: adopting plural forms of economic exchange (for instance, markets with and without money, basic income) to ensure care for people and nature, material security, sustainable livelihoods, and well-being in relocalized agri-food systems and territories in which economics is re-embedded in society.

Social equity and gender justice: developing ways of knowing, pedagogies, new knowledge, institutions, policies, and practices that challenge and reverse intersecting coloniality, homophobia, patriarchy, and racism.

Political: expanding people’s direct participation and inclusion in the democratic governance of agri-food systems and the territories they are rooted in. large-scale shifts to agroecology-based systems partly hinge on the development of governance that is deeply democratic, and rejects intersectional discrimination (for instance, regarding caste, gender, or race). Moreover, governance for the common good needs to have the capacity to tackle the inequitable power relations that underpin the dominant regime and “lock in” industrial food and farming as the norm