Sridharan Sethuratnam — India
Hometown: Guelph, Ont. / Yercaud, Tamil Nadu, India
Award: IDRC Internship, Rural Poverty and Environment program
Topic: Mind and Migration: The Effect of Out-Migration on Traditional Environmental Knowledge Systems
Research location: Tamil Nadu, India
“I consider myself a farmer first before anything else. The lenses I look through now are influenced by my farming experience.” - Sridharan Sethuratnam
Sridharan Sethuratnam studied agricultural engineering at a good university. But when his degree was put to the test in the paddy fields of Tamil Nadu, the southern Indian state where he grew up, he was in for a surprise.
After earning an undergraduate degree in 1983 from Tamil Nadu Agricultural University in Coimbatore, he worked for six years as a manager on a large tea plantation. He was soon well versed in tea types, from the premium “leaf grades” that were sent to the London Tea Auction, to the “dust grades” destined for tea bags and the domestic market.
But his steepest learning curve began in 1993, when he started running a rice farm in Tamil Nadu’s fertile Tanjore delta.
“That’s where I put my education to use – and found that it was not much use,” he says. “If in any part of my life I have learned from my failures, it was in that five years as a farmer.”
The agriculture taught in Indian agricultural universities was based on the industrial farming model of the American Midwest, he says. “We learned nothing about traditional Indian agriculture, which was supposed to be inefficient. Yields were low, and we needed to push those up.”
“I KNOW MORE THAN YOU”
“When you go into farming, you realize how difficult it is,” Sethuratnam says. “It is not an easy profession. I took a beating for two years.”
He describes his initial attitude to the villagers he employed on the rice farm as: “I’ve had this education, and I know more than you.” So he didn’t listen when they advised him to plant the rice seedlings at least 30 cm apart. The agricultural department had told him to boost yields by placing the seedlings at 15 cm intervals.
“But a local guy said: ‘Don’t do that, because if you’re hit by a pest, it will spread fast.’ And that’s exactly what happened. We had huge pest damage.”
The villagers also told him when not to plant at all. “This month is not right,” they warned. “There may be too much rain.” But he went ahead, and lost more than seven hectares of paddy to flooding. “I learned from the villagers that there’s only so much that you can control,” he says.
“My education had told me that traditional practices were full of myths and superstitions, but I learned that they contained a lot of common sense. The farmers taught me to see, to observe, to be curious, and to value their opinions.”
TWO MIGRATIONS
In 1999, Sethuratnam moved with his wife and two daughters to Brunei, where he worked as a soil conservationist. They embarked on another new chapter in 2004, when they emigrated to Canada. “I knew there was a lot of farming in Canada, and I hoped that maybe I could get into a farm there,” he says.
He landed in a Toronto suburb, living with his family in a basement apartment and working in warehouses. Within 18 months, however, he was able to quit a job assembling vacuum cleaners to enter a Master of Science program at the University of Guelph that combined his interests in agriculture and the environment.
To supplement student loans, he worked as a research assistant for a professor who was investigating what would motivate farmers in southern Ontario watersheds to accept environmentally beneficial management practices. “The problems farmers face in India and Canada are quite similar,” says Sethuratnam, who feels great empathy for Canadian farmers.
As his degree neared completion, he applied for an internship with the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). “There aren’t many internships where there isn’t an age limit, but IDRC doesn’t have one,” he says. He was 46 when he began a one-year position with IDRC’s Rural Poverty and Environment program in January 2007.
BACK TO INDIA
Sethuratnam’s research on how migration from rural areas is affecting traditional environmental knowledge in India took him back to Tamil Nadu. He focused on three agricultural villages and one fishing community, interviewing the families of villagers who had left to find work in towns and cities, or even abroad. What happens when a generation leaves a village? Will oral traditions that have long helped to guide the management of natural resources be lost forever?
He arrived in his study area on a hot April afternoon, at the height of the south Indian summer. Over the next four months, he interviewed more than 400 migrants’ relatives, and also spoke at length with 17 village elders. These “key informants” – who were at least 65 years old and included a couple of centenarians – were particularly rich sources of information on traditional agricultural practices and other aspects of village life. “Once they started talking, it was difficult to stop them,” he says.
PULL FACTORS
Migration is not a new phenomenon in this part of India. In the 1830s, villagers had begun leaving to work in British-owned tea plantations in Sri Lanka. Sethuratnam collected a wealth of data on the wide range of factors inducing migration today, including higher incomes and more regular work in cities.
He also identified improved access to higher education as an important contemporary “pull factor.” Colleges have mushroomed in India in the past decade, in towns as well as cities. “This has made it possible even for youth from villages to acquire a degree, after which they’re reluctant to go back to the village,” he says.
He was struck by the fact that 6% of migrants from his study area were women. “This small percentage, in a rural Indian context, is huge,” he explains. “These are very traditional areas, where women going out of the village is a no-no. But it is starting to happen.”
PUSH FACTORS
Sethuratnam had set out to study the impact of rural-urban migration on traditional natural resource management practices. But a month into his fieldwork, he discerned a cause-effect relationship that was the other way around.
“The breakdown of collective, community natural resource management systems was serving as a ‘push factor’ for migration,” he says.
He cites the example of villagers’ loss of control over an intricate network of small reservoirs called yeris, with which they had once efficiently harvested monsoon rainwater for use throughout the year. Maintenance of this ancient irrigation system was now the responsibility of the state government, and some of the reservoirs had become clogged with silt and invasive species.
The deterioration of traditional water-harvesting systems, and loss of knowledge within the community about how to maintain them, had led to reduced yields and incomes. This, in turn, contributed to villagers’ decisions to leave and try their luck elsewhere.
“Migration was, is, and will be a risk-spreading option for the population in these areas,” he says.
Sethuratnam plans to present his findings in a journal article, and hopes to go on to do a doctorate. Deep down he is a farmer, he says, but the IDRC internship has given him a taste for research that draws on his own background in agriculture. “The intellectual space and time I had over the past year was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for me,” he says.
Kelly Haggart is a senior writer at IDRC.
