On Sunday, after the others left for Rishikesh, I was chatting with a friend from college. He’d heard about Grassroutes (I’ll find out how!) and was quite impressed with the opportunity the whole Grassroutes experience offered.
Out of the blue he asked me if I was interested in a trip in an ambulance.
He was referring to the 108 service that the EMRI (Emergency Medicine Research Institute) (www.emri.in) runs across 10 states in India. “The impact they’ve had in Uttarakhand is huge”, he said. He happened to know the person in …

After the others left, I spent sometime wondering what to do. I needed to reach Aarohi, another NGO on the 1st of July, and I’d three days to kill. I thought I’d go to Almora, but our host Anandji said I’d like Kausani.
I spent more than 2 nauseating hours in the back of three different jeeps to get there, but it was worth it. Kausani is a small quiet town with a narrow street lined by shops, many hotels and loads of greenery. I was staying in a nice …

“Hum pahadi log hai”, says bua-ji as she beats her chest with her fists when talking about the difficulties of mountain communities.

It’s true, the pahadi log are a tough people. They survive no matter what.
The mountains offer few sources of income: agriculture and the army. However, as agriculture is weather-dependent, and as water is always an issue in the mountains, the occupation is hardly lucrative. There are stretches of land that are largely undeveloped due to forest area protected by the Forest Department. So no large industries are flourishing that …

We were at Majkhali yesterday, a village about an hour’s trek from Naini where we’re staying. The summer’s been particularly hard on these people. The infiltration well that Grassroots installed has dried up and about 20 families in the village now rely on a naula nearby. A naula is the traditional type of well in this area. It’s about 4-5 feet deep and taps the sub surface water. The naula we saw had nearly dried up as well. There was a trickle of water at the bottom, which allowed the …

Packing for a trip to the hills no longer involves a few mufflers and a pair of gloves. Make sure you also have a wide-brimmed sunhat, a good pair of shades and lots of sunscreen. Ranikhet, as we discovered upon arriving, is as hot and thirsty as its drier neighbours despite being a hill station. Its body of brown, sparsely covered Kumaon hills has wrapped  itself around the area such that no matter which way you turn, you feel the full strength of its presence.
Letting yourself be swept away by …

If biking is as exciting to you as it is to me (even if only on the backseat), I totally recommend taking the mountain route. The deserted roads, with a spectacular drop on one side and carved stone faces on the other,  the curves of the path as you follow the mountain’s contours, all heighten the bike experience. Of course, it helps to know that you’re at the seat of the himalayas and feeling incredibly lucky to be there too.
We biked up and down and down and up and all …

The restoration of the Gagas River Basin is one of the Pan Himalayan Grassroots’ long-term projects in the Kumaon Hills. The mighty Gagas River is drying up, carrying only a fraction of the water it used to. Women and children spend hours to bring a single bucket of water home. Thousand of lives have been affected, and things will only get worse.
Grassroots believes that deforestation is the main cause for the drying up of the Gagas; if the hills are reforested, the river will return to its former …

The SHGs have a two-pronged approach:
One: they form a microfinance group (I’m not sure if there’s a better word for this) where each member of the group contributes a certain amount every month. This forms the principal which they lend out to members of the group at a lower interest rate than banks. At the end of the financial year the interest collected on the loans is divided equally between the members of the group, but the principal remains untouched. This way, women don’t have to resort to money lenders …

The plan that day was to visit the Dausad gadhera, an area where Grassroots had made considerable progress.

After breakfast we got into a cab and picked up Girija at Kalika. Then we drove to the Dausad Manch office where we met one of the representative’s of the Manch. He told us a lot about the work that was done in the Dausad region and that though the Manch office was originally set up in association with Grassroots, it was now run entirely by the Manch.

We also visited a farmer, Lakshman …

The Pauls- Kalyan and Anita, founders of the Pan Himalayan Grasroots Development Foundation, were busy with prior commitments when we landed at Ranikhet, so we had to wait a few days before we could meet them. It was an anxious wait for us, as we’d heard a lot about them and were really dying to meet them. Day 4 was the day we finally did, and what a session it turned out to be!
Our conversations with the Pauls were free wheeling, and covered a host of topics. One thing …