 The
Need In India
The Area in India served by Garden Harvest
is the Dakshin Dinajpur District of West Bengal.
an area of 5887 sq. kilometers that includes Calcutta and the area to
that city's north. Countries that share international boundaries
with West Bengal include Bhutan, Bangladesh and Nepal
Click here for a map of the area.
The population is extremely poor, the
average per annual per capita income being less than $200.
Garden Harvest is operating in the areas
which are mainly dependent on agriculture. The target groups are the poor and marginalized sections
of the population. Besides agriculture, people in this area depend for
their livelihood on informal occupations, such as daily wage laborers, petty vendors selling
vegetables etc., service providers, as in pulling a rikshaw or van. The income
from such hard work is
hardly enough to keep body and soul together.
The Diet of the local population:
The
diet consists of one very frugal meal a day, it consists of
rice/boiled potato and vegetables particularly during the winter
when vegetables are cheaper, occasionally their meals are
supplemented by fish or eggs, which of course is once in a blue
moon.
Housing:
Residents live
in thatched huts which consist of just one multipurpose room
without any kind of provisions for a kitchen nor any electricity nor
running water.
Agriculture:
Most of the
families in the area of operation hold a small patch of arable land.
Agriculture is rain fed. If water is available they can produce rice
paddy, wheat and mustard.
Education:
The economic
condition of local residents is so grim that many cannot afford
to send their children to school. The majority of their children
have to work with their parents to act as helping hands rather than
attend school. In a village like Vikahar approximately more than 350
children are unable to go to school due to lack of food and dress.
This fact has been further aggravated by the phenomenon of seasonal
migration. In the lean months the able bodied persons migrate to
other cities or districts in search of jobs.
 Therefore, the best option will be to
provide these marginalized families, which again constitutes the
majority in the area, with cow/goat/domestic poultry. This support will enable them to utilize the animal
resources to fetch income as well as to ensure nutrition to the
family members. So, animal husbandry will go a long way to
supplement the income of the marginalized population in the area. It
may also be mentioned that the villagers are more or less adept in
animal rearing, but of course they need bit of exposure by way of
training so that they can derived optimum output from the animal
resources.
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