Students get lessons in farming

Chittaranjan Tembhekar & Anahita Mukherji I TNN

Mumbai: Caught in the concrete tangle of urban life, city kids can well be forgiven for supposing that milk comes out of tetrapacks and wheat from plastic pouches. In a bid to let the children experience the thrill of growing their own food, a handful of schools have put farming on the curriculum.

Since the onset of the monsoon this year, 85 Std III students at Kharghar’s Vishwajyot High School have been tilling the earth at a farm in Owe Camp village, a few kilometres from their school.

In addition to farming, the children have learnt the art of catching crabs, handling farm animals and climbing trees from the kids at the neighbouring gram panchayat school, who often join their parents on the farm. Vishwajyot has adopted the gram panchayat school so that children from both institutions
get a chance to interact with each other.

“Our students will spend four periods a week farming. Not only will they sow the paddy, but they will even shift the crop to a safer place once it starts growing and will harvest it after four months, at the end of the crop season,’’ said Sushama Dhumal, principal of Vishwajyot.

Smruti Koppikar, a parent of a Std V student at Tridha, a Vile Parle school that follows the Rudolf Steiner method of education, can still recall the expression on her daughter’s face when she came home from school one daywith a packet of rice that she had helped to grow on a farm on the outskirts of Mumbai. “The look on her face was priceless,’’ said Koppikar. Tridha has made farming compulsory for Stds III and IV.

“In the city, we all live in boxes made of cement, but in the village we get to work with soil, mud and grow things ourselves,’’ said Koppikar’s daughter Ananya, recalling her experiences on the farm. Ananya especially loved her stint on a farm on the outskirts of Panvel when she was in Std III, where a farmer showed the kids how he used a bullock to turn the soil over, and then got the children to take the bullock around one by one. In Std IV, Ananya spent time on a farm in Titwala where she helped grow her own wheat and rice.

“On a farm, children get hands-on experience of what it’s like to work with the soil, something that cannot be packed into the pages of a textbook,’’ says Koppikar.

While most schools get kids to troop down to the nearest farm, some, like Sahyadri, a school run by the Krishnamurti Foundation, have their own plot of land on campus that children can cultivate.

Farming is an activity that Sahyadri—a school set up on Tiwai Hill, 800 m above sea level, some distance from the Pune Nashik highway— has introduced for kids in Std VII. “It’s an experience that will stay with them throughout their lives,’’ says Amresh Kumar, the school principal.