◊ By Kavitha Kuruganti

There are so many things that one wants to say – to say to dear Debjeet, in fact, which is not possible any more.

As many of you know by now, he succumbed to Covid-19 on May 15 (at just 53 years of age). He died of cardiac arrest after being on a ventilator in a Bhubaneswar hospital for many days.

He tested Covid positive on April 26, had to be admitted to the Christian Hospital in Bissam Cuttack on May 1, and had to be moved to Bhubaneswar from there on May 4.

Every day of this hospitalisation, hopes were swinging back and forth as his condition kept changing and there were desperate prayers from many, many of us that he would somehow overcome and recover.

There were many people in Odisha and elsewhere who ran around to bring medicines or do other things, over the last fortnight, to somehow help Debjeet survive (several Odisha and even Andhra Pradesh bureaucrats stepped in too). But that was not to be, unfortunately.

I have known Debjeet for about 18 years, since 2004. And have kept discovering and re-discovering him over the years.

He would read and quote from many different kinds of books. He was well-versed with many sectors of the development world – adivasi rights, women’s rights, health and nutrition, organic farming, forestry, ethno-architecture, yoga and Ayurveda.

He was constantly learning from adivasi communities and many others around the country.

What one can say about Debjeet is that he was “self-made”. When he had to leave an NGO where he was working to start his own work, initially, as a project of DRCSC (Development Research Communication and Services Centre) in Bengal, with Ardhendu Chatterjee as his guru orienting him to integrated farming systems, and later as a separate NGO called Living Farms, he faced many active obstacles placed in his way.

The NGO world seems to have several such ugly stories unfortunately for all of us when a young person chooses to find her/his own feet.

Debjeet, the sensitive person that he was, would get affected by it every now and then, but continued resolutely and calmly enough on his path.

He and I started working together in 2004 against the onslaught of GM crops and foods in India. And I must add that a fair amount of credit for the Odisha government’s policies on GMOs goes to Debjeet Sarangi.

When he approached me to join the Board of Trustees of Living Farms at inception, I considered it my privilege to do so and stayed on till 2020. And what a learning experience it was!

Over the years, his and Living Farms’ work turned out to be pioneering, and gave me immense opportunities to get an insight into new worldviews, new perspectives and new ethos.

It was that of Debjeet, and that of the adivasi communities that he worked with, and that of people like Debal Deb (of Basudha Farm). I can only say that I don’t have enough wisdom in me to have imbibed all those values and convert my own life drastically to follow this ethos.

But Debjeet attempted to, to the maximum extent possible. He also helped Debal Deb in his journey of reviving his work on different fronts with the adivasis of Odisha, moving one part of Debal da’s work out of Bengal.

What followed was the building of an organisation that became a source of inspiration and support to many people – this includes civil society activists, grassroots workers, researchers, students, film makers, government bureaucrats, philanthropists, donor organisations, artists, writers, media representatives and several others.

In ASHA (Alliance for Sustainable & Holistic Agriculture), he helped open our worlds to how “development perspectives” towards adivasi communities could, and need to be re-shaped.

Through Living Farms, he established some very creative and innovative interventions, with the right perspectives and that too at scale, with measured noteworthy impact!

And the work was deeply political, not of the FCRA-fearing kind, but of a constructive, by-itself-structure-altering kind.

Indigenous Communities’ Self Determination, Forest Rights, Food Sovereignty, Seed Sovereignty, Plurality of Knowledge Systems, Local Autonomy, Gender Equality, Communitarian Ethos, Circular Local ‘Economies’, Community Education and Healthcare, Community Ownership and Control over Natural Resources and so on – in effect, Swaraj.

That too of the “Kutumb” and “Samaj” kind of the Kondhs, deeply egalitarian and communitarian. Debjeet’s work encompassed all of these.

He started straddling an extremely challenging world of working along with communities that were attempting to strike the right balance between innate views, values, norms and knowledge, and external influences, to preserve their own identity, survival, dignity, knowledge and ethos.

This also meant ways of bridging the widening gap between older and younger generations in these communities. The biggest and the most challenging equilibrium to be struck was between the interfaces of the non-monetised worlds of adivasis in the area and the monetised, exploitative, extractive economies all around them.

This meant creating an organisation that did not have staff members carrying a “know-all” attitude and approach into their work. This meant creating an organisation that had a diverse mix of local people from the Kondh community and “professionals from outside”.

This also meant sometimes, using modern science and knowledge to understand and explore the local practices and wisdom, to support the same.

This meant, especially in the realm of malnutrition that Debjeet and Living Farms sought to address, a unique combination of multiple strategies that include biodiverse ecological agricultural pathways, forest food pathways, nutritious kitchen gardens, as well as, securing state-based entitlements and services for basic healthcare, and maternal and child healthcare.

Living Farms demonstrated to the world how intensification of sustainable “dongar chassi” (upland farming, which is often times podu or shifting) can lead to better diets for the communities.

Along with Debal da, revival of desi paddy varieties began, apart from conservation by work being initiated in Koraput.

Living Farms brought forth, through numerous research outputs, the rich wealth of uncultivated forest foods, and how forestry approaches have to adopt forests-as-food-producing-habitats as a key perspective.

Uncultivated forest foods were showcased by Living Farms in exhibits in Delhi, generating a very positive interest from all around.

Through every Kisan Swaraj Sammelan, we in ASHA would attempt to expose the world to these foods too. Locally also, re-popularising forest foods and foraging for the same (including by adivasi children back from residential schools) was taken up.

Living Farms initiated and sustained a very unique rural organic market, by supporting organic producers to find sensitive customers for their produce in places like Bissam Cuttack and Muniguda. In fact, this evolved further into a ‘healthy tiffin’ pushcart in Muniguda main road in the mornings, popularising millet based recipes.

The scale of work that Living Farms attempted with kitchen gardens as a key approach to nutrition-related outcomes was very impressive. A project supported by APPI (Azim Premji Philanthropic Initiatives) saw a sudden scaling up of Living Farms work from around 220 villages to 2200 villages, with staff numbers swelling from around 35 members to 200 almost overnight!

This was of course a huge challenge for any organisation. What is more challenging is a scale down of an organisation, after the proof of concept is squarely established (in this case, through a rigorous third party impact assessment) back to about 35 staff members, and 500 villages. This is a feat very few NGOs would manage successfully.

Living Farms’ ability to strike a very good equilibrium with governments is worth noting here (this is at least my subjective view on this subject!).

One would find that while some of the most talked about civil society groups in India had shunned engagement with governments, while most others have chosen to become ‘service providers’ in good or bad government schemes and programmes in the hope of earning some NGO-based livelihood, Living Farms has a unique kind of engagement, and has successfully influenced Odisha and Chhattisgarh governments in several interventions.

I remember Debjeet, Jyoti and a staff member personally cooking and feeding many millet-based recipes to all participants including senior state government officials, when the Odisha Millets Mission was being incubated by RRA (Revitalising Rainfed Agriculture) Network along with NCDS.

Debjeet’s dream project was to do with adivasi youth re-discovering their communities’ strength and skills, and collectivising themselves, through the Green College.

In the recent past, work was initiated to understand more deeply the values and principles that guide Kondh architecture and habitations, apart from technical aspects of the same. Debjeet also wanted to initiate education interventions that will counter the mainstream approach to adivasi children’s education. “Those concentration camps” is what he would call residential schools and large colleges that seek to ‘mainstream’ adivasi children.

To most youngsters who come to visit Living Farms and who want to take up some research projects, he would introduce them to concepts of alternate research methodologies so that indigenous communities themselves can take up appropriate and sensitive research or documentation.

While that was all about Living Farms’ work led by the vision that Debjeet held, I need to share with the world a few things about Debjeet himself.

The best-fitting description that I can think of is that he was a mindful being always – a very humble, gentle, compassionate, generous and sensitive visionary. No harsh words. Gentle humour. A certain perplexed concern when he came across negative behaviour.

He might be amongst those rare NGO chief functionaries, who opted for a lower salary than the ‘second line’ functionaries in the organisation when required.

One of those rare people, who chose to hand over the Board functions and powers trustingly and willingly to a whole set of non-founders, so that he could take up an executive role.

Someone who found ways of weaving in support, even as he and Living Farms drew from them, for researchers, writers and activists across India. Someone who sought and got support and companionship from several inspirational personalities of India Little, warm gestures were a hallmark – I am grateful to him for sending me a copy of Amrutara Santana, the Gopinath Mohanty novel set in the Kondh community, an epic, which is a beautiful narrative of the Kondh world in a fictional setting.

Each and every time ASHA put out a fund-raising appeal for any of its activities, I would get a message within minutes from Debjeet about his donation to the same. He was always giving.

I know that he would support individuals within the salary he was drawing, even as he contributed back to the organisation itself. He, Jyoti and Khushi maintained a very humble and simple lifestyle.

In Muniguda, where he spent most of his time in the past several years, if you come down from the guest room early in the mornings, you would find Debjeet playing some hindustani music softly at work at 5.30 am.

He would insist on coming with me to the Muniguda railway station each time I had to catch a train, at the unearthly hour of 2.45am. And he is one of those rare men in my world, who would check whether I have reached my destination safely (not that I needed that, but this is just to say that he was sensitive and conscious about the lack of safety for women).

Very often, we tend to forget to mention/recognise the support and contribution of the spouse. Jyoti and he were colleagues in an NGO before they got married. She is sensitive and supportive, and also skilled and knowledgeable in the world that Debjeet straddled. She would often help in prompt translation of material into odia.

There are several unfulfilled dreams of Debjeet that one is reminded of. And maybe I am not even mentioning them adequately here: Rebuilding and reviving the vernacular. Liberating children of indigenous communities from an education system that is alienating and humiliating them towards their own society. Reviving barter markets in the area, but one that is attuned to nutrition – “barter for nutrition”, a bridge between tallia (foothill) kondhs and Dongrias. Helping adivasi youth finding their own agency and voice. Further development of Green College. Reviving the traditional housing ethos and style of the kondhs. Documentation of local folklores…

The last time I met Debjeet in person was when Kapil Shah (of Jatan Trust), Anantha Sayanan (Safe Food and Sustainable Agriculture activist) and I visited Muniguda in early February 2020, to create a plan to push back the huge inroads that glyphosate and genetically modified cotton were making into the lives and environment of the kondh community.

The new world of corona pandemic and lockdowns became the new normal thereafter.

I am deeply grateful to Debjeet for the privilege he provided me to be a small part of his life’s journey, for the wonderful and warm care he extended during and beyond the several Muniguda and Bhubaneswar visits, for his gentle teaching and orientation of folks like me to newer worlds, and for the mindful and meaningful life he lived.

He went away too young and too early.

I hope that many people will come together to fulfil Debjeet’s unfinished dreams, to carry forward his vision.

I write this along with the humble acknowledgement that this is greatly more challenging now, in his absence.

But attempt, we must.

Go onward gently, as you would, Debjeet.

Kavitha Kuruganti is a social activist involved with sustainable farm livelihoods and farmers’ rights. She is with Alliance for Sustainable & Holistic Agriculture (ASHA), a nation-wide alliance of organisations collectively working towards  farm livelihoods.