Kisan Swaraj Yatra Reaches Rajghat: Thousands take pledge to reclaim sovereignty of our food and farming New Delhi, 11 December 2010: Smt Sonia Gandhi met with a delegation of Kisan Swaraj Yatra members today and assured them that she shares the concerns raised by the Yatra. Meanwhile, thousands of citizens from all across the country came together today at Rajghat, the memorial of the Father of the Nation Mahatma Gandhi, to proclaim their sovereign right over food and farming. The event marked the culmination of the 71-day long Kisan Swaraj Yatra which started from Sabarmati on Gandhi Jayanti, the 2nd of October. The Yatra is a pan-Indian outreach and mobilization effort to draw fresh attention of the nation to the continuing agrarian crisis in India. The Yatra, one of the biggest initiatives in the recent past to bring together people from all sections of society on the issue of sustainability in Indian farming, interacted with farmers and others in 100 districts of 20 states that it cut across in the last 70 days. There were public meetings, farmer interactions, field visits and citizen forums in 100 districts as part of the Yatra, through which a dialogue was struck with nearly twenty five thousand people, including farmers, consumers, agriculture scientists, political parties and governments. The Yatra was organized by ASHA (Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture), a newly formed loose network of hundreds of organizations across the country. More...

Contact: Kiran Vissa 09701705743, Nayani Nasa 09999778674; 9.30am: Yatris and participants will pay respects at the Gandhi Samadhi, Raj Ghat Day’s events at the Gandhi... Read More

10.30 am onwards: Farmers’ Meeting in Khori campus of SCRIA, Rewari district of Haryana Contact: Sunderlal, 09996022534 05.00 pm: Public meeting in Nityanand School, Rohtak... Read More

We spent the night in the SCRIA campus in Khori village, Rewari district, Haryana. It was a wonderfully-maintained campus, probably one of those very rare NGO campuses where order and discipline rules! It was a beautiful winter morning that we woke up to, pretty yellow fields of mustard greeting us in the morning mist. We were told that breakfast would be served at 9.15 am and believe it or not, we could set our clocks to the time when it was actually served, to the second! No plastic cups or plates in sight and it was a great relief! We had a quick round of discussions in the bus, using the public address system within the mike. Each Yatri shared with the others their 3 main “take-aways” from the entire Yatra - what did they learn, what did they find striking, what is the strongest impression that they are carrying right now and so on. It was a very efficient forty minutes in which this was done. A separate blog has to carry the gist of what was said during those forty minutes, of course. More...