WUNRN
INDIA - FRUIT TREES VILLAGE PROJECT
SAVES GIRLS' LIVES
"This
is our way of meeting the challenges of dowry, global warming and female
foeticide. There has not been a single incident yet of female foeticide or
dowry death in our village," Singh says.
In
In Dharhara
village,
And this practice
is paying off.
Nikah Kumari, 19,
is all set to get married in early June. The would-be groom is a state school
teacher chosen by her father, Subhas Singh.
Mr Singh is a
small-scale farmer with a meagre income, but he is not worried about the high
expenses needed for the marriage ceremony.
For, in keeping
with the village tradition, he had planted 10 mango trees the day Nikah was
born.
The girl - and the
trees - were nurtured over the years and today both are grown up.
Dowry deaths
"Today that
day has come for which we had planted the trees. We've sold off the fruits of
the trees for three years in advance and got the money to pay for my daughter's
wedding," Mr Singh told the BBC.
"The trees are
our fixed deposits," he said.
In
The state is also
infamous for the maximum number of dowry deaths in the country.
But the mango trees
have freed Nikah's parents of undue worries. And their story is not unique in
Dharhara village.
With a population
of a little over 7,000, the village has more than 100,000 fully grown trees,
mostly of mango and lychee.
From a distance,
the village looks like a forest or a dense green patch amidst the parched and
arid cluster of villages in the area.
'Great value'
And most residents
can be spotted sitting in the cool orchards outside their homes.
"Now, we've
stopped doing traditional farming of wheat and paddy. We plant as many trees as
we can since they are more profitable and dependable," said villager Shyam
Sunder Singh.
Mr Singh paid for
the weddings of his three daughters after selling fruits of trees he had
planted at the time of their birth.
"One
medium-size mango orchard is valued at around 200,000 rupees ($4,245; £2,900)
every season. These trees have great commercial value and they are a big
support for us at the time of our daughter's marriage," he says.
The villagers say
they save a part of the money earned through the sale of fruits every year in a
bank account opened in their daughter's name.
The tree-planting
has been going on in the village for generations now.
"We heard
about it from our fathers and they from their fathers. It has been in the
family and the village from ages," says Subhendu Kumar Singh, a school
teacher.
"This is our
way of meeting the challenges of dowry, global warming and female foeticide.
There has not been a single incident yet of female foeticide or dowry death in
our village," he says.
His cousin, Shankar
Singh, planted 30 trees at the time of his daughter Sneha Surabhi's birth.
Sneha, four, is
aware that her father has planted trees in her name; the child says she
regularly waters the saplings.
As yet she doesn't
know what dowry is, and says the trees will bear fruits for her "to
eat".
The village's
oldest resident, Shatrughan Prasad Singh, 86, has planted around 500 mango and
lychee trees in his 25 acres of land.
His
grand-daughters, Nishi and Ruchi, are confident the trees mean their family
will have no problem paying for their weddings.
"The whole
world should emulate us and plant more trees," says their father Prabhu
Dayal Singh.
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