Arid Zone Environmental Research Centre (AZERC) in URMUL Trust PARIVAR

The drought of 1987 compelled Urmul Trust to become concerned with issues of natural resources and their management. This concern was reflected in the growing range of activities like the fodder farms and the fodder bank, the Nahar Yatra, farmers' organizations, and work with animal breeders. AZERC was also an outcome of the same concern, an attempt to tie together all these different efforts in the same direction.

The rationale behind AZERC is to facilitate movements in this direction, and hence it can be thought of as a road building organization, a sort of PWD. The destination of the road is freedom from, or protection against the three types of _kal_, i.e. security of food, fodder, and water. The foundation of the road is the belief that to achieve this triple security it can never be enough to bring from elsewhere exotic species, techniques, or ideas. The road to food, fodder, and water security for all can only be built on the bedrock of values and systems that have existed here earlier, of caring and cooperating to ensure the survival with dignity of the entire family of living beings. And in Western Rajasthan there is a solid layer of human thoughtfulness which has evolved to make up for nature's niggardliness.

AZERC's task is not to run away into a past of dubious validity from an insufficiently understood present, or to extol the virtues of the particular, the regional, at the expense of the universal, however. It is rather to understand the natural and the socio-cultural environment of Rajasthan in its relationship to the past, and to describe those of its features which would be of wider interest, not just for their own sake, but to facilitate attempts to set up or revive systems of food - fodder - water security.

(AZERC team: Kashyap Mankodi, Rahul Ghai; Advisory Committee: Chetan Ram, Arvind Ojha, V K Madhavan, Sanjoy Ghose, Diba Siddiqui)
(Note for translation into Hindi, to be circulated within the Urmul Parivar by 1 September 1994)

Photo Credits Rajesh Vora