Amarkanan Rural Socio Environmental Welfare Society
A traditional conservation group for sustainable biodiversity and livelihood

Activities

Conservation of environment and natural resources work

Environment conservation is the top most priority of the society. Men survival totally depends upon the survival of the nature. Sustainable biodiversity is interrelated with the sustainable livelihood, thus we are working on protection of our surrounding environment & biodiversity. Conservation and restoration work has been followed by both In-situ and Ex-situ conservation type. Our society has been successfully implemented traditional rice and vegetables cultivation programme and conserving more than 300 traditional rice varieties into our farm field and also running a field seed bank. This year our society has been awarded “Plant Genome Saviour Community Award-2015-16” by the Protection of Plant Variety & Farers Right Authority (PPV&FRA), Department of Agriculture, Cooperation & Farmers Welfare, Ministry of Agriculture, Govt. of India, for the outstanding contribution of collection and conservation of indigenous crop varieties of Bengal. Hon’ble Union minister of Agriculture and farmers welfare Sri Narendra Singh Tomar presented the award on 22^nd October, 2019 at Dr. B.P. Pal Auditorium, ICAR-IARI, Pusa campus, New Delhi. Currently we are running a project regarding the formation of field seed bank of traditional rice varieties is association with West Bengal Biodiversity Board, Govt. of West Bengal.

Establishment of community seed bank

Landraces are disappearing very fast from the agricultural fields of Bengal due to many reasons, and we should protect and restore these varieties for sustainable agriculture. Lack of seeds of traditional varieties is a major constraint for the cultivation and conservation of agrobiodiversity of this area. Thus for the smooth availability of traditional varieties we have established a community seed bank at the ARSW Society which help for the conservation and restoration of agrobiodiversity of Bankura district as well as all West Bengal, and improvement of existing varieties. We have been distributing many rice seed sample to the marginal farmers, various academic and research institute free of cost from the seed bank for the restoration and varietal improvement from last five years.

Farmer’s awareness regarding agrobiodiversity conservation programme

West Bengal has a rich sources of natural resources and agrobiodiversity. Due to present changing climatic condition and environmental pollution the natural resources and biodiversity is gradually decreasing. Agriculture is the main source of livelihood of this region and for the sustainable livelihood, sustainable biodiversity is necessary. Keeping this situation in mind our society has been working on spreading awareness for conservation of nature and natural resources. We are specially organise awareness camp on conservation of agrobiodiversity of our region making farmers aware about the importance of conserve farmers varieties of rice, pulses and other vegetables currently existing in our region. We are also aware about the application of green manure as much as possible at the farmers’ fields for the protection of soil health and stop soil pollution. So far we have visited 14 different villages mainly predominating tribal community and aware about the necessity of conservation of agrobiodiversity which is protected by their ancient generation.

Cloth distribution

We have organise winter cloth (blanket) distribution programme to the poor people of Ranbahal village PO-Amarkanan, Dist-Bnakura, West Bengal. We distributed blankets among the poor villagers of Ranbahal in winter season.

Child education

We are working on education of poor village students. The nursery and primary education has been adversely hampered for the COVID-19 pandemic in the year of 2020 and 2021 ongoing. We are providing free nursery and upper primary level coaching to the childrens belonging to the economically weaker section. We are planning to developed a library for the school going children of economically weaker section of Ranbahal village of Bankura district.

Celebration of important days

We have been celebrating various important days, birthday of great man of this country in order to uplift the morality the people of the locality especially for the school going children from the beginning of our journey. We also celebrating various environment related days, like world environment day, International biodiversity day for creation awareness for the environment, climate change and importance of the conservation of our local biodiversity to the people as well as the school children.

Roadside plantation

We have started plantation and nurturing trees from this year and planted big shadow plants on roadside, pond bank etc. to protect soil erosion and improvement of the our environment.

Covid-19 relief camp

We are running a Covid-19 relief camp from May-2020 onward. Poor and marginal people were adversely affected in this pandemic. Prolong lockdown makes their livelihood more and more vulnerable day by day. We provide dry food, daily needs to the poor and handicapped people of Ranbahal village from time to time.

Mainstreaming of folk rice varieties

So many folk rice varieties consist of several important nutraceutical characteristics. we are trying to mainstreaming these varieties into the local market. Studies on nutritional profiling of more than 100 folk rice varieties has been conducted by the ARSW Society for searching the such potentiality.