Reading the excellent and insightful review by Dr Ardeshir B. Damania of Feroze Varun Gandhi’s (pictured) book A Rural
Manifesto: Realizing India’s Future Through Her Villages ("Future of farming,” Books, Parsiana, November 7-20, 2019) has prompted me to order the book. I was especially interested in his references to Israel’s water management and the soil salinity in Iran which is affecting cultivation.
I have also copied this mail to Dr Rca Godbole, a molecular biologist who studied at Freiburg, Germany. She is a major shareholder in and scientific adviser to SaliCrop in Tel Aviv, an Israeli start-up which has developed seed treatment that enables crops to do well in saline conditions. SaliCrop uses abiotic (not involving or produced by organisms) stressing of seeds so that they can perform in saline soils. Test runs show very promising results in fields near Panvel, and in Israel.
I am sure putting Damania in touch with her could prove beneficial, especially if the author Gandhi, in his capacity as member of parliament, were to take up the SaliCrop experiments in order to make rural India resilient.
In Israel, when it rains, people put buckets on their rooftops to collect the water. By law, the bucket is theirs, the water is not. It is poured into a common well or pool.