that was a bit of a stunner all had was
a back Pig the doctors asked me to do a
few tests and a few more tests after
that
and finally the game with the grim news
they said you have a type of blood
cancer which is called multiple myeloma
it has no cure is definitely treatable
here I was wondering I lived a very
healthy lifestyle I don’t smoke I drink
moderately I could out track out walk
guys half my age and I did not
understand why me then I thought maybe
it was the food that hibernating or was
it due to the agricultural situation we
had in the country before we get to the
end of that mystery let me just give you
a quick a few facts about where as a as
a as a as a whole planet we are headed
there are more people alive today on
this earth than have ever been born
before now dovetail that in with the
figure that 40% of us are gonna be water
deficient 40% of us will have less water
than we have today by the year 2030 are
you aware that we waste 1.3 billion tons
that’s B billion tons of food every year
and that’s the current situation right
so that’s what’s gonna happen and
currently we waste that much we put so
many fungicides we D sides pesticides
anything with a side that we can think
of we put on our plants like Anna
University they’re an interesting study
a few years back Lucknow University did
a study and they found traces of
insecticide even in mother’s milk well
isn’t that the first thing we’ll give a
kit and let’s do a quick thing how many
of you love eating
Danya patinas the lettuces yummy tasty
stuff right you know where they’re all
grown so let’s give you example of deli
so all your TST Paula Daniel
all your green veggies they are grown
along the banks of the Yamuna you know
what else happened on the banks of the
Yamuna every day from about 5:30 to 8:30
in the morning exactly we are
biologically contaminating the very
thing we are eating and no matter how
much you wash it how much those are Oh
plants water that you wash it with it
doesn’t go it sticks so we had to start
growing ourselves we have AG but how do
we grow it because everything is
polluted today the land is polluted the
air is polluted the water is polluted
what do you do you have to find out some
sort of a system where you can grow your
own food the we thought will first eat
organic and this is real this is
something which we should all think
about so when we go in someone tells us
the Murata we’ve got an organic field
they were like wow this is great
he’s got three acres of organic field in
the middle of a complex and his
right-hand side someone is playing DDT
on his left-hand side someone is playing
mellow teen but our field is organic it
doesn’t work that way again we really
don’t have any organic fields close to
our cities we don’t have them but yet we
need to eat clean food now whenever we
face with such astounding odds my
thought always goes towards this very
grainy picture of the smiling little
girl so in in summers all your a lot of
kids sitting here since in winters the
boys wear double-breasted coats and the
girls were single breasted coats to
school unfortunately for this girl he
had a brother who was 5 as elder to her
me and I would wear my double breasted
clothes to school and my mother you know
times were hard those were tough days
for everybody and my mother just could
not bear to throw in my old jackets I
had no cousins what she would do is she
would use the only things at her
disposal so she would use all her
ingenuity she would use a cheap local
tailor and would capitalize on the
complete lack of fashion sense that my
sister had absolutely zero and she would
cut my blazer up and make it into a
single breasted jacket for her this was
the first memory I have
of making things work and we made things
work well you know we’re standing in
line to buy tickets ordering food
getting a passport getting a electricity
connection we just made things work it
just happened
later on we realized or I realized that
this ingenuity in action Punjabis had a
name for it and we called it to Ghana
jacquard this ingenuity in action
basically has three pillars the first
one is it should be local and innovative
the second one it should be easy to
learn and operate and lastly it has to
cost passage to the rupee now that was
the situation we faced with we had a
life-changing situation with a card with
us and we decided that we had to do
something about it now back to growing
food so we’ve spoken about how we had an
issue we found to God now we got to grow
our own food how did we start that
length what we had no land you have no
land no what am I going to try on that
don’t worry
anyway now there’s the land was bad
whatever land was available was
virtually impossible to buy sky-high
prices
the air was polluted and water was in a
very very bad shape the ground water no
why don’t we just put up two of those
arrow plants I tell you what let’s put
ten arrow plants and we’ll just use
those our water for our following sorry
there’s a catcher for normal farming we
consume about 14 liters of water for one
head of lettuce 12 liters of water for
one tomato and 18 litres of water to
grow one head of broccoli to the max for
yourself Wow and if you eat in organic
food this is what happens to your body
what’s happened to our slide here but
you know it’s really really really not
possible to have that much clean water
produced on site and how do we store our
food we are growing in the fields we are
growing in the farms and we need to get
our food to buy B state we don’t eat in
those farms which are hundreds of
kilometer
how do we get our food from there to
where we are today how do we get food
here the very fact that the growing is
contaminated getting the food to us
everything at the end is not organic
it’s unhealthy and hat has no
nutritional value at all so this is
really really sad everybody just go eat
ice cream right so we have terrible food
growing even if we manage to grow it
well we transport it so badly there by
the time it gets here is just on
nutritious paper and doesn’t the doctor
tell us keep Pollack how have more this
have more green leafies have SOG but
what if we are poisoning ourselves by
having these very things and that didn’t
work out for us
you know whenever you’re faced with such
odds that just won’t make sense again my
thought goes back to how my mother made
those wonderful glazes for her we had to
do something after a while we realized
that probably the solution was lying in
our balcony whilst I was in Singapore I
picked up a hydroponic kit which grew
eight plants this was something I was
planning for my retirement as a fun
hobby which I would follow later but now
we come to the tragic bit
eight months if you can grow eight
plants why can’t you grow eight thousand
I mean why can’t you grow eight million
if you can grow eight launching your
balcony you can grow a lot right so why
couldn’t we do that so then we decided
okay we’re going to use hydroponics to
do the needful now before we go any
further let me quickly give you a
two-second intro on hydroponics I won’t
make this very boring hydroponics the
science of growing food without any soil
it’s really weird isn’t it so we think
about it we’re very in a school what are
the couple of things you need to grow
food you need air you need water you
need nutrition there’s unique Sun you
need light there’s no soil did you ever
need soil you didn’t but get we grow in
soil because it was the easiest thing to
do and was something we were doing for
centuries so we said we are going to
grow high-tech we are grown grow without
soil and we want to use this technology
of hydroponics
but it is very easy to grow hydroponics
no it is because if you if you look at
it the first example of large-scale
hydroponic system was the Hanging
Gardens of Babylon which was one of the
seven wonders of the old world now for
us to grow hydroponically you need three
components you need a net what firstly
you need a container we were starting we
use in the Heaton’s
paintings we used all sorts of stuff to
grow stuff in I mean people are getting
scared when we’re going to the houses
and saying sir after garage McCree think
it dummy and they’re like wondering
presenting what these guys are doing
collecting all a data bus but we did
that we wanted to make this this science
really really inexpensive now when he
decided to grow large-scale the first
thing I did was I went to one of these
websites and I saw exactly how much it
costs to import these equipments into
India and I said you know I’ll just
import everything and we’ll grow
everything at home that decision lasted
for about 20 minutes because that’s the
time it takes to open the laptop type
alibaba.com and try figuring out what
the prices are they are so expensive so
I want to eat healthy but even I’m not
gonna eat a 80 to be tomato right it
just doesn’t make sense so we’ve got to
get the cost down we’ve gotta do
something intelligent to get the cost
down and sometimes intelligence and
beauty cannot don’t go hand in hand so
we’ll talk about that so we started with
growing with paintings those paint
buckets that he modified to grow
tomatoes in we made our own versions of
Dutch buckets this is another way to
make a bucket we made our own Indian
version of Dutch buckets we fabricated
everything ourselves and in the end I
think we said that we’re not gonna do
all this because it’s going to be very
difficult for you to get at the heat in
so we stuck to this decided from food
grade PVC pipes and you know why food
great this is in this really cool
because it has no patent we have no
patent there is no intellectual property
we are probably the worst salesman in
the world because we are trying to tell
you that we don’t want to patent any of
this it doesn’t make sense these are all
open source you can do it and I can do
it it’s a pipe with holes in it and we
watch so we put these designs on our
website so that everyone can grow just
by
being what we’ve done we this is the PVC
pipe that we are talking about and we
started with growing in this and in the
end we felt that because this is four
widely available this is the right thing
to do our experiments in now these PVC
pipes are which hold the water and what
we do is we have these net cups and the
net cups are there to hold the plant and
inside the net cups you can use any
inert medium perlite vermiculite coco
peat lake abalzer many of them so like a
balls is basically expanded clear right
so before that let me show you these net
parts so the ones on the left the glass
is what we initially started using we
just went literally went and bought
really bad quality plastic glasses and
drilled holes in them and started using
these then when we started modernizing
it and set up a test farm we molded the
ones in the right which we do ourselves
this is the interesting part so the
thing on the old which you see are the
lacquer balls be imported from from
Europe those cost us a lot of money I
spent a huge part of my children’s
college fund on buying those after doing
that for a couple of couple of cycles we
realized that we had to get them cheap I
mean if you gonna grow these in a large
scale in India and present this as a
solution for the Indian farmer we have
to make them cheap so we called up Jacob
by individuals and said we need these
clay balls and he said there are round
clay balls and you send them to me and
he sent something like that which is
over there and I called him up and I
said you gotta buy this doesn’t look
round to me he said this around America
it doesn’t look round to me he said this
is round so I said I am Telling You he
says sir it cost only 20% of the last
one said hi it looks round to me now yes
yes looking round yeah so our idea was
to just bring things as cheaply just
bring down the cost so that every one of
us each and every one of us could afford
it
not just the two or three or ten percent
of our population but the bulk of our
populace which lives not here but far
away from these cities and we come to
the last bit the third part is how do
you feed your plants
you have to feed your plants what they
normally take from soil nutrients so we
feed them nutrients externally now the
nutrients are very very expensive
we again got imported nutrients from
Holland it didn’t work out it was
expensive
then finally we decided let’s do it or
not own let’s try it and we started
experimenting and finally I would say
now that we are more or less we make our
own details we save 70% of the money we
would have otherwise spent on this and
most importantly now we are making it in
bulk for our own use and for retail
people told us don’t don’t get into
nutrient business plant like alga here
karaage VOC or okay well the plant is
our my bedroom in the house right now
so I don’t care what we are still doing
it and it works so these nutrients that
we make at home on our own two of us
which have zero agricultural experience
between us we still manage to make it
work now before we end we’ll show you a
couple of things everyone grows lettuces
at home they grow cabbages they grow
parsley and kale which we are showing
here what we also grow we grow olive
trees we grow papaya trees we grow
mulberry trees we go on our debate we
grow avocados and we grow aloe vera and
we grow cactuses and we do this all on
our roof of our head of our home and and
we do it we do it keeping in mind that
I’m gonna live in that house for the
next thirty years so we don’t have to
stress the roof too much and yet we
manage to grow all this we have a home
composter so we made a zero waste system
where all the waste that comes from
these papaya are mulberry trees we put
it into the home composter put in 5 kgs
of earthworms and we get our own compost
brew which we again put in our nutrients
to make our food so we are trying to
create these very local very urban
low-cost systems in the end I think what
the kind of message we want to tell you
is that all of us we don’t have to eat
poisonous food there is no trade-off in
feeding and over expanding massive
population and clean ethical food they
are not exclusive
there is no premium on good food in this
country for our population there is no
premium
and you can do it and there’s a reason
guys there’s a reason why there’s a
cancer belt in Punjab there’s a reason
by the Cancer Express which goes from
southern Punjab all the way to Rajasthan
every day carrying patients with them
there’s a reason why the average height
of the Punjabi has reduced as you can
see here but it has reduced your on your
on year on year and I don’t know maybe
could it be our food and if it is
shouldn’t we do something about it so
eating bad food and wearing fancy
clothes is like standing on a weighing
scale and sucking your stomach in it
doesn’t it make might make you look good
it doesn’t do anything for the weight
right so let’s concentrate on things
which make a difference and let’s try putting a collective effort on it