#06 - On travelling to report climate change, with Vaishnavi Rathore

Vaishnavi Rathore is an environmental journalist at Scroll.in, whose work at The Bastion also won her the Prem Bhatia Memorial Trust's Award. Her work has taken her all over the country, but it largely focuses on communities impacted by climate change and environmental crises.

MM: As an environmental journalist, you’ve done a lot of travelling through rural India. And I'm guessing there was a lot of field work in college as well, before that. How has that sort of fieldwork shifted your perspective?

VR: It’s made me a lot more open-minded for sure — the way that it has changed so many ways of looking at things, it’s insane. And the idea that there are people who live differently than you, very differently than you, it’s something you get to appreciate everyday.

MM: Can you give us a couple of examples?

VR: Sure. For instance, in January this year, I had to go to Rajasthan for a reporting trip, and I realised that there are skills that people have developed over the years in order to live with the harsh geography and climate of a place like Rajasthan. There’s very little water, right?

In the Thar desert area, you won’t find a lot of vegetables that can be grown and consumed. What you do find a lot are melons - different kinds of melons, watermelons, musk melons and other kinds of wild melons. One buzurg old man was telling me, that there used to be a big water problem before the Indira Gandhi Canal came — without enough water for themselves, how would they take care of their sheep and goats who are an important source of their livelihood? What they would do is feed the melons to the animals instead, because that has the water content and it grows easily. They kept the drinking water for themselves — and it’s so fascinating because in the city you never have to think of these things. I’m part Rajasthani, but I had no idea of what it took to survive in the desert.

And another thing that ends up becoming very stark — you end up learning a lot of things in classrooms, through your academics and Master’s and all that; and then you go on ground and you realise, jo bhi padha hai, uska kya point hai (whatever you have learned is pointless), because on the ground things are very different.

MM: Such as?

VR: One big example is, I wanted to get a sense of how people understand climate change. I have five days of reporting, but it took me two days just to figure out what language I should use — “Jal Vayu Parivartan”, which is technically used in official reports and everything, makes no sense on the ground. What does that even mean? On ground, the climate impact meant that sometimes people had to sow their seeds and harvest their crops a few weeks earlier, or a few weeks later, and the way people were describing these changes was “prakriti badal rahi hai” — nature is changing. In Himachal’s Lahaul district, they would use the term “global warming”, because the impact they experience is of lesser snowfall and rising temperatures.

In English, “prakriti badal rahi hai” would translate to “nature is changing”, which does not have the same impact as climate change. But people have their own vocabulary to understand these changes. And that, again, is such a shift from everything that you know and you've been taught and you're supposed to be using in your articles and research. And it's a constant learning/unlearning because you go on the ground, as you travel through different geography, everything changes.

MM: Two things are super important in your job, especially the fieldwork — the empathy, where you have to connect with people to connect their stories, but journalism itself requires objectivity and neutrality in a lot of people’s worldview. Is that something you think about before your field visits? How do you balance these?

VR: That’s a really good question, I don’t think I make that conscious effort to segregate it anymore. Recently I went to Orissa for a reporting trip, and the story I had to cover there was about coastal erosion, where the sea is literally “eating up villages” — there are three villages that have gone completely under the sea, because the sea level has risen so much, and these are the kinds of stories that I had to grapple with, and talk to people who have lost their homes because of it.

And I don’t think there is a way you can not be empathetic about it — I stopped consciously telling myself to stick to the objective questions, I stopped limiting myself to things like when their house went underwater, or kitne paise ka nuksaan hua. It’s not a conscious effort, but I’ve realised that the kind of questions I end up asking are also coming from a point of feeling something myself, at that point.

I’ll give you an example of the Rajasthan story that I was doing on lumpy skin disease, which killed numerous cows last year. Every family that I met had lost a lot of cows, and I was talking to one woman — and usually it’s women who say these things, haan — I was chatting to her and she was telling me they lost these many cows, and we were sitting in a cowshed , and she was pointing at the cows and telling me this one recovered, this one recovered — and literally my first question (it wasn’t a conscious question), my first thing was inme se aapki favourite kaunsi hai, which cow among these is your favourite?

Because I know she will have favourites, I know it! And she did! And she was like, my favourite was the one that we lost to lumpy. And her story became the lede of my story, it was the introduction, about this woman who lost her favourite cow to lumpy skin disease. And it was just a natural question that came up, I wasn’t thinking about empathy versus objectivity at that point.

And there’s another element here when you talk about objectivity in research. Every single person that I spoke to felt that the immunity of the cows was reducing because of the decreasing quality of the fodder, and there’s a whole story to that, but I could not find any academic research to back that up. No scientific research.

And if everyone has said it, kuch toh matlab hoga iska, there must be something to it right? And I was talking about this with my editor, and she was like — listen, there is no one who is more of an expert on fodder, than the people who handle it everyday. There’s going to be no scientist who would know it better than the people who deal with it. They've been doing this all their lives." So that idea of who an expert is, who I should be interviewing, what do you need to understand as “scientific knowledge”, and who the “experts” are is also a constant learning and unlearning through this process of talking to people,

travelling to new places.

A slight detour, but I thought you might enjoy this — one of the women I was hanging out with told me this folk tale that the village believed in, about a a temple that used to be in their village when I was in Odisha.

Once upon a time there was a king, and this goddess came to him in a dream, and she said if you want your village to be protected you must worship me. So the king agreed. He wanted to make a temple as grand as the one in Puri. So he asked the vaastu expert to come and see if is this this a good place, what direction we should place the temple and all, and apparently the vaastu expert said that if you want to make a temple here then make a smaller temple than that in Puri, because idhar bees saal mei paani aa jaega — in 20 years, this place will be underwater.

So ultimately that king made the temple; 2016 was the last time it was on ground, and now it’s under the water. When the people moved from their old village that went underwater in 2018 or so, they took the statues of the goddesses with them to their new village. I saw it on my visit.

And I was blown away when she told me this story. Folklore takes years to build up, what kind of knowledge must they have had where they knew coastal erosion is happening? Isn’t that crazy, that it’s taken us so long to come and write about it and give it a name, which is coastal erosion, but here people say, they would say ki samundar kha gaye — literally the sea is eating the village, a phenomenon that had somehow been able to find a way into folktales long ago.

MM: Wow, that's super interesting. Speaking of language — you mentioned Rajasthan, Orissa and Gujarat, and you’re going very deep into places that are not very Hindi speaking — how do you manage the language differences and learning on the fly, what does that look like?

VR: I try to have some sort of contact before I go down, someone I can coordinate with, because in places that I’ve never gone to, I don’t always know how it will be in terms of accommodation, food, safety, all those things. Usually I try to identify an NGO (non-government organisation, equivalent to a “non-profit”) that works in the area, and work with them. Especially for the kind of stories that I do, NGOs have a great spread and reach — you’ll probably not find any researcher or college or academician working to that extent in the field.

The NGOs are usually kind enough to send someone with me, so they can show

me around, and help in all the translation. Usually they are local community members, on my most recent reporting trip to Orissa I just hung out with these two women and it was so much fun! And this whole translation thing has also made me really question ki Hindi bol kaun raha hai hamare desh mein?

You go to even the most “Hindi-speaking” place, like Rajasthan, you would assume ki woh log bolte hai, but no, when you go away from the city centres, they will be more comfortable in their local dialect. Madhya Pradesh, bro! There was a different dialect in an Adivasi region — not a “slightly different” dialect, but it didn’t even sound like Hindi, I needed a translator for that.

So it was again a worldview change, ki I thought Hindi belts mei Hindi se kaam chal jaega — nahi hota hai aisa. I thought I’d be able to manage with Hindi in the Hindi-speaking belts, but it doesn’t work like that.

So it’s difficult to go through a translator, but I try to catch on to some of the local words. Like right now in Orissa, I learned that cyclone is called batya in Odiya, so I was asking questions using that word. And then there different crops — dhaan is generally rice, and using that word also helped me connect with people very quickly, because they realised that okay she does know something about us. In Rajasthan there was a particular word for winter rain — Mavath, so I would ask them about that specifically, using the local words. The words that I know I’ll be referring to baar-baar, repeatedly, those I pick up because I think it’s very important to make that connect, but obviously language is not something you can pick up in a day. For that I do rely on people.

MM: And how do you think about your personal safety, when you’re travelling in places where you don’t even know the language?

VR: Earlier I used to travel with pepper spray, I don’t anymore — luckily I’ve never had to use it. Also I feel like if I were in a situation like this, then I don’t know if I would actually go into my bag looking for pepper spray, I might hit the person first! That would be my first instinct…

My usual concern is the stay part, not the travel part. The travel in itself, I can’t prepare for it in any way, if I know I have to travel by train there might be some creeps there, but it’s not really something I can control.

What’s really important to me, is that I end up living in what would be my “field” of the story, so it’s not like going in the city and then coming back — I want to minimise that travel time, I want to just be able to chat with people while I’m having dinner, or having chai at a tapri. When it comes to stay, I usually ask the NGOs I’m talking to, if they have a guesthouse or somewhere I could stay upon paying – this also works out better for me, because it’s cheap, and I know it’ll be safe, since its trustworthy and the organisation would have some accountability. So that kind of accommodation helps me in that aspect as well.

So as I mentioned, the NGOs or people I know on ground usually help me find a place to stay. Even if I’m not fully sure of what the area is going to be, and where I’ll be staying, I only end up asking will I be able to lock the door at night — that’s the only thing I really want to know.

When you ask “guesthouse kaisa hai”, people usually think you’re asking kitna luxurious hai, do you have an AC or whatever — that’s not what I want to know, but I do need a door I can lock from the inside. And does it have a toilet — I’ve been in situations where this ODF (Open Defecation Free) status is a scam, so I want to make sure beforehand.

MM: Since you’re an environmental journalist, I can’t really let you go without asking you this. As individuals, what can we really do about climate change?

VR: I think as individuals, the first thing would be just to understand the world beyond what you see. If I wasn't travelling to these places, I wouldn’t know what climate change impact looks like — there are people whose houses are under the sea because the sea level is rising, that’s such an insane concept. And this is happening now, it’s not something waiting to happen 10 years later. And there are people who are disproportionately affected by it, there are countries and communities who are more affected by it than others

And maybe that awareness also comes from reading, from watching stuff, but I don’t think anything compares to travel.

You can go ahead and do organic farming, and have a compost pit in your house, all of that is great. But we do need to answer a larger accountability question, which needs to be asked to the government, private companies and large corporations. It can happen through whatever path you choose — for me it’s writing, but if you want to join protests where you’re questioning where the money (that’s coming in for climate change adaptation programs) is going, do it; if you’re writing RTIs to find out, do it; if you want to pressure corporations to do the things that they’re supposed to do, do it.

On the personal level, individual steps are great, but let’s not stop at that — we have to figure out the accountability for the people or organisations who need to be making that change, who are responsible for making that change.

You can follow Vaishnavi on Instagram or Twitter, and keep up with her work at Scroll.in.