SUN, SALT AND SAND

Use of solar-powered pumps for salt manufacturing has not just helped Gujarat's Agariya community fight the rising fuel costs, but also drastically cut their carbon emissions

- RAVLEEN SALUJA

KANU BEN Patadia looks at her palms and remembers when they would be covered in soot all the time. “Only in the last six years have my hands been this clean,” she says. The soot she refers to came from operating oil-powered pumps all day long to make something none of us can live without— salt. It disappeared once she shifted to solar-powered pumps.

Kanu Ben belongs to the Agariya community that has been involved in making salt for centuries in the Little Rann of Kutch (LRK)—a 5,000 square kilometer salt marsh in the Rann of Kutch in north Gujarat. By switching over to a solar-powered pump in 2015 (she bought a second one in 2017), Kanu Ben has saved about 15 tonnes of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere, as per an estimate by Ahmedabad-based non-profit Vikas Centre for Development (VCD). According to the non-profit, the Agaria community has installed around 3,000 pumps since 2017-18, which would have saved release of around 12,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide. Overall, some 70 per cent of the 7,000 Agariya families in LRK have at least one pump, say non-profits in the region, though there is no official data on this.