The Sweet Stuff

Enroute to a community meeting we stopped to see jaggery being made. It was a family run operation where they make jaggery by sequentially boiling cane juice in three different vats.

Our driver warned us in advance that we may not eat jaggery again if we see how it is made. But wasn't particularly dirty. They use some sort of local grass for cleaning the jaggery. The grass is shredded and soaked in water. This makes the water viscous. This is added to the cane juice in the first two vats. Scum is removed from these vats as it froths up.

By the third vat the syrup has the characteristic yellow color of jaggery. The smell varies from that of fresh cane juice to that of overpowering sweetness of of thick syrupy piping hot jaggery. The steam rising from the vats permeates everything.

The best part was of course eating the warm jaggery. The sweet stuff is the good stuff.

Shitty Matters

Most of yesterday was spent in transit and when not in transit, we were talking shit - quite literally.

I have a project in UP and the soil here is silty-clayey, which means it doesn't absorb much water. The regular sanitation solution in the area is to take all the water and to throw it in a water body. Our site is low lying and that isn't really possible so what do we do?

We considered recharging but the water table is high in the area and we run the risk of contaminating the aquifer.

So far the idea evolved involves household level pre-treatment and percolation in the top layer. Again this is doubtful because we're not sure all the water will get absorbed by the top layer.

This is still a work in progress.