 Namaskaram and good morning to everyone. Well, I'm not an environmentalist nor am I a scientist and you can obviously see that I'm not a woman. So I can speak about women's issues because I was embodied in a woman's body so I have the right to speak. When it comes to environment, I never studied these things but from a very early age, my engagement with rivers, forests and mountains of southern India was very deep to an extent where when I was just ten, eleven of years of age, I would just get lost in the jungles of the south India, southern India. I lived off the jungles. For most of you, even if you go to a forest, you go and stay in a resort, you don't understand what I'm saying, living off a jungle, what it means. It needs a completely different kind of approach and understanding of what life is around you. So when for days on end, sometimes for weeks when I got lost in the jungles, in my experience it was never like that this is nature, okay, this is a tree, this is a river, this is an animal, this is an elephant, this is a tiger. No, when you live there by yourself without any protection, those are days when you don't have any communication, no phones, not even a torch. A torch was a big thing, I wouldn't have a torch. So when you live like this in the jungle, you experience this as an extension of yourself, a life larger than yourself. When I was seventeen years of age on, I floated down the Kaveri river, which, unfortunately measures of the river you see today, it's all sand. This wonderful river which is the bread for two southern states and India, I floated down Kaveri river 163 kilometers, 13 days on just four truck tubes and a few bamboos. I lived off the river. And why I'm saying about this is, unfortunately this experience and this connect is missing in the world today. That is why we are doing what we are doing. We are doing everything wrong simply because we have no clue what it is in terms of life. We only know it as an academic subject. In the last twenty-five years I've been watching with great concern how this Kaveri river is depleting. Every year on here it's going down. Two states are literally waging war for water between them as to who should get more. Even right now there's a Supreme Court thing going on, it's going on endlessly. But nobody wants to do the right thing about reviving the river. Everybody's talking about how much can I get and how much can you get. Particularly in the last seven to eight years, the depletion is so sharp. Well, there the statistics say it's thirty-nine percent depletion in Kaveri. But in my experience it's nearly sixty percent, what it used to be. About three-and-a-half months in 2017 the Kaveri did not even touch the ocean, it just dried up. When we launched a painting competition in over hundred and thirty thousand schools across India, you won't believe, lot of children painted river, river in their mind was just sand. They actually painted pictures of sand, not of water. That is how the future generation understands the river, that it is a large bank of sand. That parents are taking them there in the moonlight when it's cool, and they play in the river, that's just sand, no water. So this is where we are driving it. I don't want to go into all the statistics in terms of what is the level of depletion across the country. It's phenomenal. On an average, all rivers in India have depleted sixty percent. From what I hear, all rivers across the world have depleted about thirty-five percent. For this there are many reasons. The fundamental reason is you and me have not been concerned enough about it. There are many, many technical reasons that we can go into, but essentially we have not activated a large mass of humanity to be a part of it. Ecological movements means always fifteen people standing in the street corner and protesting about something. Everybody thinks these are some eco nuts. So this is why we went into this rally for rivers where we wanted the nation to be engaged in a big way. Hundred and sixty-two million people participated and it's become a moment and now lawmaking is happening. Action on the ground is beginning to happen. This is not a full solution. Solution needs lot more effort and time and a sustained effort. It's not like we do something this year and forget about it, next year it's not going to work. What I see is right now it's wonderful that tomorrow they're launching this decade of action for water revival or river revival. If we do it now, I would say in fifteen to twenty-five years, we can bring back the rivers of this world at least by twenty percent up. If we do it after ten years or fifteen years later, let's say we start twenty... let's say we start twenty-thirty and then start working, it will take hundred to hundred-and-fifty years to have the same impact. This I am not saying with any kind of statistics attached to it, I'm watching these things every day. I live in this world and I have a certain sense of attention to what's happening. If we don't act now, the recovery will take much, much longer. And in this, when water becomes scarce, the first person who suffers most is the woman always in the rural societies. On an average, they're saying in the world a whole lot of women, nearly about eight hundred million women take six hours just to gather water for their family. Six hours. I want you to just imagine, six hours of your life goes into just getting water. And obviously, when you have to carry water, all the beautiful things that water does to you and me on a daily basis that will not be possible, barely drink and make sure your children are fed or something like this, beyond that it will not go. So water shortages always hit the woman fast and then the others. So right now we are still in that state in this world. It is hitting the woman very badly. Men are still managing to drink a wreck when there's no water, you know. But that will go after sometime. They will also suffer. Right now they think they have a solution in a bottle, but that solution will go after a while. So what is the solution for this? See, one thing is agriculture. In India, agriculture consumes eighty-four percent of the river water. In the rest of the world, it averages somewhere around sixty-eight to seventy percent of the water is consumed by agriculture. In Europe, it's around twenty-five percent. In America, it's around forty percent. Why this is so is there is a distinct difference between nations which are located from zero to thirty-three degrees latitude and what is above. So generally whatever I speak is within thirty-three degrees latitude because here the precipitation is of a certain kind. For example, in India, the precipitation of the rain is approximately forty-forty-five to fifty days in a year on an average across the nation. The water that comes down in these forty-five days, we must have the ability to hold it in the land for three hundred and sixty-five days. This is where the real problem is. In Europe, the average rainfall and snowfall put together is about hundred-and-seventy days of precipitation. And there is an advantage with snow. It stays there and slowly melts down giving time for the earth to absorb the water. But when it comes to heavy monsoon showers, if you don't have the necessary vegetation to hold it, the moment it comes, it's a runoff. And the runoff causes enormous damage both to the soil and agriculture and the lives of the people every year during monsoons, hundreds of people die because surprise runoffs will happen that what you did not expect, that much flood will come all of a sudden. So the fundamental thing that we're aiming at is we need more vegetation. We don't have enough vegetation for the number of people that we have right now. Well, in all this, the elephant in the room is population. Nobody wants to talk about it. It's about you and me that we are nice but we're just too many, you know? In the beginning of twentieth century, we were just 1.4 billion people. Today, we are 7.35 billion people. So once the human footprint on the planet increases, every other creature who are all eco-friendly creatures, from a worm to an insect to a bird to an animal, every one of them are continuously working for the ecology and the well-being of the ecology on this planet. All of them are withdrawing. Nobody has calculated what is the insect population at the beginning of twentieth century and what is the insect population now. Nobody has calculated. There is no way to calculate probably, but I think it's dropped down by fifty percent or more. I must tell you this. When I was… many years ago, I stayed in the rainforest of southern India in the western guards because I was fascinated that by the tigers and I wanted to see tigers close up, so for about twenty-three days I stayed in the jungle by myself. By day four, my food got over so I tried to live off the jungle. And by seventh, eighth day, I lost my jacket somewhere. And by about tenth or twelfth day, I lost one-half of my shirt. Don't ask me how it happened. But I had only half a shirt, but I didn't have the mind to get rid of it because that was a little bit of support in the night. So when I lived there, I had very close encounters with elephants, tigers, panthers, big buffaloes. But after I come out after little more than three weeks, when I look back and see what is the biggest impact, it was the insects. Oh my God, what they're doing in the jungle is unbelievable. The coordinated work that they're doing, the orchestra that's going on in the rainforest in the night is so phenomenal and they're saying and doing something that none of us can figure. I… what I noticed is in the western guards, exactly at two-fifteen in the early morning, one set of insect… insects will stop their concert and another will just start. Repeatedly, every day I saw exactly at two-fifteen in the morning, they're doing something that we haven't even figured what. They're… they're doing something so coordinated and so fantastic that we really don't know what they're doing. Today, some scientists are saying, if all the insects on the planets die today, that means life on this planet will end in the next eighteen to thirty months. If all the worms die, all life on this planet will die in the next three to six months. If all of us disappear, planet will flourish. So we must understand our misunderstanding about our self-significance. It's very important because we have come to a place where our population is of that size, that unless we are a sensible population, there is no way. Simply we are heading in a direction that there is no way. So one of the immediate corrective steps that we can do is increase the vegetation, particularly in the tropical climates, without increasing the vegetation. There is no way we can hold water in the soil. Agriculture has become an aggressive process. In the name of agriculture, in the last forty years, for example Ganga basin in India, Ganga basin accounts for twenty-five percent of India's geography, thirty-three percent of India's agriculture. But in this Ganga basin, which is one of the largest rivers, it's a sacred river, it has a lot of legend about it. But we have removed ninety-four percent of tree cover in the last fifty years. Why this happened means forty years ago when I was living on a farm, at that time the campaign was going on. This was the time when India went into chemical fertilizer. All the chemical fertilizer companies openly telling the farmers, you must chop down the tree. You cannot have trees in your farm because if you have trees in your farm, they will take away the fertilizer. But otherwise, the traditional understanding was always every farmer knew. If I have ten acres of land, how many trees and how many animals I need on the land was something traditionally always understood. If you want to keep the soil rich, see the organic content. To call soil as soil, the minimum organic content necessary is two percent. But today in many states like Punjab, Marath Vada, some parts of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, the organic content in the soil is point zero-five percent. The scientists are saying in another three years all these lands, the soil will become sand. If you take away all the organic content, soil will turn into sand. That means the desertification is happening at a very rapid pace. Our ability to grow food, which is very important because southern India has a history of twelve thousand years of organized agriculture. Twelve thousand years, we formed the land but we kept the soil rich. But in one generation, it is becoming uncultivable. In the next fifteen, twenty years, they're estimating anywhere between twenty-five to forty percent of India, Indian subcontinent could become a desert, that is, it's uncultivable. You cannot grow anything out of it. With such a massive population, this is a huge risk to take. So what we are looking at right now is, first thing is vegetation and vegetation and vegetation. To bring back as much vegetation as possible, particularly around water bodies, rivers, lakes, ponds, everywhere we are trying to bring back vegetation because without vegetation, there is no organic material. To keep the soil in such a way that it is capable of holding some humidity within it. In all this, there is a significant role for a woman to play because always in every family, conservation is always done by the woman. In so many ways, whether it's economic conservation or physical resources, whatever there is, especially in rural societies, women are always the conservators. But today we put them into a very uncomfortable situation. This is not a new situation. For example, lack of toiletries, spaces and facility, this was perfectly fine twenty-five, thirty years ago because they could go sit somewhere in their field, that was a private place. Now it's happened like this, there is no private place anywhere. Everywhere there are people, everywhere there are automobiles, everywhere there are stupid cell phones that somebody will take a picture of you. Really, it is not a small thing. It is not a small thing. You get caught in your toiletry position on a photograph. Your life is ruined in the village. Your life is literally ruined because somebody is looking at this and grinning at you. It's kind of once you take away that little space that a woman needs, this is a simple way of exploiting. That if you take away that private space for a woman, then she will never come forward. She's always on a back step. It's a very simple way to exploit a woman is that you don't give her that little private space that she needs for her own toiletry needs and little bit of privacy. If you take away that one thing, then suddenly you will see that she is always on back foot. So this has to change as a part of this, the government of India has built over sixteen million toilets in the last four years. It looks like a big number, but we are 1.3 billion people. And not only that, there are other cultural and also the water deficit areas. Even if you build a toilet, nobody wants to use it because there are water scarcity in the area. So we are trying to solve this on many different levels. I will tell you my experience. Well, almost twenty-five years ago, when we first went to set up this yoga center in southern India, it's about thirty-five kilometers from the city, we are in the, you know, at the foothills of a mountain. So every day when I finish my programs at nine o'clock in the city and I drive somewhere around nine thirty, I'll pass through these villages. And it would be most embarrassing for me because many women will be sitting on the roadside for their toiletry requirements. They can't go in the morning because morning there will be men out there. So they go in the night, in the evening, in groups. And when the car headlamps flashed, it was... They would just put their heads down and I would feel so terrible, I would wait in the city for two hours before I drive, so that I'll drive there around eleven thirty, by then everybody is gone. Then we decided, let's build the toilets. So these two, three villages that I have to pass, I said we must build toilets here for the women. So I went visiting them and I... These are small homes that the government of... The state government had built for them. For them it was overwhelming to have me in their homes, but when I walked in, I was just looking around. Then I found a toilet in their house. And I said, but there is a toilet. But then they said... They said, Sadhguru, how to do it inside? Forever, for ages, toilet means it happens in the fields. How to do the toiletries inside the house, they feel it's a kind of a sacrilege. That is when I understood, so if you provide a private toilet, they won't use. They need a public toilet which is functional and clean, which is a challenge. Because most of the men are not potty trained. Yes? Once they use it, nobody can use it. You know this. So this process is going on right now to bring awareness how to use a public toilet so that the next person who comes doesn't feel like not coming here and going sitting on the street somewhere. How to make it that way and also the water is a big, big challenge. Because somebody gives a small piece, donates a small piece of land, we go and build toilets there and we beg for water from somebody and put one little pipeline. But in summer months, that guy cuts it off because he wants water for his fields. So this goes on like this. So there are solutions for this. We have come up with various solutions, but the important thing is execution. It is such a massive level of execution. Governments are doing what they can do. They're providing subsidies and stuff, but still without the involvement of the community and the responsible way of handling it, there is no solution. You can build toilets. Somebody is tying goats inside the toilet. Somebody is using it for some other storage purposes. So all kinds of things. So this needs a national movement. This is what has been unleashed now in the name of Swachh Bharat, that a national movement. So the rally for rivers is very significant in this direction because one thing is we right now in Maharashtra, this is beginning to happen now, it's on the ground. The detailed project report is ready and we are planting what is, what is 15 crore trees now, what is that? 150 million trees in the coming year. On the river banks, we've taken up two tributaries. One reason why we are taking tributaries, not the main rivers, is people have forgotten that rivers exist only because of tributaries. For example, Cauvery, this river had over 72 tributaries about 40 years ago. Today, 37 of them have completely vanished. We are looking at the main river and wondering why the water is not flowing. Because still we have this fancy idea that rivers come from heaven and land in somebody's hair and comes drips down onto the ground, all these kind of things. People have not understood the mechanics of how a river is made. So this is one thing on the ground we are trying to bring into our understanding. First of all, to bring the focus to the tributaries. We have identified 110 tributaries across the country. We want to make sure every school child knows that at least the names of the tributaries in their state because these are feeders. Without these feeders, there's no real river. So this is a massive process. This is not going to happen overnight. But a time has come that if we... See, I'm not trying to paint a doomsday picture because wherever water shortages have come in rural India, a whole exodus has happened from those villages to the city. If massive exodus of rural populations move into the city, you can look forward to some terrible civil strife, the kind of civil strife that you've not imagined possible when people don't have water to drink. So this is not to paint a doomsday picture, but a time has come if we do not change our direction of how we operate, this is going to become a reality that we are clearly pushing populations in this direction that there will be enormous civil strife in the next 20 years' time. If we don't change the direction right now, fortunately the government, at least in India, they have taken it seriously and the policy changes are being made aggressively. And I found that, you know, after the rally, after these 30 days of driving, the next day I presented the document to the prime minister at 6.15 in the evening. By 11.30 in the morning, we get a phone call from the PMO that they've formed a special group to look at this and they want a soft copy of this. I was surprised in less than 24 hours that there is action. When it comes to ecological aspects, never before governments have been so agile. Fortunately, they're agile, they're determined in the states, lot of action on the ground beginning to happen. Budget is being allocated in a big way. So as we are capable of creating problems for ourselves, we are also capable of coming up with solutions. In this the role of woman is important because in the sapling making, sapling making is a little gentle job. It's not like ploughing the land and doing something, it needs a little care, somewhere in the backyard you keep it. We have estimated that in many of these states where massive plantations are going to happen in the coming years, we have seen how this can be mainly given to the rural women. We see that very easily, without any investment, very easily every woman can earn something like 25,000 rupees per year, simply in her backyard, just with wastewater she has in her home. And this will be a massive economic process for the women. One important thing that needs to happen as we try to enhance water holding and other things, consumption has to go down. Everybody says when I'm brushing my teeth, I will turn off the tap and I've done my business. Well, it's nice, the gesture is wonderful, but that's not a solution. That you turned off your tap when you're brushing your teeth, the gesture is wonderful, I respect that, we value that. But it is not a solution because 84% of the water is consumed by agriculture. So one thing we are pushing towards right now, it is being looked at how to make a policy framework out of this is there are two basic problems to the Indian farmer. All of you should know that there has been a tragedy of in the last 10 years time, over 300,000 farmers have committed suicide, not being able to pay back their bank loans. So why does such a big bank loan happen, first of all? Why does somebody get into your debt that he cannot pay back? Essentially it's because of his investment into irrigation and his land holding is very small. The land, average land holding in the country is about one hectare or 1.2 hectares. So in approximately nearly three acres of land, he has to create his own water resource. So the only solution is bore wells. Bore wells as I know, when I was doing farming 40 years ago, I put a bore well only about 80 feet bore well. And at least eight months in a year, the water was flowing out by itself, no pump. Naturally it was flowing out, only about four months I had to pump. Rest of the time water would just flow out and I would just use it as it is. Today in Coimbatore city where we live, the bore wells have gone to 1,200 to 1,400 feet. All the palm trees in southern India, their crowns are falling off because no tree is capable of putting its roots to 1,200 feet. Every home has minimum one or two bore wells. I was just talking to a farmer in our area, a 27-year-old young man, very enthusiastic wanting to do farming. He is shifted to organic farming now and his life could be saved because of that. I was just talking to him and I asked, what's your water source? He said he is sunk nine bore wells. Nine bore wells in three acres of land, he's never going to make this money. He has to either sell his land or run away somewhere or hang from a tree. This is all the options he has. He will not make that money because it's over one crore rupees, which means over 10 million rupees he has spent on three acres of land for water. So one big push we are doing right now in the country is to aggregate irrigation with micro-irrigation. We have... The Rally for Rivers Board has been in consultation with all the micro-irrigation companies to aggregate irrigation. If you... Right now as a... I think it came up on the video, we have aggregated farmers, not the land, only the irrigation and the marketing. The farming he still does individually. If we aggregate irrigation, if the burden of irrigation investment goes off him, companies can invest in this and farmer can pay a rent for the micro-irrigation. From my experience, what I know even in our own organization, where people are trained and they're doing things meticulously, everything, in spite of that, micro-irrigation systems don't work beyond four to three to four years generally, because somebody goes and digs it up and animal steps on it, something happens. They're all putting it on the surface because they're afraid maintenance is difficult in the subsoil. If it's on the surface where the temperatures are over 35 degrees centigrade, the surface evaporation is around 75 to 80 percent. 75 to 80 percent of the water is evaporating. What irrigation are we doing? Unless you do it subsoil, it doesn't work. Subsoil means it needs some expertise to manage this. So this is the reason we want large corporations to manage micro-irrigation systems and farmers pay only rent per crop. And we want this entire FPO or farmers produces organizations to flow out of not out of government policy, but out of financial institutions, that right now they're giving loans to individual farmers. The simple thing, I don't know if you people anybody here can influence this, the simple logic, and we're operating like this in this box for a long time, individual farmers get loan. But if farmers organize an FPO they won't get a loan because there is no hypothecation of land. Only if secured, land is secured. Believe me, even on paper if you have secured the land, you're never going to go and get his land in the village. No bank official dares to go and get a farmer's land forcefully. It's never going to happen. It's just a fool's paradise. Instead of that, if we fund an FPO, let's say 10,000 farmers come together and now there is a commitment and now there is a certain responsibility and farmer is one guy who's not going to close his business and go away. If you if you finance a small company, if they run into loss, they will close it down and go away. A farmer will never close it down and go away. Only thing is you may have to defer the payment from this year to next year when there is a bad agricultural year. But the question of financial security for the company or the bank which invests in this is never there. But unfortunately the international banking policy says, unless it's a secured loan, this is the level of interest, 18 percent. This has to change. We are trying to bring this policy change in the country because without aggregating irrigation, without taking the debt burden of irrigation from the farmer, there is really no way out because the holdings are so small that it is simply not practical to irrigate them. And the market, again, he's a small farmer. He doesn't have cold storage. He doesn't have market access. This farmers produces organization that we started four years ago. We have done nothing on the work ground. This is I'm telling you, on the ground we have done nothing. I've just put three young boys on the phone, morning to evening they're on the phone continuously negotiating and renegotiating. You won't believe. The farmer's income has gone up over hundred percent without doing any work. Just by negotiating, just to tell you what happens is this is a coconut, arachnid growing area. The merchants come. He goes to a big farmer who's got a big heap. He offers last year, this is, we have settled this from the last year, 56 rupees per kilogram. He goes to a medium farmer who has a medium sized heap, 35 rupees. He goes to a small farmer, 26 rupees. On the same day, on the same day, the same produce in the same area, the small farmer gets 26 rupees, the big farmer gets 56 rupees. We have made sure in the last two years, everybody gets 56 rupees, simply because we have aggregated the marketing. And this has made a huge difference. So these kind of interventions must happen means there must be aggregation of irrigation and aggregation of marketplace. In this, in this, women have a significant role. Once they are handling the marketing process, one thing that will happen to India is, if we aggregate India's irrigation in micro irrigation system, right now every day the farmer is going to his land, not necessarily because there is some agricultural activity, one thing is to just switch on the pump. Another thing is to just establish that this is his land. Though it's been his land forever, still every day he has to go and establish, this is my land. If large companies take over irrigation, if the farmer doesn't have to go and switch on the pump on a daily basis, he has to go to his farmland for active agriculture, I'm talking. He has to go to his land only 60 to 65 days in a year. That means we will be releasing the hands of nearly 500 million people for 300 days. The amount of allied and alternate and value addition industry and craft and other things that can come up in this is tremendous. That if we know how to harness this, there's a tremendous revolution waiting there. In this, the role of the woman is very important because the man is always going out to do what is considered to be hard work, which is not everyday's work, but he has to go there because in case there is a fight, he is the one who is there. The woman is the one who is taking care of all these things. Somebody comes, she says, what's the prize and this and that. If this gets into our hand, once there is more economy in the hands of the woman, I'm sure sanitation will be one of the prime issues in her mind. It's not like the last issue. Right now it looks like it's a last thing on people's minds. That would be the first thing on her mind and naturally this would get handled, whatever subsidies and other government assistance that is there for sanitation would definitely get to the ground. We have seen this happening in villages. Initially we went and approached panchayats and the ruling bodies, but now we just go and meet the woman. To put our toilets in the place, but the maintenance is given to women, we are giving some small salaries for them, just a small, very small salary for them to see that it's kept clean. And in those villages it's working wonderfully well because it's self-significant to them. It's important for their survival that there are toilets and there is sanitary spaces for them. So this water as a source, water is not a commodity, water is life-making material for all of us. You know, you shake yourself and see you're just a body of water. 72% you're water. So if we don't protect the water bodies, this water body won't survive. This is staring in our face. People who are living in North America may not think it is such a dire thing, but believe me in Asia and Africa, it is very huge, very huge issue. And we are rapidly moving to a place where turning around will be very difficult. It's appropriate that at this moment the United Nations has taken this step of a 10-year action plan and which is most vital. It's important that we make this into your success because this is the survival of this generation. And also, as I said in the beginning of 20th century, we were 1.4 billion. Now we are 7.3 billion. United Nations has made a projection. By 2050 we'll be 9.6 billion. I want you to think when it's 9.6, do you want to be here? It doesn't matter. You may grow enough food, you may build enough toilets, but do you want to be here in that crowd? So this is something we must understand. This is happening not necessarily because of excessive reproduction. It is because lifespans are getting better, which is a wonderful thing that human beings are getting to live a full lifespan. But when we take death into our hands, we should take birth into our hands also. I'm not talking any philosophy, simple arithmetic. When we take death into our hands, we have to take birth into our hands. So instead of making predictions that by 2050, this is the kind of disaster we will be, I would appreciate if all of us have a plan that by 2050 we'll be 4.5 billion people, or then you can live whichever way you want and it'll be fine on this planet. Thank you very much. If you have questions. So thank you so much for that amazing talk. What do you recommend that we can do to help you from New York with this cause? Say, to put this on the ground, one thing that's needed is a very committed participation on the ground. Fortunately, we have managed that like never before. I just gave a call to the youth in India that this is the situation. Now it's our choice. Either we are a vain generation, we just complain and we died, or we did what we have to do. So if you want to do something, you don't have to give up your life, give three years of life to me. Only qualification is you should drop one thought in your mind, what about me? Three years you live without this question, what about me? We'll solve this problem. So today hundreds of young people, men and women, they've dropped their jobs, some of them they've dropped their final year education and they're here for three years and they're coming. We're taking 40 at a time and training them and putting them on the ground. Every month 40 people are going on the ground. Highly qualified people, holding good jobs, they've given up their jobs and they've come three years, I told them I'll give them food and clothing, that's about it. So that commitment we are seeing in the youth, but it also needs a huge financial backing. Whether the governments both state and center will be able to take care of everything or not is a big question. One important thing for a moment like this is it must get quickly on the ground and people should see the result very quickly. If you don't show them any result in the next one or two years, people will lose their interest. They'll go and do something else, okay? So to make that result happen as quickly as possible, one thing is a fund. We need a big fund. So that wherever there is slowdown of government we must be able to infuse that fund. A group of responsible people, if they own this fund and disperse this fund according to the needs of the projects on the ground, governments have a lot of money, but the government procedures everywhere and particularly in India takes time. Now the monsoons come end of May, I want to plant then, but the government sanction comes in October. This is the usual case. Whatever we have done our work, all these 36 years has all happened out of our own funding. That's what is effective. Wherever we waited for outside fund, what has to happen today will happen tomorrow and it's no good. It's simply no good. If it doesn't happen in a timely fashion because nature is not going to wait for your bureaucracy. This day it rains, this day we must be ready, otherwise it won't work. This day there is a summer vacation for the schools, this is the time we can plant. You tell me to plant in September. How do I plant? There are no children, there are no students. How do I plant millions of trees? If there are no children, no students, no young people available, so all these things are there. So if there is a fund managed by a responsible group of people, we can do incredible things on the ground because right now we are trying to establish large manifestations. Right now we have taken up two rivers in Maharashtra and also in Karnataka it's coming up now. Where we will transport regular agriculture around the river basins to tree-based agriculture. By moving into tree-based agriculture, we've already proven in small models that we have done in Tamil Nadu. Farmers' income can go up anywhere between three to eight times in six to seven years time. That farming can be made into a lucrative process. We've been doing some kind of a simple survey and in Tamil Nadu when I asked all the farm leaders, you saw some of them sitting there. How many of you want your children to go into farming? Less than one percent. Right now India has a latitudinal spread that is from Kanyakumari to the foothills of Himalayas. There is weather and soil conditions where just about anything you can grow in on this planet, you can grow in the Indian subcontinent. And we are the only nation with a population which has an intrinsic knowledge about how to make this magic of transforming mud into food, which is nearly sixty percent of the population. In United States, such a population is less than two percent. In India we have sixty percent of the population who have this intrinsic knowledge. We have the land, we have the weather. The only thing is if you let this fifteen years pass by, then you will see that knowledge will go away because today there is compulsory education in India. If you go and work with your father in the farm, it's called child labour and he gets arrested, the father. Yes, unfortunately. So all the crafts we have killed, all handicrafts we have killed because if you sit with your father or mother and weave a basket, this is child labour, somebody will come and arrest you. Now if you go to your farm, somebody will arrest you. So no children are going to the farm. Everybody is going to the school, learning algebra. I don't know for what. So we are going to lose this intrinsic knowledge that we have because over twelve thousand years of organized farming, there is an intrinsic knowledge. He may not know any agricultural sciences, but he just knows how to grow a crop. Believe me, many of you who are very well educated, you may be MBAs in many things, just grow one crop. I'll give you fertile land. Believe me, you can't do it. It's so complex and it's so timely. It's so meticulously needs to be done, otherwise it won't happen. He looks illiterate. Just because of his looks, we're thinking it's some incompetent job. No, food is the most important thing in our lives. We might have forgotten because we've had our breakfast. So this capability is going to go away. So we are trying to make some policy changes. So we are trying to manifest large-scale manifestations where shifting to tree-based agriculture, how it is one of the most lucrative activities you can do in the world. We have proved this in Tamil Nadu. The Vietnamese farmers have proved this, that their incomes from paddy cultivation to fruit cultivation, their incomes have gone up twenty times. Okay? Two thousand percent increase in income. And just to give you an example, there's a woman farmer with only 1.2 hectares of land, very close to our center and this is part of the FPO or the Farmers Produce Organization. Her name is Nalini. She'll be very happy I mentioned her name. She said, Sadhguru, you must talk about me. So this Nalini has only 1.2 hectares of land. She was earning thirty thousand rupees per year and struggling wanting to sell the land to educate her son. Now she shifted to organic farming under our care. We have not given her any money. We have not given an investment, just advice. And little market facilitation. Today she is earning 5.6 lakhs per year. Okay? From thirty thousand. So on an average an Indian farmer with one hectare of land earns eleven hundred and fifty dollars per year. She's earning nine thousand dollars per year because she shifted to organic way of farming. This is the difference it can make. But right now the big problem with organic farming is I do organic farming in my little piece of land. But you are there next door. You spray all the strong pesticides. All your insects are on me. So tomorrow I'll spray something stronger than yours so that they go back to yours. I mean it's not going to work unless an entire region takes up to organic farming it will not work. And this even this idea that there is something called a synthetic farming is a stupid idea. Farming is organic. Food is organic. Our bodies are organic. There is no question of doing this any other way. But unfortunately in the last thirty, forty years we have taken a wrong turn. But it's time to fix this for this to be fixed. Support is needed. We are trying to see how to manifest large scale models where let's say twenty five, fifty thousand farmers aggregate their irrigation process where the debt burden is taken away from them and we establish marketing agencies, commercially competent marketing agencies. Not an illiterate farmer trying to go and trade his products. So if these two things are established in large models and we show the success of it, economic success of it only then this will happen. Any amount of preaching on ecology is not going to bring results. We have to show economic success. So right now we're in the process of establishing that with government help. As I said, government help comes but not always timely. There's a whole lot of process. If there's a responsible body which wants to take up one module like this. Twenty-five thousand farmers are let's say fifty thousand or hundred thousand hectares of land and convert it into organized irrigation and marketing process that this is a huge economic success for the farmer. Only then their children will go into farming. Once you show economic success, then there is no stopping that everybody will want to do that. Somebody has to facilitate it. That's all. So we want to set up this kind of modules in two or three different parts of the country where there'll be substantial exposure to everybody else. If that can be done, it'll be fantastic for New Yorkers. Thank you very much for being here today and for giving us such leadership in a time when action is needed. And when we're in such dire need of that kind of awareness. As consumers, as human beings, science has done this. A very good job of quantifying the kind of water impact that we have and the choices that we make when it comes from the things that we drink and eat. The packaging that they're put in and also how those things are delivered to us. My question in a world that's where temptation is increasing, where the things that we love the most, like chocolate and olive oil and denim jeans and cheeseburgers and everything else, that requires so much more water than anything else. What advice can you give to the people in cities that are usually detached from nature and a lot of the consequences of our decisions? War it down, but you're buying it worn down. That's a serious problem. If you wore down your pants, that means you're living in one pair of pants and it's wearing down, that's a good thing. But now you're buying it already worn down. That's a different matter. So, see there are two ways to approach this. One thing is we try to contain human aspirations. I see in California there's a big effort in this direction. In everybody's house in the front, there is a Tesla parked, of course. So they drive the Tesla to the office, but then when they want to go out in the evening, they got a big SUV, the six-liter engine, all right? So containing human aspiration is always a difficult thing. It's much simpler to contain human population. It's a much more sensible way to do it because this whole idea that every other life is here to serve us, this must go out of our head. If you spend sufficient amount of time, if you just spend enough time with the ants, you will see they have a life of their own completely. The traffic is better managed than ours. Hello? If you spend a little time with any animal, you will see they have an entire life of their own. Somehow we think we are the only life, rest are all here to serve us. This wrong idea, either through culture or religion or whichever way it's entered our mind, first thing is we have to get rid of that one idea. If we get rid of that one idea, we will look at when we say life, we don't just mean you and me, we mean all life. As I was saying earlier, the planet can thrive without us, but cannot thrive without worms, insects, birds, animals, isn't it, or trees for that matter. So this has to sink in to our next generation. In our schools, ecology is not a subject. It is the space in which we live. It is our home. Maybe we'll build a box like this for ourselves, but the real home in which we are living is the ecological space. So this is not sunk in because unless this sinks in, whatever we do is very patchy. Okay, we won't wear denims. We'll wear something else. Okay, we won't drive a petrol car. We will drive an electric car. But this is not a solution. These are all band-aid treatments for cancer. What we are suffering right now on the planet is a serious cancer. But we think by band-aid, as I said, I will turn off my tap when I'm brushing my teeth, which we always did. We did not even think it's ecological. Right from our childhood, our mothers always told us, you're not going to waste anything, you know? Whether the food that is served on our plate or the water that's... If water is served in the cup at a meal, we have to drink that water we took before we get up in our homes, not because there was a water scarcity. That's how it was. What is served on the plate must be eaten. What is in the cup, it must be had. There's no question of leaving it and going away. So we've developed a culture of wantonness, mainly because we think we are an exclusive life. We are not an exclusive life. Because other lives have included us, we have a life. But we have excluded them for which if we do not consciously correct this, nature will do it to us in a very cruel way. It's my wish, being human beings, we will correct these problems consciously. Don't allow nature to do cruel things to us and it will do. If we let it go like this, nature will do very cruel things to us. But being human, we... our fundamental qualities that we are capable of being conscious, we must solve our problems consciously. And this is the time. We can't let it go by now. Good morning, Sadhguru. And everyone else here, thank you. I feel honored to be in your presence. My name is Ajay. I study at NYU and I also work at the United Nations. My question is directly in line with the previous question. I think in this world of consumerism, the solution to all of this is leading spirituality. I see consumerism and spirituality to lead a spiritual life. I think then most of the excess need is cut off. But my question is, you know, they say, I'm a classic example of no knowledge is better. Some knowledge, I mean, total knowledge is power, but some knowledge is dangerous. I'm a classic example of that. Because I read spirituality. I read about philosophy. And then when I try to apply it in my real life, it's magic. You know, it's like sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It seems like a pain when I can use all the resources at hand, but I think, oh, I need to be spiritual. But then I feel the time is now, you need to be now and you need to use your resources. So this half knowledge of knowing something and not knowing how to truly use it is my challenge. And what do you think is a way out of this? If something is working, sometimes working, sometimes not working, that's not magic, that's called an accident. So magic means something happened in a miraculous way where it is not even expected to happen. But even what is expected if it's not happening, when I say what's expected, you being healthy is expected of you, a young man. You being peaceful and happy is expected. If even that is happening haphazardly, you have become an accidental life, not a magical life. Don't, don't fool yourself like that. If you become a magical life, even if you put you in a war zone, if you can walk with a smile on your face, then you're a magical life. Right now, studying in a university, being in United Nations, if you have problems, that means you're an accidental life. So first of all this idea, spirituality is some quantum and materialism is some quantum, one against the other. No, no, no, there's no such thing. It's like this. Is it true that you gathered this body over a period of time or were you born like this? So you acquired this body. Whatever you accumulate and acquire, you can say it's mine. You cannot say it's me, isn't it so? Hello? I start using this microphone continuously and after some time I said this is me. That would be madness. So you start using this body and maybe some brains. No. No, I'm saying this because you may think you are stressed. You may think you're anxious. You may think you're miserable. You may think you're depressed. You may have many exotic names. Fundamentally, your intelligence is turned against you. That's all it is. You may think there's an ecological problem. You may think there's a psychological problem. No. Essentially, our intelligence is working against us, isn't it? There is no other force coming and bothering you here. It is just that your own intelligence is working against you. Don't give it exotic names. Just know it's like this. If you don't understand this, take your right hand and punch yourself in the nose. Suppose if somebody tries to punch you, you have differences. If your own hand starts punching you, what do we have to do? We'll have to tie it down. If it doesn't work, we'll have to amputate it. Yes or no? So right now, knowingly or unknowingly, every human being is doing this. Once their intelligence starts working against them, they will try to hold it down. What to do? Not able to bear the stress. Evening, I'll just have one drink. That one drink will multiply you know as time goes by. What you're trying to do is amputate your intelligence. Intoxication means amputation of intelligence, isn't it so? So you're doing it already. Is that the solution? No. If your intelligence worked for you, then you would be a magical life, not an accidental life. So for all these ecological situations or whatever you think is, leave this word spiritually, it's the most corrupted word, just leave it. All that you have to look at it is, your body and your mind should work for you. If your mind took instructions from you, would you choose to keep yourself blissful or miserable? Make a choice, sir. Blissful or miserable? Blissful. That's all. Right now your intelligence is not working for you, it's working against you, your own thoughts and emotions working against you. I don't have to do anything to you. You know how to freak yourself. My name is Dimple, I'm from Bangalore, but I'm studying in Columbia University now. I know you touched upon this, but I'm curious to know what the impact of genetically modified plans are for the earth, and also what could be the impact of the movement of vegetarianism. The question is just this, if you have any machine, you must know what kind of fuel it is designed for. There's a whole science you can look at this, this is not the time for me because we just have a few minutes, but if you look at the nature of how this mechanism is built, your mechanism, the system, particularly the elementary canal, which is a digestive process, is much, much similar to a herbivore than a carnivore. You don't have the instinct and the system of a carnivore, but for survival we can just eat just about anything and survive, that's always there. Once survival is taken care of, then choice comes, isn't it? Right now we have come to a place in a society like this where there is choice as to what you can consume. So now I would say, don't listen to anybody, don't listen to your doctor, your nutritionist, especially not me, okay? Just experiment. One week just go on meat diet, see how it feels. One week just go on fruit diet, how it feels. One week just go on vegetarian diet, cooked, uncooked like this, one, one week you go and one week mix up a few things and eat and see how it goes. What keeps you most alert and agile? What naturally reduces the sleep quota, that is the best food. Sleep quota means just this, your body is going into a certain state of inertia. Most people are sleeping eight to ten hours a day, which means they're sleeping off one-third of their life. What's the point? They can as well die at fifty. One-third of their life is gone in sleeping and people are saying, there's a whole moment in America I'm saying, you must sleep, you must sleep. I think they're sleeping too much. On an average for twenty-five years, I slept only two-and-a-half hours. These days I'm getting little lazy sleeping three-and-a-half to four-and-a-half hours because this is not about depriving yourself of sleep. If your body is in a certain state of agility and aliveness, sleep will naturally go down. Death will come, you don't have to practice it every day eight hours a day. It'll anyway come. The importance of the food that you eat is, it must energize you and keep you alive and active. The moment you eat, you feel like this. Obviously you're putting wrong fuel, you understand? You buy a petrol car and pump diesel into it, it may still run around in New York City but it splutters around. Same is happening to most human beings, they're spluttering around in their life. The important thing that you have here is time, isn't it? What you call is life is just a certain amount of time and energy. You can't do anything about time, it's just rolling away for all of us. Whether you do something, you don't do something, you are awake or you're asleep, time is going away anyway. The only thing you can manage is your energy. Now you eat that kind of food, which will keep you in higher states of energy so that your life is maximized, otherwise it'll go waste. Thank you very much.