00:02Leave forever or stay put after all?
00:08Plant something new again in a place like this?
00:13Is there a future here?
00:20Straight after school, they head off to the garden.
00:24We are in Sumur, a small village in the Nubra Valley.
00:27It's a five-hour drive from Le City.
00:30The soil is fertile.
00:32Today, the children are planting young cardamom plants.
00:35Fourteen-year-old Lamo is helping too.
00:39So basically, this is a VELAV module
00:42where we are learning green learning.
00:45And here, we have all the work that we do.
00:49So actually, we have a garden here
00:53where we divide the children in six groups.
00:59The children learn from the older villages
01:01the best times to plant,
01:03natural forms of pest control,
01:05and which plants go best together.
01:09Knowledge that would otherwise have been lost,
01:11according to Rigzen Wangmo,
01:13who founded a non-profit called the Village Lab Foundation.
01:16She was born in the Nubra Valley herself.
01:19After time spent in Pune, Delhi,
01:22and at Harvard University in the US,
01:24she returned home.
01:26The idea behind her organization is that
01:29if children love the place where they grow up
01:31and can earn a living there,
01:33they won't move away later.
01:36Growing up, the sense of belonging and identity
01:39was very difficult to come by
01:43because the system and processes are structured
01:45in such a way that you want to leave your village behind
01:50because you see all the flattering things in the TV
01:53or in the books.
01:54You seldom see a girl like me in the books, you know,
01:58in a village who is probably doing a farming
02:01or those are some of the things that has never been included
02:06and celebrated.
02:08Rigzen Wangmo wants to prevent Sumur
02:11from suffering the same fate
02:12as the villages of Upper and Lower Kulum.
02:16The two mountain settlements are now ghost villages.
02:19Almost everyone has left
02:21due to shrinking glaciers, erratic rainfall
02:24and ultimately not enough water to irrigate the fields.
02:29Today, more than 20 villages in Ladakh lie abandoned.
02:35In Fayang, scientists at the Himalayan Institute of Alternatives
02:40are searching for solutions for the mountain villages.
02:44Gitanjali J. Angmo co-founded the institute.
02:48The courses that are offered here,
02:51the departments or the schools that we have here
02:53is to solve the problems of the context.
02:56In our school of eco-responsive architecture,
03:00we research, experiment and teach our students
03:05to make passive solar heated buildings
03:07which stay at plus 20 when it is minus 20 outside
03:11in the freezing winters.
03:13Similarly, we have a school for high altitude desert ecology
03:17where we innovate and make ice tupas,
03:22which are artificial glaciers,
03:24to solve the problems of water in spring
03:28when villagers need it most.
03:32Ice tupas are artificial mini glaciers.
03:35They store water during the winter,
03:38which farmers can then use for their fields in spring.
03:42Part of the institute's educational approach
03:45is to send students and staff out into the villages
03:48so they can see first-hand the challenges faced by residents.
03:53San Robin, for example, has built a simple biogas plant.
03:57His prototype is almost ready.
03:59It's designed to replace liquid petroleum gas or LPG
04:04with clean biogas delivered straight to where it's needed.
04:07This here, you see all the sensors are in place
04:12and once it is all set up,
04:17this biodigester will help solve the problem of providing the LPG,
04:22the cooking gas for the common dining hall
04:25which you see behind me right there.
04:26So there will be a pipeline that will streamline the flow of LPG
04:30directly to where the food is getting cooked.
04:33So there will be no need to carry the heavy cylinders
04:35from the plain to the Ladakh region
04:37which is a cumbersome task during peak winter season
04:40when the roads are all blocked.
04:43Kungzung Namgayal is one of those who left Upper Kulum.
04:47He now lives a few kilometers from here
04:49where he runs a restaurant.
04:51But he has started coming back to farm his fields.
04:53That's because there's now water here again
04:56thanks to the ice tupas.
04:59The authorities also supported him in setting up this system.
05:03It combines solar power and drip irrigation
05:06allowing him to farm his fields independently
05:09throughout the entire season.
05:11But so far, no one else has chosen to follow his example.
05:37He tells us that if his fields are one day profitable enough,
05:41he can imagine living here again.
05:42He hopes his two children will return too.
05:45They are still studying at university.
05:51Great hopes rest on these children too.
05:54If they know and love their homeland, they might stay.
05:57They might develop new visions like Gitanjali J. Angmo.
06:00Or they might return later after completing their education
06:04like Riggs and Wangmo.
06:06Only then will they be able to pass on their knowledge
06:09to future generations.
06:11Then there will be a future here.
06:13Something between a stone.
06:15This is a các parmassment.
06:16I'm going to orientate our students'robivitations
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