KOTHAPALLY: The
village school in Kothapally, in southern India, has only a handful of
amenities - blackboards, desks and chairs, a playground with a wooden bench
under a tree. But it has one unusual resource: an automatic weather station.
Nestled among farms, the government school is the only one in the southern
Indian state of Telangana - and possibly in the country - to have a weather
station on its premises, scientists overseeing the station said.

Ninth graders,
all children of local farmers, record rainfall, humidity, wind speed and the
air temperature as part of a bigger project led by an international crop
research institute to customize the village's farming to its water availability.
"I understand how this works. I know if it rains well the previous day it
is a good time to put fertilizer on the crops the next day," said Vamshi
Voggu, 14, who doesn't much like science lessons but enjoys his morning
weather-monitoring job at school. "My parents are farmers. This
information helps them," Voggu said during a class break, with his giggly
friends chiming in on how farmers in the village benefit from the device.

Two decades ago,
Kothapally faced an acute water crisis, with little available to irrigate farms
or to drink and women walking miles to fetch water. Nearly half the village's
children were out of school, many herding cattle to supplement family incomes,
villagers said. Around the same time, officials at an office of the non-profit
International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT),
located about 60kms from Kothapally, were planning to replicate an on-campus
watershed management project in a village.

A local
politician nudged them to the water-scarce village. The project, which brought
in rainwater harvesting pits, dams, farm ponds and the weather station, has
yielded rich harvests over the years, with the groundwater level rising by
about four meters and farming increasingly tuned to rainfall readings. As the
struggle for water has intensified in India in recent years, with many villages
and cities running out of the precious resource, Kothapally has stayed afloat.

"The number
of rainy days in this region is decreasing, which means longer dry spells and
more rains per day," said AVR Kesava Rao, an agro-climatologist who is an
honorary fellow with ICRISAT in Hyderabad. The changing weather patterns and
improved groundwater access have brought changes to traditional farming
practices in Kothapally. Fields of mostly cotton have diversified to include
water-smart sorghum, maize, pigeon peas, vegetables and also flowers.

Recording the
village's rainfall for the first time has also given key indicators of soil
moisture, to help plan cropping patterns, Rao said. ICRISAT scientists
originally visited the weather station once a month to take readings, he said.
"But we thought of involving the community and moved it inside the school
about a decade ago. Every year, we train children over two days on how to check
the readings. The students are proud now of what they have in school," Rao
said.

Morning drill

When Binkam
Sudhakar joined Kothapally high school as its principal four years ago, he had
never seen a weather station before. Now he considers it the school's best tool
for practical lessons on climate change, a departure from the rote learning
common in the Indian education system. Every morning, before the school
assembly, two students walk to the station with a notebook and pen, pull out
the mobile phone shaped display unit and check rain and temperature readings by
punching a few buttons. They then write the readings on the colorful weather
chart painted on the wall outside the school.

Local farmers say
the daily bulletins are hugely helpful. "This is very important. We check
the rainfall here on our way to work," said Voggu Anjaiah, 50, who owns
six acres of farmland and checks the weather readings every day. "I grow
cotton, bitter gourd, green beans and pigeon peas. Earlier we grew only cotton.
We did not know how much it rained. Now that we do, we understand when the soil
moisture is good and have started growing vegetables," he said.

But with many
farmers illiterate, less than half of village farmers check the weather station
readings like Anjaiah does. Some children read out the information from the
board to their parents who never went to school. Others students share
important updates, such as good rainfall the previous day, when they get home
from school. The young weather recorders believe they are engaged in an
important task. "I never miss my turn," Vamshi said.

Turnaround

When Venkat Reddy
of child rights organization MV Foundation first visited Kothapally in 1991, he
saw vast tracts of dry farmland and children working as laborers. Four years
later, after intensive campaigns involving young people going door-to-door to
urge parents, employers and village council members to send children to school,
Kothapally was declared 'child labor free' by the local government.

"The entire
village came together for its children," Reddy said by phone from the
southern Indian city of Hyderabad. Student numbers improved in the village
primary school, and enough students have stuck with learning that the village
now has both a primary and a high school, which offers classes through tenth
grade. And as more children enrolled in school, the weather station readings
became accessible to more farmers.

"My parents
never made a profit from farming. We were very poor. I was pulled out of school
after tenth grade," said Malleshwar Goud, whose 13-year-old son Gurulingam
is in the ninth grade in the village school. Goud grows pulses, soybeans, maize
and vegetables on his farm and said he is no longer dependent on one yield to
survive the entire year. He said he never checks the weather as his son shares
the readings with him when he returns from school.

Though it was not
planned, Kothapally has become a laboratory for social change experiments,
campaigners and scientists said. Reddy of MV Foundation said his organization
replicated the Kothapally campaign to end child labor across villages in
Telangana and neighboring Andhra Pradesh state, as ICRISAT expanded its
watershed management project to 13 villages in different Indian states. Goud
hopes a good school and better crop yields through the year will protect his
son's future. "He will study until he finds a good job," Goud said.-
Reuters