Dear Friends,
For over three decades Navdanya has been conserving and rejuvenating nature’s immensely biodiverse food basket and our vibrantly rich cultural diversity. For us, at Navdanya, food, its production, its transformation and its distribution, is a matter of celebration of our crop diversity and our food cultural diversity.
Navdanya takes this opportunity to inform you about the festivals around the biodiversity and food heritage of India which we plan to organise at the Navdanya Food stall 18 in Dilli Haat (opp INA). This year to celebrate 2020, we are organising our first festival, Akshat, from the 22nd to 29th of February.
We would like to welcome you to our Akshat festival to celebrate with us the abundance of akshat and all that it gives us while savouring its goodness in all its diversity, across various dishes and processed foods.
Rice, akshat is a symbol of prana, breath and prosperity. For thousands of years akshat has had a cultural resonance in Indian ethos. Each traditional variety has its own traditional and cultural significance. Festivals related to the different agricultural aspects in the village communities are associated with akshat.
Akshat has its origin in the Indian soil as the term sativa indica indicates; it has been weaving the cultural and social fabric of India since millennia.
From a wild aquatic grass, Indian farmers, over the centuries, selected and cultivated thousands of varieties of rice. The varietal diversity of cultivated rice in India can be considered to be the richest in the world, a diversity of 2,00,000 varieties. Navdanya farmers have conserved more than 4000 of these varieties.
Our program is as follows:
22nd - 29th February: Come and enjoy special diverse and festive dishes made from indigenous rice
25th to 27th February: Come and watch our Navdanya women farmers from Bengal & Odisha as they make moori; alpana and delicious savoury and sweet dishes from rice.
28th -29th February: As we come to a close, we will serve you all the various delicacies prepared during the Akshat festival.
Write to us at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. , 9650665663
For more information: www.navdanya.org/site ; @NavdanyaBija
