One of WaterAid’s projects in India has found a novel approach to tackle this dilemma and generate income. Their solution lies with worms.

The community living in the Kalmanthai slum in Tiruchirapalli has worked hard to rehabilitate and build communal sanitation blocks for men, women and children.

They have also established water supply projects and credit schemes which they manage themselves.

The slum is adjacent to a wholesale banana market where truckloads of fruit, leaves and stems arrive every day. Discarded produce litters the area. With no proper disposal systems the community groups realised they would have to manage this and the other waste in the slum to ensure they had a clean environment to live in. WaterAid’s partner, Gramalaya, suggested the community ran a pilot vermiculture project.

Vermiculture uses worms in a controlled environment to do what they are best at- converting organic waste into nutrient-rich compost in nature’s way of recycling.

Members of the community groups underwent training and initiated a small-scale trial project investing Rs.2,200 (£29) they had raised from the sanitation blocks. They bought 4,000 red worms, Eisenia foetida, commonly known as the red wiggler or manure worm, which are best suited to composting.

Encouraged by the initial results the community then set up a larger scheme. An area of land by the communal toilet blocks was set aside with a small shed and composting arrangements for the worms.

Now in every 45 day cycle, for an investment of Rs.500, nearly one tonne of compost is produced. The compost is packed in bags and sold for Rs.5 per kilogramme, making nearly Rs.3000 per cycle.

The success has spread to other slum communities and individual households, which are now also carrying out vermiculture projects. The original project now even breeds and sells worms to those wishing to follow its example. But vermiculture isn’t only a solution in urban areas; another of WaterAid’s partners in India, REEDS, is now implementing a large-scale vermiculture project with rural farming communities in Andra Pradesh.

This scheme shows a highly successful and profitable way of waste disposal that provides communities with employment and funds to carry out their own future development work. As the members of the community proudly claim the scheme is ‘generating wealth from waste’.

The Origin of Life
Somewhere, and at some time on this earth, these gases combined together. They took energy from heat and light to form amino acids, the essential chemicals for all forms of life. As earth cooled over millions of years these compounds accumulated within oceans, lakes and ponds to evolve into the simplest forms of life that could reproduce. This is understood as the origin of life. Early life was anaerobic, fermentative and chemoautotrophic. There was no free oxygen in the atmosphere. It was like this for almost 2 billion years.

Photosynthesis
Nature simultaneously was unfolding a new drama. The first photosynthetic bacteria had started appearing in the sea some 3.5 billion years ago. Oxygen started evolving as a by-product of photosynthesis. It took marine photosynthesisers another billion years to enrich the oceans and the atmosphere with enough oxygen and to create the ozone layer. The oxygen poisoned the then predominant life forms, which were anaerobic. Today their descendants survive in obscure, oxygen deficient environments.

Life in the Oceans
Till about 450 millions years ago, life was confined to the oceans. Terrestrial life had not evolved. Marine ecosystems were well developed. There were shallow water and deep-water organisms, floating and swimming and the bottom dwelling. Most of the animal phyla known today were present – except the chordates. The most abundant fossils from the period which was known as the Cambrian were Brachiopods and Arthropods, which were again very different from present day forms. The Trilobites, of which more than a 1000 species have been described from the Cambrian rocks alone formed a diverse group which eventually disappeared about 425 million years ago. The brachiopods and the coelenterates and sponges exist still, though in different forms.

The Great Migration
Early organisms in the oceans critically modified the physical environment by giving earth an oxygen rich environment. This enabled living things to leave the sea and colonise lands. The first forest ecosystems started fringing the shallow seas about 300 million years ago. They were mostly relatives of the present day horsetails, club mosses and ferns. Some were gymnosperms. Angiosperms have appeared just about 75 million years ago.

Our distant ancestors, the amphibians also left the oceans to colonise the lands about 300 million years ago and through a series of evolutionary steps, culminated in the immense biodiversity we witness today. A diversity that has come about with precision and perfection, each species being unique in its own way