Speaker: Dr Madhumita Puri, Founder and Secretary, Society of Child Development, Delhi

March 5, 2023, Sunday

12 noon – 1 pm

• Holi is the most colorful festival of India. 
• The best way to play Holi is to use natural safe colors to protect health and environment. Chemical colors are toxic.
• A campaign “Khelo Holi Naturally” was started many years back by Dept. of Environment, Govt. of Delhi.
• Holi colors can be made with waste flowers from temple. But it took us some time to learn the process, how to convert them into colors and to make them skin friendly. By 2006-2007, we made approximately 20-30 kg of color, but generally people greatly appreciated the idea.
• The Ministry of Environment granted permission for doing it in schools; we did a public awareness program in schools, where 100 schools joined. Flowers were collected from temples and they were taught how to make colors from the waste flowers. The project was for 2 years.
• We started with 20-30 kg, today around 2 tonnes of color are made.
• The recycling of the flowers is done throughout the year. 
• Many individuals and organizations have adopted this method.
• There are around 5k-9k temples in Delhi. We are working towards establishing a conversion process (of the waste temple flowers) in the temple itself.
• We have widened the scope of our work and now we also collect papers from offices, plastic bags, food packaging materials from homes.
• The disabled beneficiaries are taught all techniques of Indian handcrafts.
• This is a triangular approach, where at one point are the disabled people, at the second point are the recyclables, and the third point is climate change (which is negative). The positive thing is income generation and greater public awareness.
• This triangular approach has been beneficial, and it is also a reasonably successful model.

• The work itself is very simple. Collect the flowers, clean them, segregate them, cut them and dry them. It requires discipline that it has to be done everyday
• The eco-friendly and skin-friendly gulals are a wonderful and safe alternative to the synthetic colors that are commonly available.
• We should revive the earlier practices of having regular workshops with temples, meetings and discussions with them.
• Flowers in community can also be sent for composting.
• Flowers at home can be used to make bioenzyme using gur (jaggery) and water. The bioenzyme is used to mopping floors, as plant sprays. Lemon/sweet lime/ orange peels can also be used to prepare the bioenzyme. The proportion is 1:3:10 i.e., 100g jaggery, 300 g lemon, orange, mausami, kinnow and pineapple peels, 1000 ml water).

Participants

Dr Anil Kumar

Dr Dipankar Saha

Ms Ajeeta Agrawal

Ms Nina Gupta

Mr Pradeep Khandelwal

Dr S Sharma