I was about to discover the unrelieved and pristine landscape with characteristics of wetlands as well as deserts, The Great Rann of Kutch.
White desert
Indian tribes
November 5, 2019
Arrowheads from Gujarat
November 7, 2019WHITE DESERT
Little Rann of Kutch
A white desert shining like a diamond between the endless Thar Desert and the mighty Arabian Sea, almost entirely within Gujarat along the border with Pakistan.
The Arabian Sea retreated millenniums ago leaving rich deposits of salt under the harsh desert landscape where you can actually hear the sound of a wind scraping along the sand.
This is a home to more than 32 mammals as well as various migratory waterbirds coming all the way from Europe, Siberia and Africa.
Asiatic Wild Ass or “Ghudkhur” falls in the family of ‘equide’ which includes horses, zebras and donkeys and can be found only in the Little Rann of Kutch and Nepal.
You can spot the indigenous Rabari Tribe people dazzling out of a v hypnotic salt desert in a search for water, walking almost 1000 miles from one season to another, eating only when their hordes eat.
A vast saline desert of Little Rann of Kutch was shimmering with the images caused by atmospheric conditions with the landscape stretching as far as the eye can see.
During the monsoon months the Rann of Kutch is submerged in a sea water-land and drys out over the rest of the year when the workers move in to elaborate the process of salt farming.
Salt has been a key symbol of India’s successful achievement of freedom since the Gandhi’s famous Salt March in 1930.
The problem of storing the rainwater was solved centuries ago by descendants of the Pakistani immigrants, now days Gujarati natives.
They have found a unique harvesting system by digging wells and connecting them with pumps…
that brings the saline water from the wells into the drying pans. (approximately 12,192 meters or 40 feet below the crust)
Some 45,000 people with their families are involved as salt workers paid approximately 40- 60 Indian rupees for a bag of salt that weights about 100kg. If I convert 60 Indian rupees for you, that would be less than an euro.
Natives involved in a sea farming working long hours every day under a scorching sun while standing in the salty water with no proper protection…
are suffering from a severe skin inflammations caused by overexposure to the sun as well as being affected by blindness, gangrene and tuberculosis.
Regardless the hard work under the scorching sun, good will and love were bursting out on every step.
“They say a person needs just three things to be truly happy in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for.”
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