UriNation: Nitin Gadkari not alone in pee fixation

Union minister Nitin Gadkari has a mind-blowing, organic solution for India’s escalating agricultural crisis: he wants urine to be used for both irrigation and as a fertiliser! Gadkari, in a video uploaded on YouTube by a Marathi newschannel ABP Majha, has waxed eloquent on his experiments with the truth of urine, with his kitchen garden, right across Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s 10 Janpath bungalow, proudly displaying the formidable success of his pee therapy. 

After Baba Ramdev’s Putrajeevak Beej to facilitate birth of male children, Gadkari’s claim may certainly look like a classic case of tradition and individual talent — extending the Sangh Parivar brand of "ancient Hindu" (read "Vedic") answers to all our woes to include the Kingdom Plantae. In January this year, reports on how some wanted government offices to be washed with cow urine, ostensibly to sprinkle the premises with contagious bovine holiness, hit the headlines. Now Gadkari has taken one step further and proffered up a Leak-It-Yourself resolution to the agrarian crisis. Whether sourcing it from compliant cows or hapless humans, the buck stops at the bucket (meant to collect the pee, of course).

While advocates of urine include, famously, former Prime Minister Moraji Desai, and while urine sits at the centre of alternative medicine practiced not just in India, but also in the West (British naturopath John W Armstrong was a big proponent in early 20th century), does Gadkari’s suggestion hold any water (pun intended)? Indians may use urine as an antiseptic or cosmetic, and a number of ancient Hindu texts may laud its pharmaceutical excellence, but the fact of the matter remains that all these claims are unsubstantiated by any modern methods of scientific verification. Assertions that urea in urine is an effective fertiliser are as shaky as proclamations on its value as a beauty secret.

But like everything else in India, the urine debate (and there is a heated one!) remains off-balance. The pee push might sit well in the larger context of the current Indian government trying to give Ayurveda, homeopathy and Unani the same official legitimacy as modern medicine, which is fiercely contested by many in healthcare sector as well as civil society. Moreover, it is very much in the same slant as those unable to stop gushing about the glories of ancient India, deriving every form of sanction and proscription from a literal interpretation of texts written thousands of years ago.

Yet the ambiguity stems from the "conservative" strain in this argument for urine, again literally. This conservatism has to do with the environmentalist streak in organisations like Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which even hopes to one day replace our collective dependence on cola with gau jal (cow water), researched and developed in the holy soil of Haridwar by the Ganga, water contamination levels be damned. 

This miniscule ecological quotient dipped in urine religiosity is laughable in the face of blatant disregard for environmental regulations and laws, especially displayed by the Ministry of Environment and Forests. Giving reckless clearance to questionable industrial projects and giving extremely inadequate compensation to farmers suffering the vagaries of unseasonal rains are, however, no laughing matter. This pseudo-environmentalism and harping on faux tradition has now left the ambit of tolerable quirk and is beginning to affect where it hurts the most vulnerable.