Courtesy of Deepika Kundaji. Bottle gourds growing in the Pebble Garden in Auroville, Tamil Nadu.

Our friends on the east coast (to be specific, in the vicinity of the town where the early scenes of the book and movie, Life of Pi, took place) are at it again with out of this world innovations:

Now that June is right around the corner, farmers and economists in India are anxiously awaiting the arrival of monsoon season, which will bring up to 80 percent of the country’s annual rainfall. They have good reason to worry: with the agriculture sector contributing nearly 15 percent to India’s gross domestic product last fiscal year, a lackluster monsoon could be disastrous for farmers and, in turn, the wider economy.

Residents of Auroville, a utopian international township of 2,000 people just north of Pondicherry, are hoping to free India from the whims of the monsoon and the uncertainties of global warming by experimenting with old-fashioned agricultural techniques to develop drought-resistant crops and underground water reservoirs.

Read the whole post here.