India: Organics increasingly available in Mumbai

The citizens of Mumbai are going organic, and the number of stores selling organic products in the city is growing. Naturally Yours, for example, is a retail organic outlet in Chembur, Central Mumbai, and offers free organic home deliveries of fruit and vegetables all over the city, Newsy Stocks reports. The company is a venture of Satvika Bio-foods, which believes in promoting natural and organic products and services.

Mumbai's first weekly organic farmers' market was inaugurated in March 2010. It is promoting natural foods and helping farmers to directly sell to their customers. The market will restart after the monsoon season on October 3, and be continued on a weekly basis on Sundays. Eco-nutritionist Kavita Mukhi, the pioneer of this market, believes that direct selling by farmers to consumers will yield them better prices. Response was good, but there was still a way to go, according to Kavita. She added it was not easy for farmers in India to get organic certification for their produce especially when standards for hygiene maintenance and transportation were high and when there was a lot of paperwork involved.

Conscious Food, an organic company based in Mumbai, sources its natural and organic products from small organic farms and farming communities all over the country. Niranjan Deshpande, supervisor of Godrej Naturebasket at Lokhandwala in the western suburbs, said people came to their store to specifically buy organic groceries such as brown rice, raw sugar, sesame oil, brown rice poha, Conscious Food whole wheat flour, and flax seeds, for example. Reetha Balsavar, director of the organic shop Navdanya, which was launched in December 2006 in Andheri in the western suburbs of Mumbai, remarked that their clientele had grown steadily over the years and that there were four different categories of clients: young mothers; people who had had a taste of organic lifestyle abroad and wanted to continue back home; people who had been seriously ill, or had had a family member affected by serious illness, and those who were eco conscious. According to Urvashi Mody, partner of Eco Corner, an organic store in Phoenix Mills, Mumbai, it will take long for every individual of the city to understand the value of an eco- friendly lifestyle but there was large scale awareness already.  (Picture: Navdanya Shop in India)
 

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