Can plants and flowers clean the earth?

By Shirish Joshi

THE concept of utilising plants and flowers to clean the polluted soil around chemical industrial units, abandoned mines and nuclear power plants is called phyto-remediation. It is an incredible technology and its use is spreading fast. Using some plants and flowers to soak heavy poisonous metals from the soil makes sense. It is a lot cheaper than other solutions used currently.

Such plants and flowers which for some unknown reason take up significant amounts of metals like copper, nickel, lead, selenium, uranium and zinc along with other nutrients essential for their normal growth are called hyper-accumulators. They store them in their roots and cells.

Plant researchers in the UK have now understood the process through which these hyper-accumulators absorb large quantities of metals. They have identified vegetables like cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli and brussels sprouts as possible candidates, which could be genetically altered to accumulate these heavy metals in their roots and cells.

Throughout the developed and developing world including India, there are vast tracts of land like abandoned mines, chemical units, metal processing units where the soil has been contaminated with heavy metals like chromium, copper, lead, zinc, nickel or manganese. The traces of these metals have gone deep into the soil. No useful crops grow on them.

As of today, such areas are abandoned or huge amounts of contaminated soil is dug up and treated with chemicals to remove these poisonous metals. The process is both time-taking and expensive.

The agricultural researchers have found that even the most polluted soil is not completely barren. There are some plants, which have evolved to grow in such soils. One group of plants can grow without absorbing these harmful metals from the soil, while the other group can absorb them in their roots and cells and detoxify the soil in the process.

Most plants find nickel to be a very bad material. They refuse to grow in soils, which are rich in nickel. But streptanthus polygaloids, a member of the mustard family, simply loves and grows only in the nickel rich soil. As every one knows nickel and cadmium are highly poisonous. It is not therefore, advisable to discard rechargeable batteries made of nickel and cadmium in the garbage.

Sunflower plant absorbs uranium selectively from the uranium-contaminated soil in its roots. If uranium contaminated water is filtered through sunflower roots, they absorb uranium. Corn and peas are able to absorb lead from the contaminated soil.

Another plant of the mustard family can take up a dangerous form of mercury from the soil and transform it a less harmful form and allow it to evaporate into the air. Onion, garlic, mustard and cabbage are able to remove selenium, another poisonous metal from soil. They also absorb large quantities of boron and cadmium.

The presence of selenium in some soils makes plants growing in those soils poisonous to animals. The soil in Hoshiarpur district of Punjab is rich in selenium. This accumulates in the grass that cattle eat. After some time they refuse to eat, develop cracks on the hooves. Their horns start peeling and bodies and tail loses hair. Within a few months they degenerate and die.

The soils that contain 5 milligram of selenium in 1 kg or above are considered as toxic soils. However, even soil containing 0.1 mg of selenium per kg can produce grass containing toxic levels of selenium. Astragalus racemosus, one of the weeds belonging to the pea family is a selenium accumulator. The plant’s ability to concentrate selenium could be utilised to produce selenium, a metal very much needed as well as useful in electrical and electronic industry,

It may also be possible develop plants with a higher capacity for absorbing metals through genetic engineering. It may also be possible to use genetic engineering to transfer the metal accumulating habit into some plants that grow faster.

But a major snag is that most of these plants are edible ones and consumed by humans and animals. If the metal rich parts of these plants or eaten, it may lead to heavy metal poisoning. As of today lead poisoning caused by lead from tetra ethyl lead in the petrol is a serious problem in metropolitan cities of India. Arsenic poisoning is causing harm in West Bengal.

Mining engineers in the US are planning to extract nickel by this method. They planted I million streptanthus plants in 1 hectare of wasteland rich in nickel when the crop was ready for harvesting they cut and dried them like grass. Finally they burned the dried plants in an incinerator and extracted nickel by leaching the ash, which yielded 15 to 20 per cent nickel by weight. Nickel is an expensive metal and used in making stainless steel, coins and special alloy steels for industry and defence. Traditional mining methods were not economically viable for extracting nickel from such soils. The current price of nickel makes the method profitable. India is very poor in nickel ores.

However, researchers acknowledge that they have much more in depth work to be carried out before the technology can be used to recover these heavy metals from the soil in a commercial way.

Plants may do the job of environmental cleaning for 10 per cent of the cost of traditional methods of decontaminating the soil. A beginning should be made in India to find out plants, which have this metal accumulating habit and develop the technology to country’s advantage.

Despite many limitations scientists feel that clean up in the 21st century may simply be a matter of letting a thousand flowers bloom in the contaminated soils.

Journeying into the Khalsa’s past

By Himmat Singh Gill

LIKE a faint whisper in this wintry air, and little noticed by the rest of their countrymen in India and all its diaspora abroad, an epoch-making multi - media presentation, commemorating the 300th birth anniversary of the Khalsa, was staged at Siri Fort, New Delhi, on November 4 on the auspicious occasion of the Prakash Utsav or birth anniversary of Guru Nanak Dev. Jointly organised and produced by the World Punjabi Organisation, Shobha Shakti Films and Times Music, this high-tech extravaganza of light and sound, drama, video projection, and an audio cassette album set in verse and music titled Bole So Nihal, and encompassing the stirring saga of 500 years of Sikh history of sacrifice and resistance, all provided for a very aesthetic and rousing prologue to the year-long celebrations that are to follow in the coming months in India and wherever every Punjabi resides abroad.

The light and sound show of Bole SoNihal was beamed that evening on BBC, CNN and canned by ‘Punjabi World’ and by early next year, this show would be travelling to Punjab, Chandigarh and the rest of India and the world, highlighting wherever it goes, the universality and rationality of the Sikh faith and its unfailing promise of protection of the downtrodden and the weak in any corner of the world.

Punjab’s history during the course of the last 500 years has been a saga of struggle, sacrifice and eventual glory, against the Afghans, the Moghuls and the British.In this the Khalsa has played a stellar role, unparalleled in the annals of any community or race in the world. Against all odds and against every conceivable depredation and mode of destruction, the Sikhs have shown that they are second to none, when it comes to protecting their country and people. Their unflinching bravery and loyalty to the land of their birth has always in the end earned them the country’s thanks and gratefulness. The double cassette album, Bole So Nihal is devoted to the birth and history of the Khalsa up to the reign of the British, and contains 28 compositions including those of renowned saints and lyricists.

The esteemed gurbani of Guru Nanak Devj Haon papi toon bakshankar, Deh Siva bar, Guru Arjan Dev Bisar gaye sabh, Toon mera pita, and compositions by contemporary lyricists like Surjit Patar Jad Shahi talwar ne, Shah Mohammad Mahabali Ranjit Singh, and Kartar Singh Sarabha Hind wasio, besides every other offering in this memorable collection set in a devotional mood, are going to skyrocket this album to an all-time new height of popularity.Guru Gobind Singh’s Mittar Piyare nu, and Khalsa mero roop, sung by Sardar Bhupinder Singh and Balwinder Singh Rangila, respectively, are classic examples of poetic wizardry and the sombre moods of the time, besides some exceptionally mellow Gurbani by the two ragis.

Mahendra Kapoor, Bhai Dilbagh Singh, Hans Raj Hans, Surinder Chhinda, Satnam Mullanpuri and Jayshree Shivram are some of the other well-known singers who have lent their voices to the shabads and lyrics.

What is most pleasing and appropriate is that this album also includes a 64-page booklet with the complete text of the songs and shabads in the album in the Punjabi language, and a large number of colourful photographic plates and rare paintings of historic value, not normally seen in most publications today. The complete ensemble of Bole So Nihal has been written, produced and directed by Harcharan Singh and Latta Harbux Singh, a "Shiromani Nirmata" award winner of the Punjab Government. The music director is H.M. Singh. They, along with the three co-producers of this historical flashback, deserve our thanks for bringing up centrestage, a psychedelic offering of the Khalsa’s birth and search for spiritual and temporal excellence in this world.

It is never easy to juxtapose events of one era and age, into the medium of the video in the present times. Yet, the producers have effectively succeeded in doing this too, and Om Puri, Raj Babbar and Dara Singh play Malik Bhago, Wazir Khan and Massa Rangarh of yore. Cycloramas, smoke and wind machines, fireworks and the firing of guns have all been meshed in together to recreate the battles and the turbulent times when the Khalsa, on one end of the fulcrum, was battling for its very survival, and on the other, was at the very peak of all its majesty and glory during the reign of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. The producers have done a fine job depicting every segment of the Khalsa’s short (in terms of other religions) history.

Bole So Nihal celebrates the goodness and the glory of the Gurus and the pathbreaking sacrifices of their followers, the Panth in fighting the oppressors and the wrong-doers.