And the rain came down

It's the end of my first day of field trips, and I'm absolutely shattered. We've spent today visiting the silk weavers who have been on the sharp end of a whole combination of effects that I am still struggling to understand. My only consolation is that an easy answer wouldn't make for a very interesting article - and one of the few things I can say with any confidence right now is that there isn't one. It hasn't just been weaving I've seen today, however, as we've also witnessed the attempts of rural people to find alternative forms of employment. The marigolds pictured above are always in demand in Varanasi, this holiest of Hindu cities and within striking distance of Sarnath, a Buddhist pilgrimage site as the location where Buddha delivered his first teaching, and with new farming techniques they are able to be grown all year round.

It has rained pretty constantly today, which is good news for the 60% of India's workforce who are employed in the agriculture sector and have been hard hit by the lacklustre monsoon season. While visiting the rural communities today however I was reminded that while so many people make their living off the land, agriculture accounts for just 18% of Indian GDP, down from 30% in 1990 as this Economist article on the monsoon season points out.

The rain was bad news, however, for Peter Caton, the photographer who's accompanying me for this piece. His mind-bogglingly expensive cameras are not a big fan of wet weather, and storm clouds don't make for good lighting, but tomorrow is another day and we can only hope one of them has a silver lining so that the incredibly generous and hard-working weavers I've met today get a portrait that does them justice.