Nitin Gadkari leaks his gardening secret, says 'I use my urine on plants'

NEW DELHI: After former Prime Minister Morarji Desai, India now has another politician rooting for the beneficial effects of urine. While Desai is said to have used it for personal fortification, road transport minister Nitin Gadkari has vouched for the magical transformation in his plants after a little dose of urine therapy.

Gadkari, who as a Cabinet minister lives in a sprawling bungalow in the capital's Lutyens' zone with space to spare for a spot of farming, has claimed that he experimented watering plants with urine at his official residence, opposite the house of Congress president Sonia Gandhi. He said he used his own urine on the plants and they grew one-and-a-half times more.

"I started storing my urine in a plastic can. After collecting it in a 50-litre can ... I have a big bungalow in Delhi. It used to be Sonia Gandhi's bungalow. There is a one acre field (for farming) in the bungalow. There are a lot of trees there. So one day, I called the gardener and instructed him to water some plants with this. And I'm telling you, there was so much difference, the trees grew one-and-a-half feet more than other plants," Gadkari said while confessing to some "awkwardness" in talking about his experiment.

He was talking at a workshop on fighting drought organized by BJP in his hometown Nagpur on Sunday.

Claiming that there was a scientific reason behind this, Gadkari said urine had abundant urea and nitrogen compounds, which nourished plants. He said urine could emerge as a cheap alternative to fertilizer.

While cow urine mixed with certain other things have been traditionally used in agriculture, this could be probably the first time that someone has advocated human urine as a nutritional supplement for plants.

As happens instantaneously these days, social media was awash with snide remarks. Twitter hashtag 'GadkariLeaks' saw a torrent of comments. One said, "PM says pee in toilets. #Gadkari says pee in the garden. The nation wants to know where to pee."

Another said, "The Modi govt has renamed many schemes but no word yet on changing Small-Scale Irrigation Scheme to Nitin Gadkari Laghu Sinchaai Pariyojana."

Another posted the picture of a tree, calling it Gadkari's outdoor washroom, while yet another post said, "Nitin Gadkari leaks farm policy, shares with farmers urine's fertilizing powers."