At The Salt Pans

Have you ever wondered where the most important ingredient in your food - salt - comes from? How it is produced? Gone beyond the packet picked up from the shelf?
I have been very intimately associated with salt as a kid. We have our own salt pans, where we produce salt from the sea. As a kid, mostly in the afternoons, I would walk to the market 15 min away, hire a bicycle (it cost one paisa per min) and peddle to the salt pan (another 15-20 mins), and help in closing a deal - either sell on the spot to one of the many local tempos, or give a "bill" to the truck which took the 160 bags (four tins each) to Hubli or Belgaum.

So how does salt get produced? The idea is to take in sea water from a small sluice gate into a large "field", where water is routed from one pan to the other, from the outer periphery into the inner core. At each pan, each stage of the "jigsaw", the water gets heated and progressively concentrated. Finally, in the heat of the afternoon, in the summer months, in the inner most cores of the pan, the water evaporates almost completely and the "salt" is concentrated enough to crystallize and can be "gathered" using long, flat implements and brought to shore from where it is packed and exported.

The government has now made it compulsory for the salt to be refined, and iodized, before it is sold for human consumption. Hence, our salt is primarily sold for non-consumption uses like ice factories and manure.

Note: Salt is also mined from the land. This is called rock salt, and has different properties than sea salt.

Here are some pictures from our visit to the salt pan last week in Goa. I should have got some more relevant pictures, as it applies to the process of salt production - but it was a day off for the workers, and all activities were off for the day. Maybe next time...