All my life I’d believed farming was the world’s most dead-end job. My grandparents on both sides were farmers in drought-prone Telangana who spent their lifetimes driving their children out of their farms. They were in search of what my grandmother memorably described as the “gentle-mental” comforts—an assured income, a home with modern amenities, a car, public school education—things one couldn’t afford by mere farming. Since then, the family resolutely turned its face from the land, taking up jobs as doctors, engineers, bankers, lawyers, moving ever outwards, from village to town to city, across the country, beyond oceans, chasing the good life.
And then, last month, I met Santosh Jadav. He looks like your average business entrepreneur from a small town: a matric pass, in his mid-thirties, dressed in sandals, trousers and a bush shirt, his BlackBerry like an extended limb. The kind of man who gets ushered straight into the bank manager’s office, reads nothing but trade journals and newspapers, and rarely speaks unless it’s shoptalk about phosphates and nitrates, hybrid seeds, drips, netajets, risbeds and, lately, biotech advances in agriculture. A well-travelled man, as comfortable riding in an airplane as on his tractor, whose annual income is in the range of Rs 70-80 lakh. A farmer from Bahirgaon village in Aurangabad district, who overturned all my city-bred assumptions about those losers with feet planted on parched fields, staring beseechingly upwards at a relentlessly cloudless sky.
Bahirgaon itself is a village like no other I’ve ever visited, straight out of A.P.J. Abdul Kalam’s vision of the future: all the 381 families (population: 2,082) there have their own homes, fitted with toilets and piped water. Besides a high school and a primary health centre, the village boasts of a common ghat where women wash clothes and the used water is piped back into the fields, banking services, a garbage collection centre, a community cattle shed, rainwater harvesting, a group collection and marketing system for their farm produce, trucks travelling daily to deposit the villagers’ harvest in the region’s best markets. There’s even a ‘knowledge centre,’ with an internet facility that actually works, although, as one villager admits, it’s probably more to impress visitors than for regular updates on farm prices and weather. For that, villagers prefer to use their cellphones, and there is probably not a single farmer in Bahirgaon, even those who own less than an acre, who can’t tell you today’s price of onions in markets anywhere across the country.
In theory, the knowledge centre is also supposed to provide video screening of good farm practices, but villagers prefer a more hands-on method of learning: they simply get on their mobikes and visit any farmer in the vicinity of 350 km who they think can teach them something, whether it is better technology, new crops, innovative irrigation or marketing. Every few months, whenever they can take a few days off from farming, they travel even further, to agricultural universities in Madhya Pradesh or Hyderabad, to study the markets for farm produce in Bangalore or perhaps a ginger processing plant in Mysore. That’s how Santosh Jadav landed up one day in 1996 in Raipur, Chhattisgarh, at the 1,000-acre farm run by Narayanbhai Chawda and his son, Vimal, in Gomchi, 18 km from Raipur.
What he was after, Santosh now confesses, is a solution to his perennial labour problem. “I read in the newspaper about the Chawdas’ huge farm and wondered: if I can’t manage to find labour for our farm, how do the Chawdas do it with a farm ten times the size of ours?” So he, along with a few of his friends, all farmers in the vicinity, jumped on a train and landed at the Chawdas’ farm 24 hours later. Santosh is a little taken aback when I wonder how you can drop into a stranger’s farm, that too in another state, without any warning. “But that’s what farmers do,” he explains. “Nobody minds—if the farmer is there in his fields, he takes you around, and if he’s not there, you go over his fields, see what he’s doing and come back.”
And indeed, within the next 15 minutes, a party of five farmers from Latur descend unexpectedly on Santosh’s farm. They’ve heard of his phenomenal success growing ginger and have driven 350 km to learn how he grows ginger without rot setting in. Santosh takes them around the ten acres he’s recently acquired outside his village, showing them the high beds of soil on which the ginger is planted, the computer-controlled drip system that delivers accurate doses of pesticide and fertiliser through a drip system marketed by an Israeli company. The visitors examine the soil, crumble it on their palms, finger a leaf, discuss the benefits of mixing organic manure with chemical fertilisers, compare their yield to Santosh’s and leave. No tea, no small talk, not even an introduction or farewell.
Ginger, I soon discover, is the new hope among farmers here—red gold. Apart from the handsome profits, ginger’s usp is that you can leave it under the soil for as long as the price in the market isn’t right. A sort of free cold storage, only better—instead of rotting when its time is up, it multiplies. And thanks to the new technology he picked up at the Chawdas’ farm, Santosh has been able to increase his ginger yield from 5-10 tonnes per acre to a whopping 30-35 tonnes. It was a field trip that more than paid off.
Farmers are scripting a story of success (Photograph by Apoorva Salkade)
With news of Santosh’s success spreading, the Chawdas have also become a legend in the state. There’s not a farmer we met on our day’s journey through two districts who hasn’t heard of the father-and-son team in Chhattisgarh. In fact, when Santosh invited Vimal Chawda to Bahirgaon two years ago, over 5,000 farmers from across the state flocked to the village to hear him talk about the new technology that is transforming farming across the country.
The Chawdas themselves have been on the move for at least three generations. The family is originally from a village in Kutch, Gujarat, where Narayanbhai’s father, Monji Chawda, owned five acres. A prolonged drought in the 1940s forced the villagers to flee their land in search of work. Monji landed up in what is now Bangladesh, building bridges for a contractor. An acolyte of Gandhi, Monji gave up his job as a petty contractor to open a rice mill in Raipur in 1942 to fight the food shortage during the War. Eventually, he bought ten acres of land and decided to be a farmer, declaring that was the only honest vocation he could think of. And unlike most parents of his time, when his son, Narayanbhai, quit engineering college to join an agricultural college, he rejoiced.
One of the first ‘degree wallah farmers’ in the country, Narayanbhai is a ceaseless innovator, has been adapting technology from anywhere in the world he’s heard or read about. One of the first trips he made abroad was to Japan. Landing in Tokyo without a word of Japanese, he somehow found his way to the nearest rice farm, returning from the encounter with an improved method of rice planting.
Exchanges like this, between farmers enthusiastic to experiment with farm technology available anywhere in the world, are becoming increasingly common. Over the last two decades, for instance, Narayanbhai and his son, Vimal, have visited farmers in Israel, Taiwan, Korea, Thailand, Philippines, South Africa and Australia. In their turn, the father-and-son team of ‘agri-entrepreneurs’, as they describe themselves, have received thousands of farmers in Gomchi, eager to learn and adopt their new farm technology. Vimal estimates that some 72,000 farmers have visited Gomchi in the last 12 years, arriving from villages in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh to learn the latest technology from them.
The incentive for all this rushing about the countryside comparing notes and enthusiastic visits to agri-expos abroad is undoubtedly the profits. Farmers estimate that by using new technology, they can increase profitability anywhere from Rs 10,000 to Rs 1 lakh per acre. Innumerable farmers’ clubs are springing up in the area—squads of five or ten farmers setting off on their mobikes whenever they hear of a farmer’s success with a new crop or new technology. And you can see the new affluence. At one of the farms we stopped for lunch, there were two trucks, two cars (one of them a brand new Swift) and four tractors parked outside the barn. It’s another matter that when we asked to use the toilet, we were pointed to the fields.
But to be fair, it’s not just the money that these men are after. You can’t, for instance, meet Tukaram Patil, 83, and not be struck by his passion to learn, the willingness to experiment, the courage to take risks, the leap of faith—all unmistakable and somehow familiar. Seven years ago, when his son wanted to build a mega water tank inspired by an Israeli model on five acres of their farm, Tukaram swallowed his fear and asked his son to go ahead. Even as neighbours jeered at them, predicting that they would eventually have to drown themselves in the ditch they were digging, Tukaram’s nerve didn’t give way. It took only a year to prove their neighbours wrong: the tank, with a storage capacity of 6 crore litres, changed their fortunes forever, enabling them not only to grow whatever crops they wished, but increasing their produce—and profits—tenfolds.
Tukaram’s son has bought a new Ford, runs a home in Aurangabad, 100 km away, for his children’s schooling, but the old man hasn’t changed. In his dhoti, shirt and white cloth topi, he’s very much himself—rising early to go to his fields and settling down at dusk to discuss the latest farm news with his neighbours. In fact, it’s Tukaram—the farmer who had never heard of turning his prime farm land into a water reservoir—who has now come up with a significant improvement to it that will save on wear and tear of the tank’s plastic lining. Some things, he explains, you don’t learn from books. There’s something about him that reminds me of my own grandparents—that same animation when the talk is of farming.
