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| Photo 1 |
“Soil salinity is often an issue in the land, due to the presence of high calcium and sodium salts, and we use gypsum to dilute it. Phosphogypsum is a waste from the phosphotic fertilizer industry that we actually put to some good use here. Sometimes we use microbes as an alternative though”, spoke Dr. Damodaran.
The hummer crossed a barren patch of rock and soil, a stark contrast from the greener parts of the countryside we had been traversing during the day. It had been a fair very many years since I’d made a road trip like this in India , and a first to the eastern precincts of the Sitapur district in the Lucknow division. Dr. Damodaran, a scientist in the Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR) was guiding us through the journey as he narrated his work in the villages we were headed to for an inspection.
We were in fact 45 kilometers outside Lucknow at the cross-over point between the Barabanki and Sitapur zilas, navigating through the kuccha tracts of dust-laden lands in the Cow belt, with the best speed a vehicle could impart to itself, as dirt blew up into mini-tornadoes while we moved from one zila to another. Apart from the intense green patches of grassy farms we would cross one after the other, or the seemingly tired shops, haunts and dhabbas, the ride seemed to last as long as the incandescent sun. It was a hotter day than most warm winter days are expected to be, yet there were colder chills we encountered as we passed the shade of thick verdant trees and roadways occasionally spotted by the shadows of narrow girths of trees and houses.
About two hours from the time we had started, we start to pull into the first set of villages which had been affected by the project that is run by my father-in-law. We came to halt against an arid rock, which stood juxtaposed against contrasting green fields that filled up to the horizon. The fields were subdivided into different tracts, each with an apportioned usage of its own. We were met here by Ram Kumar Singh, an old farmer who wore a tired face, whose scrawny creases of age did not defy the struggle they have survived through a poor man’s lifetime. He greeted us with a deferent namaste. He hosted a half-worried look about him, which appeared to be his general state of mind. Nonetheless he also seemed happy that someone had come to meet him, and was obliging to say the least. Dr. Damodaran started to speak directly to Ram Kumar, addressing him in a pally manner, as if it were an old friends reunion.
“Aur Ram Kumar kya haal chaal? Kaise ho?” (How are you Ram Kumar? How are things!)
“Theek hoon sir” (I’m OK, sir)
“Kaise aa rahi hai fasal aaj kal. Pehle se koi improvement hui”? (How is the crop production these days? Any improvement from before?)
“Ji, thodi si, lekin jaanwaron se pareshaan hain” (Yes, a little bit, but the animals have created havoc here)
“Aapka beta kahan hai? Woh aaj bhi nahin dikhai de raha ?” (Where is your son? He isn’t here today also?)
Ram Kumar Singh hung his head. His silence spoke of his sons, one of whom had abandoned the farm to move to the city to find better paying work, and the other who remained a bum, unempathetic towards the cause of the land. Migrant workers shifting from the village to city is not a new phenomenon, but the pace at which it had picked recently was unprecedented. Many such farmers like Ram Kumar feared for their future as well as the future of their land and agriculture, having lost their younger generations to the dust.
“Aap batao boodha aadmi kitna kare”. (You tell me, what’s an old man to do).
Damodaran switched from his friendly tone to one of urgency and chiding.
“Aapko sab apne haathon mein lena padega! Aap aise do saal ki mehnet ko mitti mein nahin mila sakte! Aapko bandaron ko dur rakhna hoga. Aap apne doorse bete ko jhado aur use kaam pe lagao. Aapko…”(You have to take this in your hands, you can’t let the last 2 years of hard work go to waste like this. You need to keep the monkeys out. You need to get the other son and put him to task. You have to....)
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| Photo 2 |
We gaze over to the ploughed land that the two men are discussing and there is clear evidence of destruction - fruit has been torn away, vegetation destroyed. The monkeys and deers come out into the open everyday and infringe upon them, ripping them apart and undoing any cultivation. Because the nilgaya (a variety of deer) comes with the namesake ‘gaya’ (cow) in its name, the farmers are forbidden by the village rituals to restrict them, touch them, drive or keep them away. The animal has nothing to do with being bovine yet it continues to be associated with the sacred cow by mere coincidence of nomenclature. A cow’s status in a Hindu society cannot be messed with. Such is the collective naivety of the village farmers, that a problem which has been persisting for several years has turned its head into their self-destruction, all for the preservation of a sacrosanct ritual that in reality does not even technically apply.
This was but a snapshot of the many everyday challenges that the scientific advisory team to the farmers faces in dealing with their local problems and in wringing them out of their misery. In the past few years, the Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR) - an apex national institute dedicated to agriculture research and education - had set up a National Agricultural Innovation Project (NAIP) through the World Bank’s assistance. Under it was a program to implement livestock-based farming, one of its many diverse initiatives to improve the livelihood security of poor farmers in Uttar Pradesh. My father-in-law Dr. R.B Rai, who leads some of the directives for sustainable agriculture in northern India at ICAR, is a Principal Research Scientist at the institute. In narrating the success story of his program’s impact in the Raebareli and Barabanki districts of U.P, he tells me of the erstwhile disadvantageous position of the landless farmers who were so poor that they could not afford three Rs. 3/- meals a day (Rs. 3 amounts to 4 cents). For those who did possess marginal pieces of land, lack of diversification, poor seed replacement, mono-cropping, and the inability to afford fertilizers, irrigation and weed management were major impediments to their travails. Common water bodies were extremely polluted, and there was no commercial activity surrounding livestock production. Additionally, the abundance of nilgai and monkeys were a constant threat to their farmlands.
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| Photo 3 |
The need to create sustainable livelihood security for the landless, marginal and small farmers was paramount in this situation. At the same time, Dr. Rai’s team(comprising 6 scientists across various ICAR institutes) realized that larger scale farmers could also be targeted for increasing their levels of productivity and profitability. Even in the latter’s case, there were several inefficiencies, since a sole agricultural or livestock component taken alone would witness high productivity for 2-3 years but then reach its limits and take its toll, leading to sharp drops in profitability later, eventually making these farmers desperate. Hence the task at hand for ICAR scientists was to create avenues for short, medium and as well as long term livelihood security in the chosen pockets of operation.
On the field, the team introduced a modified form of poultry production for the landless where regular chick supply (dual-purpose backyard breeds) was supplemented with an in-situ azolla cultivation. Azolla, a plant increasingly used in sustainable production of livestock feed, acts also as a biofertilizer. The poultry showed significantly higher rate of growth and egg production with the modified diet. Hens in batches of 25-50 supplied to each family required only night shelter and open grazing. With the in-situ azolla cultivation, the poultry would quickly attain about 1-1.5 kg of body weight and start egg laying within 6 months. As my father-in-law explained later, poultry production has been repeatedly proven as one of the best tools in eradicating poverty in farming societies, even in post-disaster livelihood conditions due to its non-dependence on many resources. Such schemes have been excellent avenues to kick-start the local primary industry in any impoverished area with minimal resources with the aid of basic intervention. However, they have seen limited success due to the lack of similar initiatives and awareness on a larger scale.
On the farming front, low cost vegetable production - seasonal and off-seasonal - integrated with composting, vermicomposting, in-house production of Trichoderma and Pseudomonads (bio-fertilizers and bio-pesticides) was encouraged for the small and marginal farm holdings. At literally zero cost, this saved about Rs 5,000 per hectare per year on the cost of fertilizers and fungicides. The home-made preparation reduced damage by pests, improved the quality, quantity and profits of farmers significantly .
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| Photo 4 |
For the initial groundwork and strategy development, Dr. Rai’s team assessed and surveyed 42 villages, which were broken down into four clusters and were examined in the area to assess the status of farming, livelihood analysis and technological intervention needed to lift the population out of poverty. Barabanki has 52% of its population below the poverty line (defined as per capita income less than 300 rupees per month). Farmers were chosen as representatives based on their willingness to learn and were organized into groups to socially encourage response and motivation. A Farmers Association in Terra village in Raebareli was formed - it now shares farming inputs among the cultivators and even has direct linkages to modern markets where produce is sold.
The cumulative progress indicator of the sum total of all these efforts has been fairly impressive. Improvements in the family incomes of landless laborers who reported a 308% increase, followed by small (292%) and marginal farmers (231%) have been observed. Germplasm and animal breeding have become well adopted with a 30-50% increase in production and an additional integrated health management scheme has proven to lower mortality by almost 70%. In terms of absolute numbers there is still much that remains to be done, but they mark a significant uptick considering the conditions the farmers had been living in previously.
Taking a step back, one needs to review the basic tenet of sustainable agriculture - small scale farming managed and run by individual farmers on their own land holdings in a holistic integrated eco-friendly manner. This directly leads to at least three advantages. Firstly, it has been shown that small farms are more efficient than large farms and that land productivity(per unit area) is higher in them. Secondly, it employs more labor per unit area of land than larger conventional farming methods, increasing employability and per capita wages. Thirdly, it promotes local markets and local consumption of produce, reducing overhead costs of transportation and storage, and an overall increase in access to quality food and nutrition in the community.
However, despite the prevalence of success stories as those revealed by Dr. Rai’s team and the promise of sustainable agriculture, including its importance in alleviating poverty by providing a means for sustainable development across the rural sector, widespread adoption of organic farming practices across the nation has indeed still been extremely slow and idiosyncratic.
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| Photo 5 |
Organic farming being a marketing buzzword in the US, it is worth noting that poor farmers in India, in fact, do practice organic farming by default since they possess small holdings and use traditional chemical-free methods. However, many lack the scientific know-how to build an ecosystem of farm production combining the use of biofertilizers, vermicompost, mixed cropping, scientific nutrient and watershed management to realize the true potential of their land holdings. Whereas conventional farming had driven many farmers to take on loans and succumb to an endless cycle of debt culminating in eventual suicides on a massive scale, marginal farmers are not even able to eke out a living by any remotely modest means.
Indian agriculture employs nearly 65% of the overall population, particularly the rural areas where most people depend either directly or indirectly on farming for their livelihood. Thus, despite India’s meteoric rise as an Asian superpower and over its recent boom in the last decade in the industrial, telecom and technological sectors, at the end of the day she remains primarily an agriculture based economy, if purely by social constitution and scale. Government policy and reform has not caught up with the recent advances in the sustainable agriculture space, despite the purported agenda of food grain self-sufficiency following the success - and eventually the plateau and decline - of the Green Revolution. Slowdown in agricultural productivity, which started in the 1990’s has worsened considerably in the last decade with declining soil fertility, changing land constitutions due to overuse of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, excessive irrigation and economic and ecologically unsustainable practices geared purely towards large-scale conventional farming outputs.
As a matter of priority, the government and external agencies need to develop extension services to increase the knowledge base of farmers regarding scientific approaches to organic farming. Many more research initiatives demonstrating the utility of conversion need to be undertaken and lead the communities by example. Since the vagaries of every land, soil and community are indigenous as is the social structure, diverse tailored grassroots initiatives need to be organized and promoted in different locales and regions en masse. Besides providing financial subsidies to help small scale farmers cover the initial cost of conversion to organic agriculture, strengthening of internal linkages to improve the interaction of buyers and sellers, wholesalers and retailers needs to be encouraged through development planning and policy.
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| Photo 6 |
We visited two other villages on our route back to Lucknow that day, both of which were direct beneficiaries of the project my father-in-law ran. In the first village, we learnt of an initiative to switch farmers from sole wheat production to a combination of grain, cash crops and flowers. It was mid-January and Valentine’s day, a nouveau urban craze was not too far out. A number of farming families were visibly upbeat at the prospect of getting better margins selling tulips and lilies, the demand for which had increased manifold in nearby cities in recent years. In the second village, we stopped by the house of a farmer who had insisted that we meet him and his family. He had started off with barely nothing and now owing to the gains of the project in recent years, owned nearly half a dozen milk producing buffaloes in addition to a fairly spacious abode with a central courtyard, in which he lived with his extended family. We were ushered in their house and were informed that hot chai was in the works. I ambled around the courtyard and noticed a group of women in traditional attire scurrying around the kitchen. Promptly one of them, a girl in her early twenties came up to me and introduced herself.
“Hamara naam Gauri hai” (Hi, my name is Gauri)
I nodded with a smile and an amiable namaste. We chatted aimlessly, as I was unsure how to kickstart the conversation. Then at one point she started narrating her story and informed about how she had just finished her BA degree and commuted by bus daily to the neighboring village to teach in a school. She said she wanted to do her MA next. I was impressed and perceptibly so.
“Suna hai aap America mein rehti hein” (I heard you live in the US)
I smiled again and nodded. There was silence. Perhaps she expected me to say something.
“Acchi jagah hai yeh. Bahut sundar” (This is a nice place. Very pretty) - I commented, referring to the fine expanse of green fields that we had just encountered en route to the village.
Suddenly, she gave me a look of incredulity.
“Acchi? Yahan kya accha hai? !” (Good? What’s so good about here?) , she exclaimed.
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| Photo 7 |
The chai arrived in a mini steel cup, and I started sipping it. It was too milky and way too sugary than I could ever get used to. I started putting it down, but the woman who had bought it looked alarmed when she sensed I wasn't going to finish it. She bit the edge of her dupatta which covered her head, and her eyebrows furrowed up. I didn't want her to go make the chai all over again, so I picked up the cup again and sipped it, slowly this time.
I thought Gauri would continue talking but she didnt. Then, after a while, she asked candidly"America kaisa hai”? (How is America?)
I didn't know how to respond to the query. Its the kind of question that is usually loaded with some context. But for once, I could make nothing of it. I didn’t know where to begin or where to end.
I must've mumbled something when my father-in-law came over and announced that we were ready to leave.
As we walked back, I glanced around the room of the entrance for the first time. It was empty for the most part, except for two outsize jutesacks filled with rice lying in the corner.