Can Indian farmers be saved? Yes, says an innovative farmer!

By Sanjay Ramakant Tiwari

He shares his firm belief that, -‘Indian farmers are in distress because there is no guarantee for return. Cash crop farmers are the ones taking their own lives. If, after understanding the customers’ needs, they start targeted & direct marketing, they will not need subsidies or loan waivers from the governments. Vegetables that may fetch some twenty thousand rupees in mandi may fetch more than rupees one lac, if sold directly to the customers at their doorstep. The buyers, in return, get these agricultural organic goods farm fresh directly at their doorstep at no extra cost. This is the prime advantage for both if the middlemen system is done away with. The agricultural reform laws have been repealed. Now the Indian farmers have to find an effective solution. If the farmers are to be saved from debt traps and from suicides, the direct marketing model is what needs to be followed.’

He and his farmer friends had created a sort of a flutter when they had bought 300 Maruti 800 cars in one go, some time back. Today one lac fifty six thousand farmers across six states in India are members of  ‘Abhinav’  Shetkari Club, floated by him, which has an annual turnover of rupees four hundred crores.

Dnyaneshwar Bodke is a living hope for Indian farmers, aggressively pushing for direct marketing as the solution for most of the ills plaguing Indian agriculture today.

Swami Ramdev, Shri Ravishankar were among the dignitaries visited the farm. The Abhinav club has received four national awards besides more than two hundred other awards and recognitions.

In a free wheeling discussion with indiainput.com, he shares his journey so far and way ahead.

In search of sustainable farming

This is about a farmer from village ‘Man’, in Pune’s Mulshi tehsil, who broke conventions to find a ray of hope for the beleaguered farmer community.
Born in a marginal farmer’s family, a young Dnyaneshwar Bodke had to walk seven kilometers a day to school, barefoot.  He had seen that even ten acres of a farm could not help  a farmer family earn enough to sustain. He worked in a private job for ten years, leaving home at 6 am daily and returning by 11 pm.

But, in the year 1999, one news report changed his outlook and life. It was about a farmer in Sangli district, who had earned rupees 12 lac practicing polyhouse farming on one thousand square feet area in his small farm. He dialed the farmers no. on a neighbor’s land line phone and spoke to him. The farmer invited him to pay a visit to the farm. Dnyaneshwar could not afford even rupees  fifteen to pay for a state transport bus fare. So he paid rupees five to a milk tanker driver one night to reach Sangli. He recalls, -‘It took me two hours to  locate the said farmer as in our country people may remember a bootlegger’s name and address but no one seems to be aware of farmers in their vicinity. Luckily, I had brought the newspaper clipping and could reach him. He was an eighth standard pass out and a very simple being. I saw his farm and even accompanied him to his bank to confirm his earnings.’

 

Confident, I returned home and announced my plans to leave the twelve hundred rupees monthly salary job. My father was stunned and didn’t talk to me for two months. There was a valid reason. He used to invest rupees thirty five thousand for paddy harvesting and sometimes would get only a few thousand in return.’

Dnyaneshwar was firm on his plans. His father then relented and asked him to get married while on job ‘because people usually do not allow their daughter to marry a poor farmer. They prefer accepting a habitual drunkard as a son in law if he is on some job and is salaried.’

However, Dnyaneshwar revealed his plans well in advance to his would-be in laws and got married upon their consent. He received training in modern Polyhouse farming from a government agency. It was mostly theoretical training rather than practical. Then for a year, he cycled 11km everyday to reach the center and worked for almost free for a year, to gain knowledge and confidence.

Armed with the knowledge, he planned to set up Polyhouse farming in one thousand square feet area. However, the bank made him bring different documents again and again as the ones submitted earlier were going missing. Farmers like him, who went to banks seeking financial support for farm projects, were thus made to feel guilty. For a floriculture project of rupees twelve lacs and fifty thousands, he had to arrange and pay rupees twenty five thousands, an astronomical sum for him then,  to the chartered accountant.

Says Dnyaneshwar, -‘After a long wait, a lot of follow ups and heartburn, my project was finally sanctioned all thanks to a senior officer who thought positively about it. His subordinate had already rejected the proposal. My observation is, our government systems have only about twelve per cent positive thinkers as against eighty eight percent naysayers. The problem is, they all get their salaries every month.’

Direct Marketing yields positive results !

In 1999, Dnyaneshwar Bodke began cultivating decorative flowers like carnations and roses. He explains how he carried out his first project,-‘Right from the inception of my Polyhouse plan, the entire family was skeptical about the project’s success and feared whether we would have to auction our one acre farm for non payment of loan. We all slogged hard for the success of the floriculture project. Usually, flower cultivators begin marketing after the harvest begins and end up in bringing the flowers in the local mandi. Instead, I began marketing a month before the season, tying up with the decorators and the hotels. In Mumbai and Pune flower markets, the supply far outweighed the demand, thus making the farmers suffer. An officer advised me to send flowers to Delhi and gave me telephone numbers. I hadn’t been to Delhi before and had never traveled in a train. I sent my samples on the train.  The buyers liked the quality and offered to pay advance. This was unheard of. My per flower expense was one Rupee eighty six Paise and I gained six Rupees twenty Paise. All the checks and money were being deposited directly to my bank account. ‘

Dnynaeshwar Bodke recounts an interesting incident when a year later, the bank manager paid a visit to the Bodke household and asked for Dnyaneshwar’s father. He says, -‘My father thought the visit was regarding the huge bank loan of rupees twelve lacs and its repayment.  And that probably the family was about to lose the farmland. So my father didn’t come out. Then, the bank manager came in and touched my father’s feet. He offered him sweets as he congratulated us for having paid back the entire loan amount in just one year. It was indeed the beginning of a revolution!’

But, the next year in 2004, due to multiple replication of the model, Bodkhes received losses. He recalls, -‘Then, with National Bank for Agriculture & Rural Development NABARD’s help, we eleven floriculturist farmers came together to form Abhinav farmers’ club and distributed tasks among ourselves. The group swelled to 305 due to good prices. Our collective success made us buy 300 ‘Maruti-800′ cars simultaneously. We also received NABARD’s award for hi tech farming. We also built our houses. That year, as the flower prices witnessed a massive drop, most of us left and our group strength was reduced to 23 members. It was the same time when people started importing cheaper plastic flowers from China, which lasted for years. We decided to shift gears as per changing trends and left the flower cultivation. In floriculture, we had used plenty of chemicals, so now we wanted not to use even a drop of any chemical.’

‘Abhinav Model’ for Indian farmers. 

‘It was also around the same time, a number of malls had begun coming up. Isn’t it ironic that in our country food items like vegetables are sold out in the open, on the footpath while footwears are showcased in air conditioned showrooms? Exotic vegetables fetch ten times more price than the Indian veggies,’ he laughs and continues,-‘One Shri Yogesh Shah of Magnet Hyper markets asked for organic exotic vegetables like Broccoli, Chinese cabbage etc. cultivated without using pesticides and chemicals. He was buying organic vegetables from Bengaluru. The air freight alone charged rupees twenty five per kilo. And our vegetables had a production cost of rupees twelve per kilo only. At the maximum expense of rupees fifty five thousands, we started getting returns of more than rupees two lac forty thousand. But, again multiple replication brought the prices down making sustenance a difficult preposition. When we sold our cherry tomato in London, many others began cultivating the variety and attempting to sell it there. Such blind replication upstages the demand and supply mechanism. This made us think of integrated farming as a foolproof mechanism. This concept involved about twenty five vegetables so that even if prices tumble down for two vegetables, the remaining twenty three could ensure profits. Out of these, about twenty are Indian veggies and four or five are the foreign veggies. People will always need vegetables, fruits, grains and milk. There will always be demand for these four commodities.’

‘It was a simple and straight idea. Controlled farming by way of a shade house or a Polyhouse protects the farmer from the vagaries of nature. In addition, if nature plays truants or plays spoilsport by extra rains, the prices go up and the Shade house or Polyhouse farmers reap the benefit. One acre of plot, about 25 varieties of vegetables, allocation of ten thousand to twenty thousand liters of water, two hours per day electricity supply and the entire family’s daily work for about four hours.  One acre plot was further subdivided into four parts. First part to organically  grow 12 types of native fruits. These included Papaya, Sitaphal, Sweet lemon or Mosambi and Guava etc. Second part for exotic vegetables, third part for growing pulses and the fourth one for leafy vegetables. The goods are selected with proper grading and then packed properly in the packaging system. Then they are delivered using more than a hundred vans, directly at the doorstep of the customers. We talked to housing societies for targeted, direct marketing. Today each one of us sells thirty kilo Indian veggies, ten to twenty liters of milk, exotic veggies around fifteen kilos. This means a daily earning of rupees two thousand to two and a half thousand rupees. Meaning, monthly about seventy to eighty thousand rupees.’

‘Similarly cow milk, cow urine and cow dung are properly commercialized. We use cow urine as an effective sanitizer. Cow dung is used in biogas plants and the remnants are used as organic fertilizer. even doctors have begun prescribing our organic agriculture goods for a healthy lifestyle. The Abhinav Club project became successful, as a not very educated  farmer with as little as one acre land holding, began earning as much per year, as an engineer would.’

‘We have provided employment to women from self help groups (SHGs). Each of the one and a half lac farmers supported by two and a half lac women from self help groups earn from rupees three hundred  to three thousand rupees, daily. All of this system works without middlemen.  We also believe that the farmers must market their own products on their own strength and brand without having to name the big corporations in seeds, or other supplies.’

 

‘We must teach farmers how to calculate the whole production cost, and how to include the manpower expenses in it. We, instead, have taught our farmers to use fertilizers, hire consultants, include the cost for fertilizers and pesticides in the production cost, while forgetting his own labor. Because, equipment or materials by big industries come with supply chain expenses. That’s how the farmers do not get remuneration for their labour and have remained poor while, we keep hearing about farm suicides. How come the companies, their consultants and vendors have gained wealth and are richer while the farmers, they are supposed to serve, have remained poor.’

 

‘Our Market has absolutely no problems. There is no competition for nice products with good quality. We have a waiting of about ten lac customers for our organic vegetables and food grains. There is much less demand for processed food in India as we prefer fresh vegetables. Two years ago, our group sold twenty two thousand boxes of fresh mango fruits while we could not sell twenty two cans of mango pulp. Nobody in the Market Committees asks the farmers about their production cost. They are not interested. farmers can not get wealthy if they keep going to the APMCs.’

‘We give much cheaper vegetables to our  customers at their doorsteps. We provide packaged vegetables and fruits. The medicinal value of the farm product and the related recipes are mentioned on the package. Five hundred housing societies are waiting in Mumbai. farmers are in an economic crisis because there is no guaranteed market. Farmers can not survive without direct selling. We have proved that if we understand the needs of the customers, we don’t need subsidies or loan waivers from the governments.  We have maintained relations with the societies and participate in their activities. If customers start buying directly from their farmers, no farmer will ever think of ending life. If customers buy organic farm produce directly from the farmers, the ‘100 per cent hazardous chemical free’ food will reduce the medical bills drastically.’

‘Biggest problem is finding labor. You may find twenty five people sitting idle in the gram panchayat building. But you won’t find laborers for your farms. They prefer non farming work.  However, children of the farmers from the Abhinav Club are mostly helping their parents in the farming and earning nicely. Graduate boys are driving three wheelers and transporting farm goods. Every farmer must get into controlled farming at least to some extent, to be able to feed his family and sustain.’