- Joined
- Jul 23, 2009
- Messages
- 3,489
- Likes
- 1,559
The onset of summer in the Saurashtra region of Gujarat can be a frightening prospect. The rocky terrain of low hills and the semi-arid plains begin to radiate immense heat. Rivers and wells dry up in tandem. Water shortage looms large and the memory of the severe drought of 1999-2000 returns to haunt. God bless the man who tries to indulge in cultivation of crops in these parts.
But that’s exactly what hundreds of farmers do several times a year in the heart of this unfriendly terrain. Wheat, cotton, banana, papaya, sugarcane, tomatoes and a variety of other crops sprout all over, erasing forever the cliché of Saurashtra being a parched expanse.
Today, one can spot crops that weren’t grown in these parts just four or five years ago. In Adtala village, farmer Vallabhai Patel, who was previously cultivating cotton, grows papayas. With a limited supply of water, he got plentiful yield.
In Sarangpur, also in Saurashtra, Swami Arunibhagat is surely a God-blessed man. A leader of the liberal religious group, Swaminarayan Movement, he has converted 175 acres of dry land into a lush haven for sugarcane, tomatoes and genetically modified cotton. He has achieved record yields that have attracted farmers from more fertile lands to come and learn how he did it. It almost looks like a miracle wrought by Lord Hanuman of the famous temple in Sarangpur.
The swamiji is not alone. The entire region of Saurashtra, along with neighbouring Kutch, a half-desert, half-salty marsh region, has become the engine of a farming revolution in Gujarat, propelling the state into one of the fastest growing agricultural economies in the country. Gujarat’s agriculture has grown 9.6 percent per year in the last decade or so, surpassing the national growth rate of 2.9 percent and boosting rural incomes.
Tiger Country Is Safer Than City Roads
Eco-Innovation: When Sustainability And Competitiveness Shake Hands
Agriculture in India has been condemned to an annual growth of 4 percent or less ever since the nation’s economic reforms pushed it towards a service-oriented economy. The share of agriculture in India’s gross domestic product (GDP) has fallen to just 16.6 percent from 46.3 percent about six decades ago. Somewhere, policymakers seemed to have ignored the importance of farming to the economy. But Gujarat hasn’t allowed its keenness to promote industry overshadow its farming sector.
“Although widely lauded for adopting an aggressive industrial policy that has made Gujarat a much-favoured destination for investment, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has actually devoted a great deal of energy and resources to accelerating agricultural growth in the state through a broad spectrum of policy initiatives,” say agricultural scientist Ashok Gulati and four others in an article published by the Economic and Political Weekly.
Studying the various points of attack that the state has used to revive agriculture could thus unveil important lessons for the whole country. After all, if the water-starved Saurashtra and Kutch could do it, why not the rest of India?
Fertile Policies
At first glance, the agricultural miracle in Gujarat seems to have been supported by factors such as good monsoon for most of the decade, increasing minimum support prices from the Centre and the spread of BT cotton, a lucrative cash crop. But all these benefits were available to other parts of the country as well and the superlative performance of Gujarat is not explained by them.
Gujarat was early to amend the laws governing the marketing of agricultural produce and allow farmers to sell their output directly to private buyers. Even today, many states haven’t done so and keep the farmer tied to the official procurement hubs. Some have gone back on reforms. But Gujarat has persisted with opening up market access to farmers.
This also opened up contract farming. In 2004-05, Gujarat took an unusual step. It allowed companies to buy crops from farmers a year in advance. This helped the farmers hedge against price upheavals and guaranteed a minimum price. What’s more, there is also some flexibility to allow higher payments if prices rose at the time of transaction. While it reduced market risks for the farmer, it also encouraged companies to invest in farming indirectly.
The result is obvious everywhere, but nowhere more so than in the 500-acre farm of the Patel brothers in Dolpur in the district of Sabarkantha, in the northeast of the state. Jitesh and Bhavesh, both having done masters in agricultural science, have managed to bring together plots owned by family members and friends and grow potato with modern techniques. They contract out their future production to Balaji, ITC and Pepsi. Their high yields have won them admirers. Each week, their farm sees at least 300 visitors from the state as well as Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, keen to learn their key to success. The brothers now act as consultants to other farmers. Very soon, the Patels will be investing Rs. 4 crore on a greenhouse to grow capsicum, tomatoes and muskmelons.
Gujarat has also stepped up its extension services significantly in the last decade, taking knowledge from research campuses to the farms. In the last five years, Krushi Mahotsavs (Farm Festivals) have grown in scope. As many as 18,600 villages host the event on the Akshaya Tritiya day (an auspicious day in the Hindu Calendar falling in May-June). University professors, government officers and even ministers are required to spend time with farmers, listening to their problems and developing solutions. While the quality of work in these fairs needs to improve according to farmers, and the researchers need to gain more practical experience, their impact in spreading awareness about things such as soil quality is undeniable.But the big change in Gujarat has come from the conservation of the most crucial resource for farming – water.
Gujarat started by planning large dam projects such as Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) to achieve a breakthrough in agriculture. To this day, its progress remains limited. Only a small portion of the potential command area has been covered with irrigation facilities. The canal irrigation system of Gujarat, while improving, is not adequate for its needs. To take water to the really dry areas, the Narmada dam’s height must be raised which the government is trying to accomplish. However, even that high-cost strategy will not be enough to fulfil the demand for water. “Agriculture suffered for centuries in Gujarat primarily because it did not have water,” says P.K. Laheri, formerly chief secretary of Gujarat and managing director of Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam and now a director with Torrent Power. “It improved when we began taking the waters of the Narmada to irrigate our fields. Then, when the dam was built, more land came under cultivation. But a lot of land continues to be rain-fed.”
That’s why Gujarat has embarked on a major exercise to conserve water and use it more efficiently in the fields. The most important turning point in the state’s agriculture has been the innovative management of its groundwater resources. The state has adopted a combination of rainwater harvesting – that traps water that would otherwise drain away – and micro irrigation – that supplies each drop of water more efficiently and directly to the plant. The movement has been a roaring success and stories abound of conversion of barren lands into fertile farms, rising yields and falling costs of cultivation across the state.
Between 2001 and 2006, Chief Minister Narendra Modi ordered the building of check dams wherever possible. His slogan was that rain water in the fields should remain there and the water in rivulets should remain there too. There was little sense in letting all this water drain into the sea. The strategy worked. And farmers began to see a rise in water tables year after year. Modi also streamlined the supply of electricity to water pumps. Because they were getting subsidised power, farmers had little incentive to save on its use or keep pumps in good order to lower power consumption. As a result, much power was wasted. Also, power theft was widely prevalent. Further, farmers faced the problem of low-voltage power that helped nobody.
Modi, in his second year in power, ordered the uninterrupted supply of quality power to farms for three-phase pumps for at least four hours a day, but only in night. This ensured that farmers could use the pumps only for a limited time and had to make the most of it. During the day, industry got quality power. The scope for power theft reduced. Farmer groups were initially angry with the changes, but came around after some persuasion.
The government was still painfully aware that the key bottleneck would be availability of water. Higher water tables and taller dams could go only so far. The real need was to save water and use it more efficiently. There was a need to champion micro irrigation. That’s when the government formed Gujarat Green Revolution Company (GGRC).
The new company adopted a twin strategy. First, it made the subsidy for micro irrigation available to all farmers, not just the poor ones. The initial investment to install the plumbing for micro irrigation could be prohibitive. Even after the subsidy, it would come to a big sum and poor farmers would hesitate to make that investment. But for the richer ones, the subsidy made it a compelling proposition and they jumped in. This, in turn, showed the way for poorer farmers who followed.
Second, GGRC tightened norms for the subsidy scheme ensuring that companies didn’t sell pipes and move on to clinch more sales. It insisted that micro irrigation technology providers also offer extension services. To ensure compliance, it introduced a series of norms – like how many agronomists must be employed for a given expanse of land, how many field visits the experts must make and even the price at which the systems could be sold. “The farmer needs handholding,” says C.L.N. Rao, head agronomist with Netafim India, market leader for micro irrigation systems in the state. “And once a farmer sees money coming in... [the farmer] becomes the champion for other farmers as well.”
Now there is even talk in Gujarat that the government will order that power connections will be granted only if a farm has micro irrigation facilities. This is so because drip, sprinkling and spraying systems that come under the definition of micro irrigation deliver water very close to the plant or even to the roots. They avoid delivering water where it is not needed, thus reducing the growth of weeds. They don’t allow water to seep too deep into earth.
Gujarat is also studying a policy adopted in Raipur, where electricity tariffs for pumps of more than five horsepower invite the higher industry-level tariffs and the smaller pumps enjoy the subsidised agricultural tariffs. This is to encourage farmers to draw less water. It is also aimed at making sure all farms get irrigated, not only those owned by rich farmers.
Micro irrigation is spreading fast across Gujarat. Back in the Dolpur farm of the Patel brothers, a modern drip irrigation system is at work. They have had to pay the full price for it because they chose to go in for micro irrigation before the subsidy scheme was set in motion. The brothers bring scientific knowledge of soil, water and weather to their farming practices. They have even built a small soil and water analysis laboratory. “We know that while one well would normally irrigate three to four acres, using newer automated techniques, we could irrigate 15-20 acres,” says Jitesh Patel. The modern systems have made sure that the four hours of power are plenty for their large farm. “We sleep better, have saved on labour and also on water,” he says adding, quite proudly, “We now enjoy a higher status in society.”
There is a new mood of resurgence on Gujarat’s farms. Farm incomes have more than doubled during the past 10 years, and are likely to grow even more in the coming years. Gujarat’s agriculture is expected to grow by at least 9% year-on-year in the coming years, compared with just 2-2.5% for the rest of the country.
For the first time in India’s history, even farmers from Punjab and Haryana have been flocking to Gujarat just to see what makes the state’s farms so vibrant. Some have even begun purchasing land in Gujarat to grow crops in that state.
The roots of the agricultural revolution in the state lay in 2002-03 when Narendra Modi, Gujarat’s controversial chief minister, decided to revamp the supply of electricity to farms and to industry. Plagued by mounting power losses (caused by lines tripping and also by theft), Modi decided to supply quality power to the farms for at least four hours without any interruption — but only at night. He sold the idea to farmers thus: accessing power at night would allow them to run their pumps on three-phase electricity, thus saving them the cost of diesel-powered pumps.
This single move allowed him to authorise the switching off of power supplies to farms during the day when industry, too, could get quality power without frequent breakdowns.Moreover, since most electric pumps would work only for a limited number of hours, it saved on precious groundwater too.
The next was to allow for farmers to integrate with consumers. So in 2003-04, Modi introduced laws permitting contract farming. This helped farmers sell their produce to large purchasers at least a year in advance and also facilitated industry clients to invest in farmers on a long-term basis.
To galvanise the farming community, he began in 2005 an annual month-long event called Krishi Mahotsav (farm festival), where all government officers, vendors (of seeds, micro-irrigation — MI — equipment, fertilisers and pesticides) and even agricultural researchers and professors are required to visit each of the identified 18,600 villages.
This is when farmers meet large consumers, create marketing linkages and even consult agronomists and government officials. Modi monitors complaints from farmers personally, keeping all concerned on their toes, and creating the groundswell — a critical prerequisite for any mass movement.
He then proceeded to set up the Gujarat Green Revolution Company (GGRC) — the pivot around which Gujarat’s future agricultural growth will depend. GGRC focuses on MI. One of its moves was to extend subsidies on MI to all farmers instead of restricting it only to small farmers. The reason: big farmers are the first to experiment with new ideas. Most small farmers follow.
The GGRC masterstroke was to make the subsidy available only to vendors who could offer ongoing extension services in terms of advice on plant nutrition and protection from qualified agronomists. This move affected MI suppliers. One firm, the largest player in the country, saw its market share in Gujarat plummet from 80 per cent to 20 per cent, while an Israeli firm saw its market share rise from around 10 per cent to 60 per cent. The latter’s agronomists are more in demand than researchers from Gujarat’s farm universities.
The shift to MI is critical. Less than 37 per cent of Gujarat’s 95 lakh hectares of cultivable land is under irrigation (canal or tubewell). The rest is rain-fed. When rains fail, so does agriculture. Yet tubewells, which irrigate almost 18 lakh hectares, deplete groundwater reserves. To control this, Modi ordered the construction of check dams so that water from streams and ponds stays impounded and doesn’t flow into drains and the sea. Over the last eight years, almost two lakh check dams have been built which, in turn, have allowed groundwater levels to soar.
But even this water may not be adequate to meet Gujarat’s needs. That is why Modi has been pushing for increasing the height of the Narmada dam and for MI. MI saves on water as it allows for higher productivity using much less water and fertiliser.For example, in cotton, if rainfed land can yield 0.3-0.4 tonnes an acre, canal/tubewell irrigation can yield 0.8-1.5 tonnes. But introduce micro-irrigation (which combines drip irrigation with feeding fertiliser and pesticides directly to plant roots) and yields can rise to 2-2.5 tonnes — a near three-fold increase over regular irrigation. Besides, farmers save on water, fertiliser and pesticides, too. Similar is the case with wheat, sugarcane, potato and green chillies.
In the past five years, almost 1 per cent of the irrigated land has come under MI. Each one has a success story to tell — with yields doubling, often more. The demonstration effect of these farms is beginning to catch on with other farmers, and the conversion rate is accelerating. But Gujarat’s success story is far from over.
this is good, atleast pepsico is not taking the farmers for a ride since the prevailing procurment price of potatoes from the farmers otherwise is a mere rs1.5-3/kg, which of course latter on gets sold at a staggering price of rs20-25/kg in the retail market with the supply chain making all the money.Pepsico engages 12,000 farmers in contract farming
Riding on high sales of its snacks brands like Lays and Uncle Chipps, Pepsico has engaged 12,000 farmers across the country for contract farming of potato. “There are 12,000 farmers doing contract farming of potato for us involving 16,000 acres of land,” Executive Vice-president of Pepsico Holdings (agro-business) Nischint Bhatia told PTI.
He said that out of the 12,000 farmers, 6,500 of them are in West Bengal working 2,600 acres. Bhatia said Pepsico’s contract farming had picked up very fast, adding that the company had procured 22,000 tonnes of potato in the last harvesting season.
He said that with the growing sales of its snacks brands, the company would adopt for more in the country for contract farming. At present, Pepsico is involved in the contract farming for potato only. Bhatia said that farmers were ensured a captive off take even in periods of glut and also a remunerative price. He said Pepsico was buying potatoes at Rs. 6 per kilo from the farmers, which was higher than what others were getting by selling the crop to the intermediaries.
Asked whether the company would enter into contract farming for other crops, Bhatia said that the company was planning to follow a similar line for oats. He said oats were presently being imported for its Quaker Oats brand and the company was in talks with various agricultural universities for cultivating it in the country. “It is still in the research stage and may take three to four year’s time,” Bhatia said. He said oatmeal was becoming a popular breakfast cereal in India due to health reasons.
Source - The Hindu
NOIDA, India — Bhisham Singh Yadav, father of the groom, is stressed. His rented Lexus got stuck behind a bullock cart. He has hired a truck to blast Hindi pop, but it is too big to maneuver through his village. At least his grandest gesture, evidence of his upward mobility, is circling overhead. The helicopter has arrived.
Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
At a wedding on Delhi’s outskirts, the groom, Kapil Yadav, and the helicopter his father hired.
Enlarge This Image
Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
Girls protected their faces from the dust near Delhi as a helicopter carried the groom to his bride’s village less than two miles away.
Mr. Yadav, a wheat farmer, has never flown, nor has anyone else in the family. And this will only be a short trip: delivering his son less than two miles to the village of the bride. But like many families in this expanding suburb of New Delhi, the Yadavs have come into money, and they want everyone to know it.
“People will remember that his son went on a helicopter for his marriage,” a cousin, Vikas Yadav, shouted over the din. “People should know they are spending money. For us, things like this are the stuff of dreams.”
The Yadavs are members of a new economic caste in India: nouveau riche farmers. Land acquisition for expanding cities and industry is one of the most bitterly contentious issues in India, rife with corruption and violent protests. Yet in some areas it has created pockets of overnight wealth, especially in the outlying regions of the capital, New Delhi.
By Western standards, few of these farmers are truly rich. But in India, where the annual per capita income is about $1,000 and where roughly 800 million people live on less than $2 a day, some farmers have gotten windfalls of several million rupees by selling land. Over the years, farmers and others have sold more than 50,000 acres of farmland as Noida has evolved into a suburb of 300,000 people with shopping malls and office parks.
That has created what might seem to be a pleasant predicament: What to do with the cash? Some farmers have bought more land, banked money, invested in their children’s educations or made improvements to their homes. In Punjab, a few farmers told the Indian news media they wanted to use their land riches to move to Canada. But still others are broke after indulging in spending sprees for cars, holiday trips and other luxuries.
“They go for Land Rovers,” said N. Sridharan, a professor at the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi. “They buy more televisions, and quite a lot of money also goes into drinking. They try to blow it out.”
Much of this conspicuous consumption is bad financial planning by farmers who have little education or experience with the seductive heat of cold cash. But some sociologists say such ostentatious spending, especially on weddings, is rooted in the desire of lower castes to show off their social mobility, partly by emulating the practices of the upper castes.
In India, as in many places, a wedding has always been equal parts religious ceremony, theatrical production and wealth demonstration project. For the country’s elite, the latest matrimonial trend is destination weddings in Bali or palaces in Rajasthan. For the new rich, hiring a helicopter is motivated by the same impulses for excitement and one-upmanship.
“Everyone wants to be better than the others,” said Subhash Goyal, whose travel company handles three or four helicopter weddings every year in the Delhi region. “This is how the new rich behave. They want to show off and say, ‘I have more money than you.’ ”
On the morning of his son’s wedding, Mr. Yadav sat in the shabby brick courtyard of his village home, finalizing the last details of a ceremony that seemed to straddle different centuries. He had earned about $109,000 selling three acres of his ancestral land. He banked some of the money, renovated his house, bought a small Hyundai and purchased three more acres farther out to continue farming.
He estimates that his share of the wedding — the bride’s father pays a bigger share — will cost him $13,000, including $8,327 for the chopper. “It is for my happiness, for the happiness of my son,” said Mr. Yadav, 36. “In my marriage, I went in a car. But that was a different era.”
As the family began the traditional procession through the village, his son, Kapil, 19, was dressed in embroidered finery atop a white horse. Mr. Yadav’s rented white Lexus finally got around the bullock cart; he was taking it to the bride’s village while his son rode in the chopper. As another touch, Mr. Yadav also had hired a truck — the Reenu Rock Star 2010 Hi-Fi DJ — to lead the procession. It was playing Hindi pop so loudly that the brick homes of the village seemed to shake.
Then a problem arose: The truck was stuck at a tight corner, and the procession was pinned between the truck and a herd of water buffaloes. As people slipped around the marooned Reenu Rock Star, another problem materialized: The helicopter was already circling above.
Usually, the procession is a slow parade to wave to neighbors. But the Yadavs had rented the helicopter by the hour, so everyone started running, sidestepping the piles of water buffalo dung and the channel of open sewage. The corpulent mother of the groom, her flesh spilling out of her sari, giggled as she barreled toward the arriving aircraft.
“Oh my God!” she exclaimed. “We are so happy!”
The helicopter landed in a clearing. In the distance, the concrete skeletons of new apartment towers were clouded in a haze. Hundreds of villagers surrounded the small blue helicopter, which was guarded by a detail of local police officers. Then the groom and two relatives jumped in, and the blue bird rose over the village, as Mr. Yadav hopped in the Lexus and roared toward the bride’s village.
The ride took five minutes, and Mr. Yadav barely beat the arriving chopper. When the son stepped onto solid ground, he was wearing a garland made of 100 rupee notes. The helicopter was to return in the morning, after the wedding ceremony, to deliver the newlyweds back to the groom’s village and the rest of their lives.
But as the white-haired pilot prepared to depart, the father of the bride, Davinder Singh Yadav, pulled him close. “Please take it over the village a few times before you leave,” he shouted. “The village is so big. Everybody needs to see it.”
A moment later, as the copter circled above the small farming houses, the father said: “The whole village will remember. The whole world will remember.”
Off-beat is in. The oft beaten track, not so.
One of the most interesting themes at this year's Pan-IIT event was the session on rural transformation. IITians who have chosen an offbeat career hogged the limelight at the event. In this series, we feature some of the IITians who preferred to be different, rather than get into a corporate rat race.
The star at the event was R Madhavan, an alumnus of IIT-Madras. This is Madhavan's success story as a farmer. . .
Passion for agriculture
I had a passion for agriculture even when I was young. I don't know how my love for agriculture started. I only know that I have always been a nature lover.
I used to have a garden even when I was a teenager. So, from a home garden, a kitchen garden, I gradually became a farmer! My mother used to be very happy with the vegetables I grew.My family was against my ambition of becoming an agriculturist. So, I had to find a livelihood for myself.
I wrote IIT-JEE and got selected to study at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. I enjoyed studying mechanical engineering.
My intention was to transform what I study into what I love; mechanisation of farming. I felt the drudgery in farming is much more than in any other industry, and no one had looked into it.
Working for ONGC after IIT
I started my career at the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC). My father refused to give me any money to start farming. So I asked the officials to let me work at the offshore sites, on the rigs.
The advantage was that I could work on rigs for 14 days and then take 14 days off. I chose to work on the rigs for nine years, uninterrupted.After 4 years, I saved enough money to buy six acres of land. I bought land at Chengelpet near Chennai.
I chose that land because the plot had access to road and water. Back in 1989, a man in a pair of trousers aroused curiosity among the farming community. That was not the image of a farmer!
Tough beginning as a farmer
I became a full fledged farmer in 1993. It was tough in the beginning. Nobody taught me how to farm. There was no guidance from the gram sevaks or the University of Agriculture.
I ran from pillar to post but couldn't find a single scientist who could help me. I burnt my fingers. My first crop was paddy and I produced 2 tonnes from the six acres of land, it was pathetic.
When I lost all my money, my father said I was stupid. I told him, it didn't matter as I was learning. It was trial and error for me for three years. Until 1997, I was only experimenting by mingling various systems.
In 1996, I visited Israel because I had heard that they are the best in water technology. Take the case of corn: they harvest 7 tonnes per acre whereas we produce less than a tonne.
They harvest up to 200 tonnes of tomatoes, whereas here it is 6 tonnes, in similar area of land. I stayed in one of the kibbutz, which is a co-operative farm for 15 days.
I understood what we do is quite primitive. It was an eye opener for me. They treat each plant as an industry. A plant producing one kilo of capsicum is an industry that has 1 kilo output.
I learnt from them that we abuse water. Drip irrigation is not only for saving water but it enhances your plant productivity. We commonly practice flood irrigation where they just pump water. As per the 2005 statistics, instead of 1 litre, we use 750 litres of water.
Imet Dr Lakshmanan, a California-based NRI, who has been farming for the last 35 years on 50-60,000 acres of land.
He taught me farming over the last one decade. Whatever little I have learnt, it is thanks to him.
I knew a farm would give me much better returns in terms of money as well as happiness. Working for money and working for happiness are different. I work and get happiness. What more do you need?
No guidance in India
I said at one platform that we have to change the curriculum of the agricultural universities. What they teach the students is not how to farm, but how to draw loans from a bank!
What they learn cannot be transformed to reality or to the villages. The problem in the villages is not mentioned in the university. There is a wide gap and it is getting worse.
After burning my fingers for four years, from 1997 onwards, I started making profits.
Even though it took me four years, I did not lose hope. I knew this was my path ven though I didn't have any guidance from anyone.
In those days, communication was slow. Today, I can get guidance from Dr Lakshmanan on Skype or Google Talk, or through e-mail.
I send him the picture of my problem and ask his guidance. In those days, it took time to communicate. There was no Internet or connectivity.
That was why it took me four years to learn farming. Today, I would not have taken more than six months or even less to learn the trick!
I started crop rotation after 1997. In August, I start with paddy and it is harvested in December.
I plant vegetables in December itself and get the crops in February. After that, it is oil seeds like sesame and groundnut, which are drought-resistant, till May.
During May, I go on trips to learn more about the craft. I come back in June-July and start preparations on the land to get ready for August. In 1999, I bought another four acres. My target is a net income of Rs 100,000 per annum per acre. I have achieved up to Rs 50,000.
Selling the products
I sell my produce on my own. I have a jeep and bring what I produce to my house and sell from there. People know that I sell at home. I don't go through any middle man.
I take paddy to the mill, hull it and sell it on my own. In the future, I have plans to have a mill too. These days, people tell me in advance that they need rice from me. I have no problem selling my produce.
More than any other education, engineering helps in farming because toiling in the soil is only 20 per cent of the work. About 80 per cent of farming needs engineering skills.
Science is a must for any farming. I have developed a number of simple, farmer-friendly tools for farming areas like seeding, weeding, etc. as we don't have any tools for small farmers.
If I have 200 acres of land, I can go for food processing, etc. My next project is to lease land from the small farmers for agriculture. The village will prosper with food processing industries coming there. My yield will also be more with more land.
Dr Abdul Kalam visited my farm when he was the President, after hearing about what I was doing. He spent around two hours on my farm.
During his visit, he said: "We need not one, but one million Madhavans!"
If I am able to inspire or create even one entrepreneur, I will be very happy, because that is what Dr Kalam wished me to do.
Experimental farming
Every acre of my land has ten cents of experimental farming. I have done this for the last 15 years.
This is a part of my research and development. Some of it may fail, but even if I succeed at one thing, that is enough for me.
The United Nations says 65 per cent of the world population suffers from food deficiency, and India ranks first in the list.
About 49 per cent of our children are undernourished. This means our future generation will be affected.
If we are not going to give attention to this area, we are in for real trouble. Food insecurity is more threatening than an atom bomb!