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My Village Report
KN Badhani
Going through the village reports of students was an exciting experience for me. I felt as though I were listening indirectly to what other people thought of me. Many participants have experienced the reality of rural life for the first time in their life in the true sense, and I am happy to see the intellectual understanding they have developed and the emotional connection they have made. When you look at something as an outsider, you gain a different perspective, and sometimes this outsider perspective allows you to offer more creative solutions to certain problems. When we live in a society, we start to accept many things as given and stop thinking of alternatives. To encourage you to emerge from this state of mental and intellectual inertia, I want to share with you an account of life in my village. I wish to talk to you about many things—my beautiful village, the panoramic view of snow-capped Himalayan peaks, forests and animals, society and culture, politics and the economy. But it is not possible to cover all these topics in the limited space available here. So I will confine myself to a subject that IRMANs love to talk about—the interplay of livelihood and market forces.
My small village, Falyani, is situated in the backyard of Nainital, the famous hill station of Uttarakhand. When I was a student, we enjoyed trekking the distance of 15 km from Nainital to Falyani. The nearest town is Garampani about 5 km from Falyani. Garampani was also the nearest road head until five years ago, when the village finally got road connectivity. Garampani valley is known for its off-season vegetable cultivation.
This is the story of how the local farmers adopted commercial vegetable farming, the role of market forces, and the challenges facing the farmers of Uttarakhand today.
Farming in hill regions is subsistence in nature. Terrace cultivation (step farming) makes it possible to do farming on the gentler slopes of hills. Land is generally available (there are very few cases of landless labourers in hill villages), but it is not irrigated and is usually fragmented. Land productivity is quite low. Farmers traditionally cultivated local varieties of wheat, rice, millet, and pulses. Vegetable farming began in this area about a century back when some entrepreneurial farmers seized the opportunity to sell vegetables in Nainital, a small town that was then emerging as an important local centre of power under British rule. Vegetable farming was initially limited to the villages adjacent to Nainital. It spread gradually to other villages as farmers found it more profitable to grow vegetables than the conventional food grains. Supply soon exceeded demand, and a marketing centre emerged at Garampani, where traders started procuring vegetables and supplying them to different parts of northern India. Since most vegetables in the hill regions are grown during those seasons when vegetables are not available in the plains, they fetch better prices. As this was a profitable venture for both farmers and traders, vegetable and fruit cultivation became very popular in the Nainital area. Market growth and commercial farming were interdependent on and supported each other. I remember the mounds of capsicum and tomatoes at the collection centres of traders at Garampani during my childhood. Now vegetables are grown throughout the year, during all the seasons—capsicum, tomato, and brinjal in early kharif; beans, cauliflower, and cabbage in late kharif; and peas in rabi.
Vegetable cultivation is a highly labour-intensive activity. Leave aside irrigation, even drinking water is hardly available in most hill villages. It is a great irony that the Himalayas are the source of water for the whole of northern India, but water is not available to the people in Himalayan villages. Agriculture, including vegetable cultivation, is not possible without water, of course. Whatever little water is available in the small mountain rivers and streams is collected in tanks. In March and April, when capsicum and tomato are planted, everyone—men, women, and children—carry water from the tanks to the fields and walk from plant to plant to water each one. Vegetable farming also requires regular weeding, which is again a highly labour-intensive activity. My village was not connected to roads, so the people used to carry the vegetables on their heads or on mules and horses to the market. Despite all this hard work and intense labour, they were not able to get an equitable price for their produce.
One day, when I was studying in class 6 or 7, I went to Garampani with my father. Our pony carried two baskets of plums. My father negotiated with the traders and finally the price was settled at 50 paise per kg. When the trader was weighing the plums, a tourist arrived and purchased some fruit. The trader charged him Rs. 1.50 per kg. I was surprised to see how a trader, just sitting there doing nothing, could earn two times the sum earned by the farmer who had cultivated the fruit using his own land and hard labour.
Later on, as a college student, I tried to understand the economics of vegetable farming in the area. Before the adoption of commercial vegetable farming, the level of monetization in the local rural economy was quite low. People used to satisfy most of their needs locally. With the adoption of commercial vegetable farming, their dependence on the market increased. They needed money to purchase food grains, seeds, fertilisers, pesticides, etc. and also to support their changing consumption habits. Vegetable farming is a seasonal activity, but farmers required money to finance their needs throughout the year. The traders started financing these needs by supplying goods to farmers on credit. In turn, the farmers were required to supply their entire produce to the trader who had provided them credit. Although the traders did not charge interest directly for this credit facility, they applied differential prices for the goods sold and the vegetables procured.
In 1987, I analysed this price differential by taking some price quotations from the open market and by studying transactions in the credit-based marketing system. The analysis revealed that traders were charging a hidden interest of about 70 per cent per annum. The interest was inversely correlated with farmers’ income, reaching as much as 120 per cent per annum in the case of poor farmers who possessed small landholdings.
However, most farmers have now escaped from this vicious circle. The credit-based marketing system still exists, but it is not as exploitative as it was earlier because farmers now have more options. These options did not emerge as a result of collective or institutional efforts. Rather they were created by the ‘invisible hand’ of the market. The profitability of vegetable trading attracted competition and diluted the exploitative practices. At the same time, as the production of vegetables increased, farmers found it more profitable to consign their produce to the regular mandi in Haldwani rather than selling it locally. Farmers now send their produce to commission agents, who sell it on their behalf in the mandi. Money is remitted to the farmers on a regular basis and accounts are settled at the end of the cultivation season. However, farmers are cheated in these mandis also. I have noticed that when a farmer accompanies his consignment to the mandi, he gets a better price. The commission agent does not disclose the true price when the farmer is not present at the time of the auction. But it is not possible for the farmer to escort his consignment to the mandi every day. Here is room for farmers to develop a collective mechanism to check this malpractice of the commission agents.
Institutional and collective efforts did not have much impact in this area. Cooperatives are viewed as government organisations and seen to work as agencies distributing subsidies and relief. There are a number of fruit and vegetable marketing cooperative societies, but all are dysfunctional. In 1996–97, Mother Dairy attempted to procure vegetables from the area for its Safal outlets. Although they offered good prices, they failed to appeal to local farmers. Mother Dairy was interested in only graded vegetables, but the local traders were not ready or willing to purchases low-grade vegetables from the farmers who were selling their better-grade vegetables to Mother Dairy.
Despite this, vegetable farming was more remunerative for farmers in comparison to the cultivation of traditional food grains. In 1996, as part of a study sponsored by the International Centre of Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), I conducted a cost benefit analysis of these two options. I found that vegetable farming generated about 2.75 times more income in comparison to traditional farming, but at the same time it also consumed 2.70 times more labour. This implies that farmers earn more income for more labour expended, but per unit reward of their labour time remains the same. However, it provides employment to farmers and checks out-migration from the villages to some extent. I found that the rate of migration from the villages under vegetable cultivation was lower in comparison to other villages in Uttarakhand.
However, there are many costs associated with the commercial farming of vegetables. It has displaced the cultivation of traditional crops, which although did not have high commercial value nevertheless had high nutritional value for the hardworking people of the hill villages. Initially, farmers did not replace traditional crops with cash crops entirely, as the traditional crops provided them with insurance in case of crop failure. However, gradually the area under traditional crops declined. Many crops and their local indigenous varieties have now become extinct, causing a great loss to regional biodiversity. You can no longer easily get madua (finger millet, Eleusine coracana), jhangora (barnyard millet, Echinochloa frumentacea), kauni (foxtail millet, Setaria italica), gahat (horse gram, Macrotyloma uniflorum), black bhatt (Glycine soja), and other traditional millets and pulses in Uttarakhand today. The famous aroma red rice of the hills is no longer available.
Animal husbandry is an inseparable activity associated with farming. Farmers get manure for their fields from the cattle and fodder from their fields for their cattle. Cattle’s rearing is very difficult in the hill regions because of scarcity of fodder. I still remember the hard work my mother used to do to collect green fodder from forests during summers. Scraps from crops are also used as fodder. However, unlike food grains, vegetable farming does produce scraps, which can be used as cattle fodder. This has made cattle rearing more difficult. Due to changes in life style also, cattle rearing is not a preferred job in the villages. Educated boys and girls of the new generation are not interested in this dirty job. About twenty or thirty years back, my family used to have about a dozen animals, including one or two milching buffalos and two or three milching cows. Selling the milk or the milk products of one’s animals was not common during those times (indeed, it was socially unacceptable to do so). Hence, all the milk produced was consumed within the village itself. Even if a family did not have a milch animal, it used to get sufficient milk for its own consumption. Now when you visit a family in this area, you will most likely be served tea made with Amulya (the milk powder).
This situation has, in turn, affected the sustainability of vegetable farming. Vegetable crops need more nutrients, a requirement that is now supplemented by chemical fertilisers because of the scarcity of manure. However, chemical fertilisers are not suitable for non-irrigated land in the hill regions, and their use has severely affected land productivity. This fact has now been recognised by scientists. But about thirty years back, agriculture extension workers promoted the use of chemical fertilisers (and also pesticides). My parents often argued over this issue. My mother was deeply opposed to the use of chemical fertilisers and insecticides. Now I realise how right she was. The indiscriminate use of these chemicals has not only badly affected agricultural productivity and the quality of agricultural produce but also poses a threat to the sustainability of vegetable farming.
Another threat comes from the changing environment and climate. The fragile ecosystem of the hill regions is a good indicator of the changing world environment. When I was young, we had apple orchards in our village. Then slowly the apple trees became diseased and died. They were replaced by apricot and plum trees. Then these too disappeared. Today you can see many mango trees in the village. All these changes have taken place within a period of thirty years. This indicates the severity of global warming.
Similar changes have taken place in forest vegetation also. The village was earlier surrounded by broad-leaved trees such as oke (querqus spp.), buransh (the state tree of Uttarakhand, rhododendron spp.), and kafal (Myrica esculenta). These trees were very useful for water conservation and soil fertility. Today the rhododendron, the symbol of the beauty of Himalayan forests, is on the verge of extinction. With changes in the environment and climate, these beautiful plants have gradually disappeared and are being replaced by conifer forests comprising mainly pine trees. During my childhood, my village was surrounded by mixed forests of broad-leaved and coniferous trees. Now broad-leaved trees have completely disappeared. Many beautiful herbs, shrubs, lichens, mosses, ferns, and wild fruits (such as hisalu and kilmora), which were my childhood companions, have disappeared. In their absence, I feel alienated in my own village. Now lantana (Lantana camara) is replacing even the pine forests. This new vegetation is causing desertification and affecting the hill farming system adversely in many ways. The most severe impact is on the availability of water. Streams and small rivers are now drying up. The rivers, which used to be full of water the whole year, now carry water only on rainy days. On the way to school from our home there was a stream. In the summer, on our way home from school, we used to swim in the ponds of this stream to get relief from the heat. Today this stream has turned into a river of sand and stone. Vegetable farming needs water, and the farmers of this water-scarce region have developed a system of micro irrigation to meet this need. But now water is no longer available for even vegetable cultivation. Broad-leaved forests were also a source of green fodder and dry leaves were used for the preparation of manure. Hence, the disappearance of broad-leaved forests is a serious threat to the sustainability of both cattle rearing and vegetable farming.
Over the years, the weather has become increasingly unpredictable, and hence the timing of agricultural activities has become very difficult for farmers. For the last three or four years, July and August are going dry and there are heavy rains in September and October. The temperature goes up in January and snow falls in March. This kind of erratic weather is very difficult for the farmers to handle, and at the end of the day all their hard work goes to waste.
However, the biggest and most serious threat to the sustainability of vegetable farming (or indeed to farming of any kind) comes from the changing job preferences induced by “so-called education”. Schools are opened by the government on a large scale. Buildings are made available, but not teachers. The government has money for constructing buildings and for setting up computers in schools where electricity is not available. But it has no money to hire teachers. The regular teachers do not want to work in villages and hence ‘manage’ their transfers to so-called villages in the proximity of big towns. Most of the schools are run by para-teachers. A single teacher is expected to teach five classes and also be involved in other work like taking the census (of both humans and animals), conducting immunisation activities, and updating electoral rolls. The result is that students learn nothing. In a study in which I was involved, evidence was collected from all over the state that showed that many class 7 students cannot write the alphabet and cannot read a book in any language. They nevertheless get certificates and degrees without any obstacle. These so-called educated youths do not want to be involved in farming and cattle rearing. They prefer migrating to big cities and taking up menial jobs. The education system is diverting young people from the traditional occupations of their forefathers but without equipping them with alternative livelihood skills.
I know that many things are required to be done to save the Indian village, but what exactly I don’t know. I am putting this story before you in the hope that rural managers and development experts will come up with a good plan of action to provide sustainable livelihood alternatives to the people in the hill villages of Uttarakhand and elsewhere.
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Associate Professor, Area Finance, Institute of Rural Management, Anand
Email: knbadhani@irma.ac.in