How polyhouse farming in Rajasthan’s desert is turning farmers into millionaires

Posted on February 24th, 2025

In the vast aridity of Rajasthan, winter brings relief from the scorching heat, but also an eerie stillness. Life here moves to the rhythm of sand and shrub.

On early mornings of late December, Jaipur, like any large city in north India, quivers in a silvery film of pollution. As you drive past the city’s last high-rises and elevated roads, the atmosphere is an emulsion of dust and smoke. Every movement lifts the earth into the air.

Here, dawn comes, but day doesn’t until noon. The dim, silver sun in an aluminum sky offers little heat or light. The fields are a naked beige after the monsoon groundnut crop has been dug up. The first green shoots of winter wheat and bajra have barely broken through the soil.

In a census of lifeforms here, trees would be an inconsequential minority. Among the trees, neem and khejri (also known as shami in most of north India and vanni, banni and jammi in the south) dominate. When I say dominate, they average two-or-three an acre.

The shami is considered a symbol of kshatriya valour. Legend says the Pandavas hid their weapons in a shami tree. Now, these trees, pruned and sheared for the season, resemble charred limbs raised in silent prayer. By summer, the khejri would yield nutritious pods called sangri used in the Rajasthani dish ker-sangri.

A wonder in the desert

Once we reach Gurha Kumawatan, a village 40km to the west of Jaipur, the transformation is startling. The fields are suddenly green and scurry with life. The raw sting of the air carries the red-wattled lapwings’ shrill and quirky ‘did-he-do-it’ call.  Towering above the farmland, giant semi-circular enclosures—like Amazon warehouses—dot the landscape.

These are polyhouses, industrial-scale farms that allow farmers to produce up to ten times more food than in open fields. Using a technique called protected farming, they require only a fraction of the water, fertilizers, and chemicals needed in traditional agriculture even on poor soil and climate that’s oppressively extreme.

Farm as factory

In a modern factory work floor, machines, trained hands and processes are streamlined to mass-produce goods with high accuracy and repeatability. Farming, however, is ruled by unpredictable variables. A season’s toil can be undone by a few spells of unseasonal rain.

“Protected farming in polyhouses helps farmers run their fields like factories,” explains Balraj Singh, vice-chancellor of SKN Agriculture University, Jaipur, and one of India’s earliest scientists working on this technology. “They can control inputs like water and nutrients with precision, leading to vastly better yields. For instance, in northern India, tomatoes can typically be grown for just four to five months. In polyhouses, they thrive for nine or even more. Open-field tomato productivity is about 2.5 tons per hectare, but under protected cultivation, it jumps to 200 tons.”

The power of precision

Precision agriculture involves providing plants with exactly what they need, exactly when they need it. By delivering the right amount of water, nutrients, and crop protection directly to the roots, farmers can enhance productivity and maximize yields. When combined with protected farming, the results are truly remarkable.

In Gurha Kumawatan, you need to drill deeper than 150 metres to find groundwater, and even that is mostly saline. But it boasts India’s highest concentration of polyhouses, with nearly 1,200 acres under protected cultivation.

Most of the 500-odd farmers who own them are now millionaires, their combined turnover exceeding ₹250 crore. Unlike the average Indian farmer, who earns just over ₹10,000 a month, they live in massive mansions and drive around in snazzy cars. With staggering yields and wealth, they proudly call their region ‘mini-Israel.’

The story of this ‘wonder in the wasteland’ indeed has origins in Israel, with a pioneering farmer called Khemaram Choudhary in the lead, some fortuitous twists, relentless hard work and unlimited ambition. 

The ‘mini-Israel’

Khemaram, 52, is a short man with pink cheeks, a bulbous nose and a ready smile. Dressed in loose white kurta-pyjama, an oatmeal Nehru-jacket, the traditional red bandhni safa with white speckles, and grey Skechers slip-ons, he has the reputation as a hustler who refuses to settle for the status quo.  He is revered as the Bhishma Pitamaha of polyhouse farming—not just in Gurha Kumawatan, but across Rajasthan.

A chance visit to Israel in 2012 proved to be a turning point for Khemaram. A bright and curious student, he was forced to leave senior school due to family finances. As a teenager, he took on the responsibility of tending to his family’s three-acre farm, despite its meagre yields. Yet, his passion for innovation never faded—he eagerly attended local krishi melas, drawn to the promise of scientific farming methods and the possibility of better income.

By 2012, Khemaram had earned a reputation as a ‘progressive’ farmer, breaking regional records with his watermelon yields. Then, out of the blue, he received a call informing him that he had been selected for a 15-day tour of Israel to study modern farming techniques. “I didn’t even know a place called Israel existed. I thought it was a wrong call and hung up,” he recalls. His speech is a steady stream of heavy Jat accented Hindi that is unhindered by punctuation, pause or the need to breathe.

“Just days before receiving the call, I had stopped by Sanganer airport after delivering a truckload of watermelons to a trader, hoping to catch a glimpse of a plane taking off or landing. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I’d be sitting in one myself,” he says.

Khemaram was part of a delegation led by Harjilal Burdak, Rajasthan’s then agriculture minister—an octogenarian and a staunch vegetarian like Khemaram himself. Their shared dietary preferences brought them closer during the trip, giving Khemaram front-row access to every high-tech farming demonstration.

When Israeli farmers and scientists claimed it was possible to earn ₹15-20 lakh from just an acre of arid land, Khemaram was convinced it was an elaborate con job.

After all, Israel receives just 508mm of annual rainfall, barely different from Jaipur district’s 565mm, where Gurha Kumawatan lies in one of its driest parts.

“Look, I was a good, hardworking farmer. I had never made a profit of more than ₹1.5 lakh, nor had I heard of any farmer in India making much more. And you know what? The Israelis gave us water that was processed from the gutter! If mantri ji had known, I swear he’d have flown in a plane full of Bisleri water from India for the trip,” he recalls with a chuckle.

While most of the touring party comprised political freeloaders and factotums, Rajasthan officials were eager to prove the costly trip was worthwhile. They urged Khemaram to convert 1,000 square meters of his land into a protected polyhouse farm, covering all expenses.

To fob them off, he made a bold counteroffer—he’d do it if they funded 4,000 square meters (nearly an acre). A week later, approval arrived.

State subsidy and super profits

At the time, setting up a polyhouse with necessary equipment cost ₹40 lakh. The government offered ₹30 lakh as subsidy, arranged low-interest loans from state banks, and provided full technical support from the local agricultural university.

When Khemaram began growing hybrid, seedless cucumbers (now commonly called English cucumbers in India) inside the polyhouse, his family, including his father, thought he was being duped.

As the structure rose, the village consensus was clear: Khemaram was building a “palace of dreams” that would only end up in debt and disaster.

“My very first cucumber crop earned me ₹13.6 lakh in just three months. I could start harvesting within a month. It was nothing short of a miracle,” he recalls.

The seedless hybrid cucumber grown in the polyhouses has a smooth, waxy, deep green skin, and is sweeter than traditional Indian varieties. When Khemaram took his first cucumber harvest to Jaipur’s Muhana mandi, traders wouldn’t buy it because they hadn’t seen it. “They thought I was massaging the cucumbers with oil to make them shiny and sweet. In the first week, I gave everybody in the market free samples,” he recalls.

Today, after less than 15 years of polyhouse farming, Khemaram is a multi-millionaire. His annual profits exceed ₹2 crore. He spent ₹1 crore each on the weddings of his two daughters to wealthy city grooms, owns multiple plots and villas in Jaipur’s elite enclaves, and has no worries about his 27-year-old son needing a job outside agriculture.

My very first cucumber crop earned me ₹13.6 lakh in just three months. I could start harvesting within a month. It was nothing short of a miracle.

Khemaram Choudhary, Farmer, Gurha Kumawatan

The Roman past

The practice of growing crops, especially fruits and vegetables, in controlled environments like polyhouses dates back centuries. Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder documented proto-greenhouses used in 1st century AD to cultivate melons year-round in enclosed structures called specularia made of translucent stone sheets. These were built to ensure Emperor Tiberius had a steady supply of his favourite fruit every day of the year.

Following World War II, as plastic became more accessible, European farmers began covering their fields in winter, pioneering modern protected farming techniques that would later have a big impact on global agriculture.

Protection from debt

Khemaram’s near-instant success not only inspired neighbouring farmers to adopt polyhouse farming but also reversed the trend of young people migrating to cities in search of well-paying jobs.

“Earlier, people here mocked me, saying I had more debt than hair on my head. Now, farmers from across the country come to learn from me, and the same banks that once shooed me away now line up outside my gate, asking for business and customer referrals,” Khemaram says with a grin, seated in the spacious ante-room of his bungalow—a space that doubles as a gym, complete with a treadmill and oversized boom boxes.

Thanks to his polyhouse earnings, 72-year-old Gangaram Nitharwal now owns two petrol pumps and multiple mansions, including one perched atop a hillock, offering him a panoramic view of Gurha Kumawatan.

Gangaram’s rugged face, leathery skin, and stubby, calloused fingers tell the story of a life spent in the fields. Seated in his sprawling lounge—its three sides encased in glass—he reclines on a rustic cane throne, wearing a more vibrant safa than Khemaram, surrounded by charpoys draped in plush candy-coloured cushions. There are ornate hookahs, and air-conditioning too. His voice is low and measured, carrying a quiet air of authority. After all, the eldest of his two sons is now the village sarpanch. A white Toyota Fortuner is always at Gangaram’s disposal. “I make more money from polyhouse farming than my two petrol pumps. Can you believe it,” he asks, tousling the newly acquired white poodle that hasn’t been assigned a name yet.

Prosperity unlimited

The economics of polyhouse farming are compelling.

“Two years after I began polyhouse farming, people in the village thought I was either lying about my income or had a currency-printing machine,” says Khemaram. Soon enough, they all followed his lead.

Setting up a 4,000-square-metre polyhouse with drip irrigation, foggers, and sprinklers to regulate temperature and humidity costs over ₹50 lakh. Most large polyhouses are built alongside ponds, roughly the size of a tennis court, to harvest rainwater. Water usage is so minimal that a single monsoon’s rainfall can last nearly a year.

A slew of central and state government schemes offer subsidies covering up to 90% of the capital cost.

Enclosures used for protected farming can take many forms. The low-tech greenhouses are erected on beams of bamboo or local wood. The plastic shade helps to protect against heavy rain or heat.

The polyhouses used by the farmers of Gurha Kumawatan fall into the medium-to-high-tech category. Semi-translucent 200-micron polyethylene sheets are used to cover grids of galvanized iron pipes that act as the skeleton for polyhouses. The sheets can last up to 5-7 years. While all the polyhouses have drip irrigation, foggers, and sprinklers for humidity and temperature control, some of the more expensive, high-tech polyhouses have IoT devices and complete automation.

A happy harvest

An acre of polyhouse farming yields, on average, 100 tons of cucumbers annually, significantly higher than the 20-30 tons per acre typical of traditional open-field cucumber farming. Prices can soar to ₹35 per kilogram when demand spikes, but most farmers prefer fixed-price, long-term contracts with buyers. The current going rate is around ₹25 per kilogram, translating to a revenue of ₹25 lakh per acre.

Polyhouse farmers typically employ resident worker families, known as seeri, who receive 25% of the total income. After accounting for their wages and roughly ₹5 lakh in input costs, farmers can net a profit of ₹12 to 15 lakh per year from an acre.

Though yellow and red bell peppers yield only 35 tons per acre, far less than cucumbers, their income potential is higher since prices can climb to ₹250 per kilogram.

“It is easier to get labour for polyhouses because they do not have to work in extreme heat. The 25% revenue-sharing system is a partnership, giving them an incentive to make the crop a success,” explains Khemaram.

While floriculture in glasshouses is not new to India, serious efforts toward protected food crop cultivation began in 1998 as part of an Indo-Israel collaboration. Israel, an agricultural technology superpower, has pioneered innovations that allow its farmers to grow tropical fruits like avocados, oranges, and mangoes even in the arid Negev Desert.

No-entry for nature?

Currently, protected farming of the kind practiced by Gurha Kumawatan farmers has a significant limitation. Only those plants that are self-pollinating such as tomato, chilli, seedless cucumber, brinjal, and strawberries can be grown.

Self-pollinating plants have both male and female reproductive parts in the same flower, such as tomatoes, chillies, seedless cucumbers, and strawberries, so the pollen from the male part (anther) can fertilize the female part (stigma) within the same flower. Cross-pollinating plants need help from nature to produce fruit.

In the controlled environment of polyhouses, natural pollinators such as birds and bees are absent.

In Europe and countries with a colder climate, bumblebees are used for pollination in polyhouses. India does not allow the use of bumblebees because they might affect local biodiversity. However, scientists in India are working on using a stingless native bee species specifically for protected cultivation.

“In the initial years, we realized Israeli technology did not work all that well. India has a diverse climate, and Indian farmers cannot afford a system that requires a lot of electricity,” says Balraj Singh, clad in a navy windowpane check blazer and white chinos.

To address this, Indian scientists adapted the technology to function with minimal power, incorporating off-grid solutions like solar panels. Modifications were also made to suit regional climatic conditions and farming practices.

China leads the world in protected cultivation, with nearly 3.5 million hectares under cover, largely due to government support, technological advancements, and a focus on food security. In contrast, India has only around 2 lakh hectares, as the concept has yet to gain widespread adoption.

An equal opportunity

Many smallholder farmers are hesitant due to the high initial investment, often perceiving it as a practice suited only for the wealthy.

Not many of Gurha Kumawatan’s farmers had the means either.

Babulal Jat, 38, is a lean, gangly man with large ears and sunken cheeks. He spent most of his life working as a seeri. His land, just over half-an-acre, could barely support his family of three children. With the money he had saved as a seeri, along with government grants, he switched to polyhouse farming five years ago.

A few months ago, his family moved into a new two-story house with shiny granite flooring and a spacious portico. The house cost ₹24 lakh to build.

“Two of my children are now in college. The money I’ve made has elevated my stature and earned me the respect of wealthier farmers,” he says.

Mahendar Kalwania, 28, has just had a daughter. Extended family and friends have gathered in the lawns of his massive two-storey mansion to celebrate over a simple feast comprising a sweet khichri made of daliya and red gram, poori and dal, and hot pakoras.

Dressed in a black gilet and checked navy shirt, Mahendar, a polite yet confident man, had always dreamed of joining Rajasthan’s civil services. It’s a common aspiration among the youth in this region. However, soon after he completed his master’s degree in commerce, his father passed away, and family responsibilities fell on his shoulders.

Taking up a job in the city was not an option, as he needed to stay close to home to support his family and manage their land. A few years ago, he decided to try cultivating cucumbers in a single polyhouse. Encouraged by the success of his initial efforts, he expanded the operations significantly.

Now, his family owns 24 polyhouses, and Mahendar manages them all. “Look, our annual income is Rs 2.5-3 crore a year. I have four cars, this bungalow, and a lovely daughter now. I don’t think it makes any sense for me to leave this and work a city job,” he says.

Strength in unity

The farmers of Gurha Kumawatan, buoyed by their success, have established a farmer producer company (FPC) called Agriglow. An FPC is a social enterprise that blends elements of a cooperative, like Amul, with a private limited company. It can be formed when 10 or more farmers in a region come together, with ownership and management retained by the farmers themselves. By uniting under an FPC, farmers can access larger markets, negotiate better prices, and reduce their reliance on middlemen—enhancing their incomes and ensuring greater economic sustainability.

At the helm of Agriglow is 87-year-old Devendra Raj Mehta, a retired IAS officer with a distinguished career. Mehta served as one of the longest-tenured chairmen of India’s stock market regulator, SEBI, and as a deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India. He also founded the NGO Jaipur Foot, which has provided artificial limbs to more than two million people with disabilities.

Driven by a passion for modern farming, Mehta and his daughter-in-law—a PhD in microbiology—ventured into polyhouse farming a few years ago, inspired by Khemaram’s success.

“What distinguishes this area is that farmers have become very modern. Farming is also a means of earning a living. Naturally, they want more income. That’s not greed, but genuine aspiration. They’ve realized that by adopting science and technology, they can increase their yields. They are now more proactive—fighting for their rights, engaging with the government, and making informed suggestions. United you stand, more powerful you are,” he says.

Under Mehta’s guidance, the FPC aims to secure greater government subsidies for polyhouse farming and explore larger national and international markets. The farmers of Gurha Kumawatan are now planning to sell their produce directly to urban consumers through e-commerce platforms and explore export opportunities to markets like Dubai.

According to Balraj Singh of SKN University, peri-urban clusters like Gurha Kumawatan—known for producing high-value horticultural crops—are best positioned for success. “These areas are close to big cities where restaurants and fast-food chains need high-quality produce like bell peppers on a large and consistent scale. Additionally, the proximity to highways allows their produce to reach ports like Mundra and Mumbai within 24 hours,” he explains.

 Pan-India possibilities

If farmers in the desert can become millionaires, can this model be replicated elsewhere?

“It absolutely can,” says Khemaram. “Farmers with better soil and water conditions can achieve even greater success than us. It requires just two things: hard work—you have to be fully committed and not treat technology like a magic wand—and courage to let go of fear. Protected farming and polyhouse cultivation work. Come visit us; we’re happy to share our experiences. There’s no other way forward for farmers seeking success.”

Watch | India’s Dairy Dilemma: From White Revolution to Warnings of Decline

Posted on January 16th, 2025

The dairy industry has long been a pillar of Indian agriculture, earning its status as a standout success story. From the days of milk shortages at independence to becoming the world’s largest producer of milk, India owes much of this transformation to the White Revolution led by Verghese Kurien. However, as India celebrates 50 years of this achievement, the sector faces a raft of challenges that could reverse its hard-earned gains.

A legacy of success

At independence in 1947, India’s dairy sector was unorganized, with low productivity and insufficient supply. Most milk came from buffaloes, as indigenous cows were primarily used for draught purposes. By the 1970s, the White Revolution, spearheaded by the establishment of Amul and the National Dairy Development Board, ushered in a paradigm shift. Cooperative models linked millions of farmers to chilling centres and urban markets, ensuring consistent supply despite milk’s perishability. Today, milk availability has soared to approximately 420 grams per person per day, a stark contrast to the deficit years. Yet, the industry’s productivity remains well below global standards. Indian cattle yield an average of 3–4 litres of milk daily, compared to the 20 litres or more achieved by European breeds.

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The slowdown in growth

Recent data underscores a worrying trend: milk production growth has halved from 6% annually to just 3.78%. Experts attribute this decline to a combination of outdated breeding programs, poor farm management, inadequate farmer education, and over-reliance on subsidies. Shashi Kumar, founder and CEO of Akshayakalpa Organic, highlights systemic issues. “We have doubled our cattle population since 1950 which has contributed to the increase in production. Most farmers lack access to modern breeding or feeding practices, perpetuating inefficiencies.”

The cost of cheap milk

India’s cooperatives, like Amul and Nandini, have been instrumental in making milk affordable. However, low consumer prices come at a cost. Farmers often sell milk at or below the cost of production.  

In Karnataka, the cooperatives pay farmers ₹35 a litre that includes a ₹5 incentive the government pays from taxpayer money. Shashi Kumar explains, “Most dairy farming is sustained by unpaid family labor and unaccounted costs. It is impossible to produce a litre of milk below ₹35. So in effect, no dairy farmer makes any money.”

Artificially low prices also hinder private sector growth and innovation. Companies like Hatsun, one of the largest publicly traded dairy companies, and Akshayakalpa, which operate outside the cooperative system, invest heavily in quality and farmer education but struggle to compete with subsidized rates.

Despite this, demand for premium, organic milk is growing, with Akshayakalpa’s products commanding prices up to two-to-three times the market average.

Global quality concerns

India’s milk quality issues extend beyond domestic markets. Indian dairy products consistently fail to meet global phytosanitary standards, limiting export opportunities. Poor animal nutrition, unhygienic milking practices, and inadequate cold chain infrastructure contribute to substandard milk quality. “We may be the largest producer, but not many countries want to even touch our products,” says Shashi Kumar. The Way Forward

To prevent a potential crisis, Shashi Kumar stresses the need for systemic reforms:

1. Modernizing Breeding Programs: Current breeding strategies, including crossbreeding indigenous cows with exotic breeds, must be better managed. Investment in indigenous breed improvement, as seen in Brazil’s success with Indian-origin cattle, is crucial.

2. Farmer Education and Support: Comprehensive extension programs can teach farmers sustainable feeding, breeding, and farm management practices. For instance, Akshayakalpa employs one extension officer for every four farmers to ensure adherence to quality protocols.

3. Fair Pricing and Reduced Subsidy Dependence: Establishing a fair price mechanism for milk that reflects actual production costs will empower farmers and attract private investment.

4. Focus on Quality: The industry must prioritize antibiotic-free, toxin-free milk production to tap into premium markets and improve domestic health outcomes.

5. Infrastructure Development: Expanding cold storage and chilling infrastructure will reduce post-production losses and improve milk quality. India’s dairy sector stands at a crossroads. The lessons of the White Revolution prove that with the right vision and commitment, transformative change is possible. However, the path forward requires embracing quality, sustainability, and farmer empowerment. Without these measures, India risks squandering one of its most remarkable agricultural achievements. The stakes are high—not just for farmers, but for millions of consumers and the nation’s food security.

From economics graduate to farming trailblazer: Anushka Jaiswal’s inspiring journey

Posted on January 16th, 2025

When Anushka Jaiswal, 28, was the president of the placement cell during her final year at Delhi’s prestigious Hindu College, she helped nearly all her classmates land jobs. Yet, she wasn’t keen on following suit herself.

Call it clarity of mind or youthful certitude, Anushka was pretty sure what she didn’t want. The monotony of sitting behind a desk, confined to a traditional workplace, topped her list.

Upon returning to Lucknow after graduation, still uncertain about her career path, she found herself captivated by her mother’s terrace garden. On a small rooftop, her mother had managed to grow a variety of vegetables—tomatoes, gourds, and more.

“I realized I really enjoyed this work and would never get bored of it. That’s when the idea struck me to turn my hobby into a profession,” she recalls.

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Embracing innovation

Anushka’s family had a history of farming, which sparked her desire to arm herself with modern, scientific knowledge. She enrolled at the Institute of Horticulture Technology in Greater Noida, where she learned about hydroponics and protected cultivation. These techniques offer a sustainable and profitable alternative to traditional agriculture.

Protected cultivation involves creating a controlled farming environment. A semi-cylindrical indoor structure called a polyhouse is built using iron grids and translucent plastic sheets. Polyhouses regulate temperature and humidity, ensuring better land efficiency and water savings via drip irrigation. The technique eliminates weather risks and allows for year-round vegetable production.

Hydroponics, by contrast, removes soil from the equation, using mediums like coco peat or chips instead.

“Traditional farming isn’t the future,” Anushka asserts. Thanks to protected cultivation, her farm now yields up to 30 tons of seedless cucumbers and bell peppers per acre, compared to the 4-6 tons produced by traditional methods. This approach conserves resources—water, quality soil, fertilizers, and pesticides—while addressing climate challenges and contributing to global food security.

Overcoming challenges

Anushka’s path hasn’t been without obstacles. Lacking ancestral land and struggling to secure investment, she encountered significant barriers. Gender stereotypes added another layer of difficulty. Family and friends she approached for loans questioned whether marriage would pull her away from the business. But Anushka’s determination set her apart. “This is my bread and butter. I’m not leaving it behind,” she says.

Polyhouse farming is an expensive venture, with costs reaching up to Rs 50 lakh for one acre of structure. However, governments offer loans and subsidies covering up to 80% of costs. The high yields typically allow farmers to recover their investment within a year.

Anushka started in 2020, cultivating cucumber on a small piece of leased land. The first harvest, just three months later, was promising—but the pandemic meant prices were lower than expected. However, as conditions improved later that year, she earned over ₹20 lakh from just one acre. To put it in perspective, an average Indian farmer cultivating traditional crops like wheat or paddy on one acre typically earns only ₹1 lakh. Today, her operations span six acres with an annual turnover of ₹80 lakh.

Empowering women in agriculture

Anushka employs 25 women farmers, emphasizing their unique ability to handle delicate plants with care. “Women are more tender with plants and monitor them closely for issues,” she explains. This inclusive approach not only boosts productivity but also empowers women in an industry where they are often underrepresented.

Building trust with her workers and investors wasn’t easy, but Anushka’s results speak for themselves. Shahzade Ali, Anushka’s manager, recalls, “I used to wear ragged clothes, toil under the sun, and barely save anything as a traditional farmer. After joining Anushka didi’s farm, my lifestyle and financial circumstances have drastically improved.” He gestures toward his new bright orange jacket and muffler, a symbol of his newfound stability.

The role of government and the path ahead

While subsidies and programs under the Mission for Integrated Development of Horticulture (MIDH) have supported Anushka’s efforts, she stresses the need for more responsive policies. “Government subsidies are based on outdated rates, which don’t account for rising costs,” she says. Anushka advocates for better farmer training and resources to make sustainable farming methods, like protected cultivation, accessible to all.

Inspiring a community

Anushka’s work has inspired traditional farmers in her region to consider adopting sustainable methods. “You cannot grow alone,” she says, emphasizing the importance of mutual growth. “My investors, workers, and village are all growing with me.”

Her journey is a testament to what determination and innovation can achieve, even in the face of societal expectations and logistical hurdles. Anushka Jaiswal is not just growing crops—she’s cultivating a brighter, more sustainable future for Indian farming.

What is the Agri Stack?

Posted on July 23rd, 2024

The Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi, or PM Kisan scheme, is the largest welfare programme for farmers in India. All landholding farmers, irrespective of the size of their holding, get an income support of Rs 6,000 per year – transferred in three equal instalments – into their bank accounts.

Since its introduction in February 2019, the union government has transferred funds to the tune of Rs 2.81 lakh crore ($33.58 billion) through direct benefit transfer (DBT) to 110 million farmers and it costs the government Rs 60,000 crore annually. 

PM Kisan is undoubtedly the flagship government scheme to act as a salve for India’s farmers under chronic economic distress. 

After all, nearly 75% of Indian farmers own less than one hectare of land – barely the size of a cricket field. The average monthly income of an Indian farming household, according to the latest government data, is Rs 10,218. That roughly translates to Rs 340 a day, at par with daily wages unskilled labourers in many states get under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA).

Data deficiency

But the design of PM Kisan raises some fundamental questions. Is the government accurately counting the number of landholding farmers? While 110 million farmers benefit from the scheme, the government’s own estimate of farmers vary wildly. The 2015-16 Agriculture Census pegs the number at 146.45 million. The National Statistical Office (NSO) claims there are about 90 million agriculture households in India.  

In short, we simply do not know how many farmers there are or indeed how many of them own a piece of farmland. 

While the Indian agri sector employs roughly half the country’s workforce and accounts for less than 20% of the economy, there is very little or reliable statistics for policymakers to go by. For instance, state and central governments have patchy information about say the farmers’ intention of sowing onions or tomatoes at the start of a season. The wild price swings of such key commodities is partly a result of poor understanding of the supply.

In a primitive supply-chain market like India, farmers often choose to grow a lot more of a crop if its prices were high in the past season. If millions of farmers decided to grow tomatoes over brinjal because tomato prices were sky high, there would be a glut of tomatoes in the markets, and inevitably the prices would crash. 

The absence of data at every part of the farm-to-plate chain keeps this sector inefficient. 

The kisan JAM 

This is where Agri Stack may help. 

Agri Stack is a public-private partnership that’s trying to create a digital foundation to improve agriculture in India and enable better outcomes for the farmers by using data and digital services. 

Much like the IndiaStack based on Jan Dhan accounts (zero balance universal bank accounts), Aadhaar card based identification and mobile connectivity – often called the JAM trinity – helped in financial inclusion and targeted delivery of welfare schemes, the government hopes that the Agri Stack can do the same for India’s farmers.

Its first task is to build a real-time digital farmers registry and digitized village maps just to be able to know the number of farm holdings. 

In computer parlance, a “stack” refers to a set of software infrastructure, tools and applications that software developers can use to build and innovate. The Agri Stack has been envisaged as a set of open digital infrastructure and tools that government, industry, and start-ups can use to build solutions for agriculture.

In the 2023 Union Budget, the government announced the implementation of this digital reform to bring greater transparency and accountability in agriculture. “This (digital public infrastructure for agriculture) will enable inclusive, farmer-centric solutions through relevant information services for crop planning and health, improved access to farm inputs, credit, and insurance, help for crop estimation, market intelligence, and support for growth of agri-tech industry and start-ups,” said Nirmala Sitharaman, Union Finance Minister in her 2023 Budget speech.

Before we examine the progress of Agri Stack in its first year, it is important to analyze the three reasons why it is necessary for India.

 1. Better targeting of subsidies

In 2022-23, agriculture accounted for 2.8% of India’s Union Budget. The Budgetary Expenditure towards farmers’ welfare was Rs 1.25 lakh-crore, 77% of which is allocated for welfare schemes like PM Kisan, according to this PRS Legislative Research analysis.

According to the Doubling Farmers’ Income (DFI) Committee, headed by Ashok Dalwai, subsidies in 2015-16 on inputs like fertilizers, water, power, and procurements linked to minimum support price (MSP) were Rs 243,811 crore. The corresponding figure in 1990-91 was Rs 12,158 crore – the subsidies on agricultural inputs had grown 20 times in 25 years.

Given the size of the subsidies, the Committee recommended that farmers’ welfare needs to be measured based on the following indicators: both absolute and relative average income; availability and accessibility to social security system – education, health, etc.; and facilitating the farmer in moving up the need hierarchy beyond social hierarchy.

Once the farmers’ income and input management (on fertilizers, water, etc.) is established in a dynamic digital database, the subsidies and welfare programmes can be better targeted at those who actually need it. This is what Sitharaman alluded to in the Budget speech when she spells out relevant information services for crop planning and health, and improved access to farm inputs.

Already, the Economic Survey 2023-24, released on July 22, 2024, states the government’s ambitious plan to distribute the fertilizer subsidy using Agri Stack. “This will ensure that subsidized fertilizers are sold to only those identified as farmers or authorized by the farmer, and the quantity of subsidized fertilizer is fixed based on parameters such as land ownership and prominent crops of the district (comprising at least 70% of sown area in a season),” according to the latest Economic Survey. In 2023-24, the union government budgeted Rs 1.75 lakh-crore for fertilizer subsidies, which was 66% greater than the budget estimates in the previous fiscal year.

2. Better access to farm credit

Based on ground experience, companies like Samunnati have seen a spate of issues that farmers and banks face with respect to agricultural finance. Samunnati works with farmer-producer organizations (FPO), a collective of ten or more farmers that can be run as a private sector company, to help them source inputs at lower costs, find the best markets for their produce, and get financing from banks and non-banking financial institutions.

“Almost 50% of the time, a loan gets rejected for a valid farmer and a valid land because the bank cannot establish ownership in the documentation,” says Raj Vallabhaneni, former CTO of Samunnati, and Founder-CEO of Kalgudi Digital, a software start-up in agriculture. Banks find it hard to gauge the farmer’s repayment record, his farmland, what crops he grows, and their sales potential. In this context, a farmers database will smoothen out lending services in agriculture for banking, financial services and insurance sectors.

Further, large procurers of agri produce will find it easier to do contract farming, Vallabhaneni notes. Indian agriculture is dominated by farmers with small landholdings, which makes it difficult for the private sector in contract farming to assess which farmer owns what tract of land. With the database, the time taken for transactions can be reduced to the mutual benefit of the farmer and agri-foods company that wants to do contract farming.

Without the database, a large number of farmers don’t get access to formal credit, leaving them with the option of turning to moneylenders or the black/ cash economy. This is also why most farmers are excluded from the welfare schemes – they don’t have updated land records to establish their ownership of a farm. And by definition, a farmer in India must own a piece of land. It leads us to the third reason for the farmers’ database: identity.

3. A better definition of ‘farmer’

There are various combinations of problems related to information about a farmer. For one, there is no standard definition, except that a farmer is a farmer if he or she owns a piece of land. The open-endedness of this definition has led to a maze of incomplete information about farmers, which has been further complicated by migration.

“We have a peculiar situation where we have more moonlighting farmers than full-time farmers,” says Venky Ramachandran, an agritech analyst who runs Agribusiness Matters, a newsletter. The average profile of a farmer could be somebody who is working in another part of the country as a migrant labourer or a cab driver, Ramachandran explains. “He would depend on his family to take care of the farm, returning during the season to become part of the activity,” he adds.

Who exactly is a farmer?

Another, crueller aspect of identity in agriculture concerns the cultivator on India’s farms – a tenant farmer or contract farmer who doesn’t own land, but works on farms through the year. Currently, such cultivators – estimated to be more than 100 million people – borrow money from the informal economy to purchase inputs and work as full-time farmers. Yet, they are not recognized by the laws of India.

While the Agri Stack cannot solve the problem, the union and state governments can through legislative changes. If and when that happens, cultivators can apply for welfare schemes, working capital and credit based on their credentials in the farmers registry.

According to Rajeev Chawla, strategic advisor and chief knowledge officer in the union ministry of agriculture and farmer welfare: India has roughly 170-180 million land owning farmers with approximately 850 million parcels of land. So, each farmer owns on average five parcels of land. “If you talk about landless farmers, cultivators and tenants — India has 100 million,” he added, at a fintech event in Mumbai in September 2023.

In 2018, the DFI Committee too called for a legislative review to include cultivators or tenanted farmers.

The DFI Committee points out that a large number of government schemes and programmes become eligible to farmers based on their land ownership certificate. This tends to exclude the landless cultivator, fishermen, nomadic farmers and livestock rearers . To make the condition of farmers better, “they also must be recognized as farmers and rendered eligible to all the benefits under various schemes, programmes, missions, as also institutional credit and relief measures,” the Committee notes.

The question is, can the Agri Stack do to agriculture what Aadhaar has done for the direct benefit transfer in the past decade? To answer that, let’s first understand what the Agri Stack will look like.

Contours of Agri Stack

In the first phase of Agri Stack, the union government is working with 12 state governments to build the farmers registry. The states are Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Assam, Odisha, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh. Most recently, Chhattisgarh has begun to digitize the information related to farmers and landholdings for Agri Stack.

The governments have undertaken to create a Farmers Registry for their respective states. It entails granting farmers of each state a Unified Farmers Service Interface (UFSI) number.

The information farmers share (backed by their land records) will help establish each of their details such as personal particulars (name, gender, age), details related to land and location, crop, health of soil, and benefits they are availing. Accordingly, a Unified Farmers Service Interface (UFSI) number/ code will be assigned to map each farmer on the farmers registry.

The farmers registry system will help government or bank officials determine the identity of farmers, the size and location of their holdings, and what crops they are growing where.   

The core registries of Agri Stack will thus be the farmer registry, the geo-referenced village maps, and the crops sown registry.

“In a couple of years, Agri Stack can do to farmers what Aadhaar did for beneficiaries (of the direct benefit transfer schemes),” Chawla told entrepreneurs at the fintech fest in Mumbai in September 2023.

The Aadhaar Way

The first unique ID or Aadhaar ID was generated in 2010, and the Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI) has covered more than 97% of residents in India over 14 years.

In 2012, the union government led by the Unified Progressive Alliance introduced the direct benefit transfer. It aimed to transfer benefits and subsidies directly into the bank or postal accounts of beneficiaries. Citizens were incentivized to link their bank accounts with their Aadhaar IDs because it could smoothen the authentication process. For government officials, Aadhaar-seeded bank accounts meant they could accurately target beneficiaries with the subsidies they were entitled to.

At the time, the problem facing India was that banks hadn’t gone deep enough into rural India, even as Aadhaar enrolment was growing at a faster clip. To solve this, the union government introduced the Jan Dhan Yojana in 2014 to ensure every household gets access to a bank account, a debit card, and up to Rs 10,000 overdraft facility from the banks.

The Jan Dhan Yojana is the largest financial inclusion programme in the world. It also completed the two elements required for electronic delivery of subsidies through DBT. One, Aadhaar to identify a beneficiary correctly, and, two, the bank account to ensure the money reaches the intended recipient. “Once the Aadhaar number is added to the database of all social welfare recipients, the government can accurately identify these individuals,” wrote Nandan Nilekani, referring to the electronic payments system in DBT in Rebooting India (2015).  

“On the other side, linking a person’s bank account with their Aadhaar number makes it possible to reliably verify the identity of the account holder. Aadhaar now serves as a link between the government and the people, making it easy both for the authorities to transfer payments to the correct individual’s bank account, as well as for people to easily withdraw money using Aadhaar to authenticate their identity.”

For the Agri Stack, what is needed now is to establish the core registries, just as Aadhaar has done. 

In the Union Budget 2024-25, the government announced a time frame of three years for coverage of all farmers and their lands. To achieve this, it has launched a digital crop survey in the kharif season in 400 districts. “The details of 6 crore farmers and their lands will be brought into the farmers’ and lands’ registries,” Sitharaman said on Tuesday.

Already, the PM KISAN scheme has helped onboard 110 million farmers. “These beneficiaries can enroll for their farmer ID – the process is similar to how citizens apply for their Aadhaar number,” said a source in the agriculture ministry, who requested anonymity. The Agri Stack will then automatically link the farmer ID against the farmer’s name in the PM KISAN database.

“If the central government digitises the land records successfully, they would have solved 80% of the problem,” says Krishna Kumar, Co-founder and CEO of Cropin Technology Solutions, a farm intelligence start-up. “You are then able to provide advisory services, and bring financial inclusion.” But this in itself is a huge ask. “When you roll out a digital mission of this scale for farmers, there are many complexities and moving parts,” he adds.

For instance, land boundaries and crops history have to be established, and the data resolution harmonized across states, right down to the district and village levels. This brings in the complexities. For instance, while the land is constant, its ownership and crops sowing patterns change. So, the farm and crops sown registries will need to be live, and constantly updated.

The good news is the government hasn’t taken up such a massive and multi-year project alone. With Agri Stack’s open framework, the private sector has a role to play in the design and implementation from the get-go.

“Even if the central government builds out a national crops dashboard as a base platform, it can share that infrastructure with state governments to build on top of it,” Kumar says. “It can then scientifically build budgetary estimates based on that data.”

For financial credit to farmers, banks need three pieces of information about the farmer: whether a land belongs to a farmer or not, his repayment record, and his crop outlook.

The harder piece of universal banking has been solved for financial inclusion thanks to the Jan Dhan scheme. So, the Agri Stack is well placed to ensure the targeted delivery of agriculture input subsidies, and even become the de facto database because of which farmers can get working capital loans or long-term credit.

Without Aadhaar to ensure farmers’ identity, and the Jan Dhan scheme for Aadhaar seeding of the bank accounts, the government wouldn’t have been in this position of strength. But in terms of sheer impact on the economy, the Agri Stack is perhaps an even more important digital mission than Aadhaar – it will formalize Indian agriculture.

From Udaipur to Okinawa riding on orange peel

Posted on May 5th, 2024

The story of twenty-five -year-old Narayan Lal Gurjar might not be out of place in Bollywood.

The playful experiments he conducted in his father’s small farm as a teenager in Kerdi, a village of 300 with 40 homes in Rajsamand district in southern Rajasthan, is the foundation for his patents and the agriscience startup incubated by Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) that has attracted investments from well-known Japanese venture capital firms such as Beyond Next Ventures and MTG.

And all this before he turned 23.

Gurjar’s firm EF Polymer (EF stands for eco-friendly) headquartered in Okinawa with manufacturing plants in Udaipur makes super absorbent polymers (SAP) from orange and banana peel that has the potential to help millions of small farmers in arid and water scarce regions across the world harvest better yields.

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Suck it up

Now, SAPs aren’t new and neither is their use in agriculture. As the name suggests, SAPs are crystalline resembling rock salt or monosodium glutamate used in kitchens that can absorb and retain water a thousand times their weight.  Besides industrial applications, SAPs are commonly used in diapers, sanitary pads and ice-packs.

In fact, the invention of SAPs has agricultural origins. In 1973, Scientists at the Agricultural Research Service in Illinois, part of the US Department of Agriculture married natural corn starch and synthetic polymers to produce a compound popularly known as super slurper capable of absorbing hundreds of times its own weight in water.

The interest of ARS scientists was two-fold. First, the super slurper, thanks to its water absorption and retention qualities could be used in the soil by farmers to reduce the need for water. When temperatures rose, the SAPs would release moisture to the roots. Second, the widespread commercial use of super slurper would create greater demand for the corn US farmers grew in vast quantities since corn starch was one of the few ingredients. Back then cellulose from wood, cotton and other plants was the chief absorbent used in disposable diapers, bed pads, bandages, and surgical sponges. Besides shortage and rising cost, absorbents made of cellulose were bulky to transport and even harder to dispose.

Subsequent advancements in material sciences meant SAPs for agricultural and industrial use could be produced more efficiently and at global scale with petrochemicals. That solved some problems, but created several more. Petrochem-based agri polymers are widely used but their footprint is pretty much impossible to erase. They stick to soil like plastic.

Success at school

 Narayan Lal Gurjar was an incredibly bright student who had read up every book on science the library of Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya, one of the better government-run schools in Rajsamand, stocked. At 16, while in class 11, his projects and demonstrations swept up awards at school science exhibitions in Rajasthan. Gurjar’s dream was to study at IIT; his teachers were convinced he was destined to get there.

However, his father’s worries were more immediate. Being at the mercy of rain gods in a region with sparse groundwater or irrigation, he had incurred a huge loss, yet again, on his crop of corn. The corn cobs simply had no water in the final third of their 100-day crop cycle. “What use is all your science, when it can’t help poor farmers like me,” he asked of his son. The question stuck in Gurjar’s head.

“He was right. Drip irrigation, sprinklers and costly chemicals were beyond our reach. From that day, the mission of my life was to find an answer,” says Gurjar, a small man with a large forehead, big eyes, a short beard that seem to be fed by puppy fat, and in a slow, halting, almost diffident tone of Hinglish unaffected by his dealings with international scientists or smart global investors.

Father’s SOS

Gurjar’s experiments as a schoolboy involved sticking all kitchen and farm waste such as spinach leaves, okra trimmings and sugarcane straw into soil and recording the impact on seedlings he planted atop. In the process, he noticed that plants on soil beds containing orange and banana peels grew better even when not watered. Dried peels when pounded into a powder and mixed with soil produced even better results.

In two years, Gurjar had learnt from books in the library and the internet that orange and banana peels contained a chemical called pectin that could trap moisture.  The small batches of the sticky, gelatinous stuff he produced by boiling the dried and powdered peel was even better at absorbing water when put to soil. Gurjar knew he was on to something useful, but he understood little about the science or the efficacy of his home-baked methods beyond a little patch of his farm.

Uni money

Gurjar couldn’t crack the IIT exam, but was good enough to secure admission into the engineering programme at the Maharana Pratap University of Agriculture Technology (MPUAT), in Udaipur in 2017, not far from his home.

“In college, students could work on practical projects only in the final [fourth] year. I would be shooed away by the professors when I told them about this field experiment I wanted to conduct. I would stand outside their room for hours to get a chance to convince them about it,” recalls Gurjar.  

The perseverance paid off. SM Mathur, a renowned scientist, headed the department of farm machinery at the university. He was also coordinator at MPUAT for a central government scheme under the NewGen Innovation and Entrepreneurship Development Centre that offers financial support to students working on commercially viable solutions for real-time problems. Convinced, of the kernel of potential in Gurjar’s pectin idea, Mathur not only allowed him access to the university lab 24/7 but also a grant of Rs 250,000.

Once the lab doors opened, Gurjar and a clutch of his classmates got to work. After attending classes by day, Gurjar would take maths and science tuitions for high school kids in the evening to top up his income, and at night he would visit juice shops in Udaipur to collect orange peels for free on friends’ two-wheelers to collect the raw material for his experiments at scale.

Natural SAPs from cellulose and starch are environmentally friendly but the process to extract thr polymers from them remains complex and expensive. That’s why scientists preferred synthetic polymers.

“In less than six months, we were able to make a SAP purely from orange peel and test it in local farms. The results were great.  Farmers needed far less water and fertilzers to get to get better yields. India produces more than 200 million tons of fruit and vegetable waste every year. There is an almost endless supply of raw material for us,” says Gurjar.

Professor Mathur helped get the fruit pectin-based polymer tested in government accredited labs and its efficacy ascertained at multiple Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR), the apex government research body, plots, especially in water deficient zones.

The results were spectacular.

Recognising the potential, Mathur not goaded Gurjar and his classmates to think of it as a business, and incorporate a company but also helped with articulating the science and its commerce.

“Narayan was a phenomenally driven individual. He could work in the lab for days together without a wink. I have not seen such hunger and passion. But he needed to work on his language, presentation skills, and the ability to convert an innovation into a business,” says Mathur.

Just as in his school days, Gurjar won most international contests on sustainability he entered. Even with grants for research, could this be anything more than a frugal engineering lab experiment funded by a benevolent government?

Go east

In 2018, Gurjar found an advert from Okinawa Institute calling for its startup accelerator programme. The application sent a day before deadline won him not just a financial grant but the opportunity to use the university’s R&D infrastructure and global network.

Gurjar went to OIST in 2019 as a college dropout. “I had access to a research and tech environment that was a hundred times better than what I was used to in Udaipur. With OIST’s credibility and network, I could send my product for testing to the best universities such as UC Davis in California, Europe and Asia,” says Gurjar.

Having passed trials across the world on multiple soil types and crops, Gurjar claims that EF Polymer’s SAP products sold under the brand Fasal Amrit can be a gamechanger reducing water usage by 40% and fertilizers by 20%. An acre of dryland can do with 1.5 kg of the polymer costing less than Rs 700 per season.

With Gurjar’s patented process, the water absorbing bio-degradable polymers can be made on an industrial scale with no petrochemical inputs.

OIST’s accelerator programme lasted only a year, the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions meant Gurjar could not come back to India for two years. He decided to use the the time and OIST’s generosity of hosting him at the university for longer to incorporate the the company in Japan as well and further his research. With OIST’s global industry network, it wasn’t hard to find investor interest.

“EF Polymer is developing products based on original technology idea that meet the social and economic needs of the farmers globally. It has created a low-cost technology that none of its competitors have been able to achieve,” says a spokesperson at Universal Materials Incubator (UMI) a Japanese firm that invests in chemical and material science companies.

According to UMI, there is immense potential for EF Polymer in counties where drought damage is high. “We believe its cost-effectiveness is already sufficient to make farmers turn to it, especially those who grow vegetables that have a high unit price,” the UMI spokesperson adds. to stimulate incentives on the part of farmers, especially for high unit price vegetables.

With the Rs 40 crore investment raised so far, Gurjar’s EF Polymer has put up a plant in Udaipur with a production capacity of 100 tons a month.

“It would have been easy for me to license this product to a large company. But I want my work to help poor farmers like my father. If I can’t do that I’m a failure. I firmly believe Mother Nature has a solution for every problem,” says Gurjar.  

West Africa’s bitter chocolate harvest is a sweet deal for farmers in south India

Posted on April 22nd, 2024

The small, dark godown abutting M Dharmambigai’s large home with a larger courtyard in Kottur, a village 15 km to the south of Pollachi town in Tamil Nadu, has never housed stock so precious.

The value of gunny bags of cocoa beans stacked unevenly, without a great deal of care, is currently more than Rs 12 lakh and almost guaranteed to go up to Rs 15 lakh soon.

The lottery of climate change is such that the misery of farmers in one country is an opportunity to make windfall gains for others in a different continent.

The price of cocoa beans, the primary raw material for chocolate, has more than tripled in the last year. In March 2024 alone, it rose from $7100 a ton to $10455. In fact, chocolate prices now trade higher than industrial metals such as copper.

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Brown gold

The rise is fuelled by crippling shortages in Ghana and Ivory Coast that produce nearly 55% of the world’s cocoa beans. According to the International Cocoa Organization (ICCO), a grouping of 51 countries comprising the biggest exporters and consumers of the bean, the West African production decline that set off since 2016 is a combination of cocoa trees infected with the deadly swollen shoot virus disease, illegal mining, which has reduced the number of cocoa farms, ageing trees and prolonged dry and wet spells of weather.

There are far deeper socio-economic reasons why West African cocoa production will not recover anytime soon resulting in chocolate becoming ever more expensive. Despite the global craze for chocolates, the farmers in Ivory Coast and Ghana that produce cocoa have remained some of the most exploited and poorly paid in the world.

Terminal decline

According to a JP Morgan report, cocoa is still largely cultivated by smallholder farmers, many of whom struggle to make a living income and lack the means to reinvest in their land — which translates to lower yields over time. “Cocoa is a market where the grower produces a very high-value good but receives a very low share of the actual value chain. As a result, replanting rates are very low and cocoa trees are ageing,” said Tracey Allen, an agricultural commodities strategist at JP Morgan in the report.

In other words, the poor West African farmers have no incentive to take good care of their plantations, or even grow cocoa at all. Many are happy to switch to crops like rubber or sell their land to metal miners.

India’s opportunity

Dharmambigai is a 71-year-old, widowed farmer with no children, who manages her 25-acre holding pretty much by herself. Clad in a pale-green-pink-and-maroon printed silk-cotton sari, wearing large steel-frame glasses, a forehead full of vibhuti and sandalwood paste on the nose bridge, she has no clue about global cocoa production trends. “I’m just happy that my cocoa bean stock of 1.25-1.5 tons is fetching a price of Rs 800 a kg. Some of my relatives have told me not to sell now because prices may go up to Rs 1000 soon,” beams Dharmambigai, speaking in the endearing, singsong western Tamil Nadu accent and manner that includes addressing younger people as ‘kannu’ [darling].  She is one of the few remaining cocoa farmers in Tamil Nadu’s Pollachi region.

India is a lightweight in the global cocoa production landscape. It barely produces 27,000-30,000 tons, far below the domestic demand of more than 70,000 tons. Can Indian farmers like Dharmambigai begin to prosper when those in West Africa give up? It’s not so simple.

A hard nut

The popularity and easy availability of chocolate as a consumer product does not help appreciate the exacting nature of cocoa farming. Cocoa is a delicate, sensitive plant that requires high rainfall, heat, yet constant shade and a great deal of moist air. As a result, their home is restricted to the region 20 degrees north and south of the equator.

In India, cocoa is a shortish tree growing up to six metres with a broad shady canopy and leaves three-to-four times bigger than that of mango. Unlike its natural home in tropical forests of West Africa and South America, Indian cocoa is grown in the shade of vast coconut and arecanut or betelnut plantations as an intercrop.

The coastal areas in Andhra Pradesh’s Godavari delta produce most of India’s cocoa followed by west-central Karnataka’s hill regions and places like Pollachi on the foothills of the Western Ghats in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. The cocoa fruit, when ripe and ready for harvest, resembles the papaya. But the cocoa fruit is much woodier, requiring a wooden mallet and considerable force to be cracked open.

Cocoa is an evergreen tree that yields fruits twice a year: June and July is when the big harvest comes after the minor season that lasts from November to January. Yields on a commercial scale are possible only after five years and trees remain productive for up to 30 years.

“My husband planted cocoa seedlings 13 years ago in our coconut farms. He passed away shortly thereafter. Since then, I’ve been taking care of it in his memory, even if there wasn’t not much income from it. Most farmers in our region have cut their cocoa trees because the price never went above Rs 200/kg,” says Dharmambigai, as she conducts the daily survey of her farm on creaking arthritic knees, riding on her husband’s beloved Willys Jeep of the 1960s vintage.

Her own cocoa farm would yield more if she bothered to prune the trees regularly and pay greater attention to them. Another disadvantage of growing cocoa as an intercrop to coconut and arecanut is that cocoa pods become the primary source of food for squirrels and wildlife such as the Asian palm civet. Civets find it easier to drill through the relatively soft fruits of cocoa compared to the rock-hard coconuts.

Harvesting and processing cocoa nuts is labour intensive. In a region that allows both men and women in the workforce industrial employment at Coimbatore’s factories and Tiruppur’s textile mills, farmhands are always at a premium.

A typical cocoa fruit or pod contains 30 to 40 beans and there are about 30 pods per tree.  When the fruit is broken the seeds are covered in a thin layer of mucous-like pulp that tastes like a sugar-free version of sitaphal or custard apple.

Dharmambigai removes the beans from the pods, and stores them in large bamboo baskets covered by banana leaves or tarpaulin. After five to seven days of fermentation in a cool, dark space, the cocoa beans are sun dried for several days. That’s when they get the deep brown colour and the coveted chocolate flavour.  You need about 500-600 dried beans to make a kg of cocoa powder.

Indian cocoa is far more astringent than west Africa’s and therefore needs more intensive processing. African beans have subtler and complex flavours to justify the premium.

“India cocoa farmers have benefited in the short term and they can take advantage of high global prices. As an intercrop to coconut and areca, our cocoa is more environmentally sustainable. We don’t grow it on forest land that has been cleared for plantation.  We have our own climate change problems.  Unseasonal cyclones destroy cocoa flowers in East Godavari district. Poor south west monsoon impacts output in Western Ghats,” says Krishna Kumar HM, the managing director of Central Arecanut and Cocoa Marketing and Processing Co-operative Limited (Campco), India’s largest cocoa procuring cooperative that sells chocolates under its own brand and to multinational firms such as Nestle.

Drone duo that heals crops with pictures from the sky

Posted on March 28th, 2024

Amandeep Panwar, 30, and Rishabh Choudhary, 31, first set foot on a farm in 2015. As students in an aeronautical engineering graduate course at a Lucknow college, farms in a village nearby offered the vast open spaces to fly a drone for their final year project. The friendship they struck up in college has resulted in BharatRohan, a startup with revenue of nearly Rs 20 crore in the frontier space of precision agriculture technology.

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Founded in 2016, immediately after Panwar and Choudhary graduated, BharatRohan uses hyperspectral imaging, one of the most advanced remote sensing tools to capture warning signals about pest attacks, disease outbreaks and nutrition deficiency in crops at a very early and actionable stage. “Remedial action at this early stage helps farmers eliminate crop losses. It can be one of the most important innovations in agricultural early warning systems. The potential is humungous,” says Kondapi Srinivas, principal scientist at Indian Council of Agriculture Research’s (ICAR) National Academy of Agricultural Research Management (NAARM) in Hyderabad that incubated the start-up.

The power of precision

Every year India loses in excess of 15% of its farm output worth about $40 billion to diseases, pests and climate related crop stress.

BharatRohan’s drones are fitted with hyperspectral imaging (HSI) cameras that film the farmland every week to ten days. The technology and the firm’s proprietary algorithms can decipher the miniscule colour changes occurring in the plants due to different biochemical changes. For instance, a pomegranate plant infested with bacterial blight develops red-brown spots on the leaves. To a naked eye, these spots are visible only after 7-10 days of infestation. But with HSI, the infestation can be identified in the very early stages, and the problem can be treated with precision without any significant damage.

BharatRohan not only identifies the problems but also suggests the fixes. “The early-stage diagnosis of the biochemical changes in crops helps us create prescription on maps highlighted with the critical zones. An actionable advisory is given to the farmers. Our executives help farmers in its implementation. With precision and early diagnosis, farmers can apply the pesticides in the tract of land. They save on inputs and gain yields,” says Panwar, CEO, BharatRohan.

Filming the farms

Hyperspectral imaging is a technique that analyses a wide spectrum of light instead of just assigning primary colours (red, green, blue) to each pixel. The light striking each pixel is broken down into many different spectral bands in order to provide more information on what is imaged. The unique colour signature of an individual object can be detected. Unlike other optical technologies that can only scan for a single colour, HSI can distinguish the full colour spectrum in each pixel. BharatRohan can currently collect plant level and row level data at 5 cm/pixel resolution.

The use of drones is a big part of the Indian government’s push towards precision farming techniques. Under the Viksit Bharat scheme, the government would fund 15,000 rural women self-help groups (SHG) to the tune of 80% of the cost of a drone. The drones would be operated by trained women drone pilots called drone didis who are part of the SHG. Local farmers would be able to rent the drones for spraying fertilizer, sowing and monitoring crop health.

The interactions with farmers in the days of flying drones over their fields, helped Panwar and Choudhary learn first-hand about the damage caused by pests. They looked for ways to use their love for drones to help farmers. With a bit of research, they zeroed in on hyperspectral imaging, but it was too complex an area for two freshly-minted engineering graduates to venture into.

The mint experiment

The duo made cold calls to several experts in the field in India and overseas. They connected on Linkedin with Keshav Singh, an IIT-Mumbai alumnus and a post-doctoral researcher at University of California, Davis, specialising in the use of remote sensing technology and the use of unmanned aerial systems in precision agricultural applications. Singh was roped in early as partner.

Guidance, mentorship, and seed money came from ICAR’s a-IDEA incubator and CSIR’s Lucknow-based Central Institute of Medicinal and Aromatic plants (CIMAP). Manoj Semwal, a senior scientist at CIMAP, helped BharatRohan create the spectral libraries for various crops and their diseases, starting with mint, potato and paddy, the three major crops in the Uttar Pradesh’s Barabanki district. The spectral library is a vast database that includes information about colour changes of a healthy plant grown in ideal conditions and those with specific diseases like the rust fungus in mint. Images from a farmer’s field can be juxtaposed with those from the library to precisely diagnose the occurrence of a disease, its stage and the nutritional status of the crop.

But every crop needs its own spectral library. To add information on a wide variety of crops, the company is working with the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), a Hyderabad-headquartered multilateral research organisation that works on millets and pulses that are the mainstay of farmers in the drylands of India and Africa.

The company’s drones can scour more than 10,000 acres of farmland every fortnight. BharatRohan uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) based tools to build proprietary models of analysis.

CIMAP introduced the two entrepreneurs to some 300 “progressive” mint farmers in region who were part of its own network. Having won a clutch of entrepreneurship grants from Indian School of Business (ISB), Rabobank and Government of India, BharatRohan began operations as a subscription-based service for the farmers in Barabanki in 2017.

Uttar Pradesh alone accounts for almost 70% of the global mint production. Natural mint oil finds extensive use in pharmaceutical, food and confectionery industries. Boosting yields Rakesh Kumar, an aromatic herbs farmer in the Fatehpur tehsil of Barabanki, a BharatRohan partner since 2017, says he and his fellow farmers were initially dismissive of the two youngsters who claimed to increase yields with the help of drones.

 “After the results of the first 90-day mint crop, we had no doubt that it worked,” he says. According to Rakesh, the income from his nine acres of land where he grows mint, lemongrass, potato and paddy, has gone up 25% to Rs 12 lakh from Rs 9 lakh in the years he’s been working with the firm. Plus, he can save around Rs 3,500 per acre every crop cycle on inputs such as fertiliser and pesticides. For the advisory based on BharatRohan’s technology, farmers would pay 3% of their produce sales to the company.

But Panwar and Choudhary quickly realised that a business that depended entirely on getting farmers to pay might not be sustainable in India. In 2019, BharatRohan changed course to become an agriculture platform company that works with farmers from the sowing stage to post-harvest sales.

Will farmers pay up?

“Currently, we work with 19,000 farmers across 50,000 acres in six different states on a variety of crops. We adopt a farmer-friendly pricing model, charging based on the crop season. For instance, farmers cultivating crops over 3-4 months are charged approximately Rs 399 per acre per season. This approach ensures affordability for the farmers,” explains Panwar.  

Using the data from drones, BharatRohan can offer farmers real advice through Whatsapp chatbots and on-field agronomists on caring for the crops.

The access to highly accurate data on fertilizer and chemical use by the farmers in its network makes it attractive for large food buyers to partner with the company. This also helps farmers with good quality produce that adheres to prescribed pesticide and chemical residue levels command a premium.

“In India, unlike start-ups in other sectors, ag-tech companies, even if they have a strong and scalable technology platform, find it very hard to raise venture capital funding for various reasons. Primarily, it is due to the investor fears about the uncertainties in India’s agriculture. But globally, given the stress on resources, high-tech precision farming is the next big thing. Innovations like BharatRohan will be the future,” says ICAR-NAARM’s Srinivas.

The nutmeg’s purse

Posted on March 6th, 2024

There are few places in Tamil Nadu more fetching and fertile than the region around Pollachi, a town 40km to the south of Coimbatore.

Girded by the Western Ghats, rivers that flow east from its peaks, amply fed by the southwest monsoon, and tropical forests, Pollachi’s soil can grow pretty much anything. It allows farmers to experiment with vanilla and cocoa to latch on to global commodity boom cycles.  The region’s Eden-image was burnished by countless Tamil films that were shot here in the 1990s, and long-term prosperity built around coconut, especially tender coconut.

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In recent years, nutmeg has considerably spiced up farmer incomes, thanks to the efforts of Ranjit Kumar.

Ranjit Kumar, 36, is a mechanical engineer who won the Chevening scholarship to pursue a postgraduate degree in nanotechnology at Cambridge University. When his father was diagnosed with kidney failure, he had no option but to chuck up a flourishing career in engineering design in 2016 and return to Kottur, a village 15km from Pollachi to manage the 60-acre family holding of primarily coconut plantation. While at Cambridge, Ranjit ensured diversification into nutmeg following a few other farmers in the region. It’s an ideal accompaniment to coconut in these parts. Nutmeg loves the shade of coconut.

Flavour bomb

The nutmeg fruit is the size of a table tennis ball and produces two spices—nutmeg and mace. It has a smooth, pale yellow exterior when ripe, somewhat similar to the apricot or plum. Inside the fleshy and aromatic fruit, the seed is clasped in a crimson filigree called mace, that when dried, resembles flower petals. Mace has a more delicate fragrance than the nutmeg. Enclosed within the hard kernel is the actual nutmeg, an oval-shaped marble that looks like the betelnut or supari. Both mace and nutmeg are prized spices. Besides food, the oil extracted from nutmeg is used in the perfume and pharmaceutical industries.

Trees can last up to 100 years and need little maintenance. It is naturally resistant to pests and needs only farmyard manure. Chemical fertilizers eat into the aroma of the spice.

Pollachi is a tiny nutmeg growing region compared to Kerala that accounts for more than 90% of the 15,000 tonnes India produces. Being a secondary production market, the nearly 150 nutmeg farmers in Pollachi with smaller output were at the mercy of a cartel of four traders.

“The farmers didn’t know much about market trends. Traders would tell us that our quality was poor and we took whatever money they offered. If you look at the organized services or manufacturing industry, the vendor and buyer are both informed parties. In agriculture, the farmer who is the vendor is in the dark,” says Ranjit.

In 2019, Ranjit started the Pollachi Nutmeg Farmer Producer Company bringing together 110 local nutmeg farmers.

A farmer producer company or FPC is a social enterprise that’s a hybrid between a cooperative, such as Amul, and a private limited company. An FPC can be formed when ten or more farmers in a region band together. But it must be owned and managed by its member-farmers.  

Creating 10,000 FPCs across the country is a keystone in the government’s plans to increase chronically low small farmer incomes. To develop the FPC movement in the country, the government has made a budgetary allocation of Rs 6,865 crore besides a raft of other schemes to increase the access to money and markets for such companies. The power of collectivization through FPCs helps farmers negotiate better prices both when buying inputs like seeds and fertilizers or selling their produce to traders.

Understanding value

Instead of farmers selling small lots, the FPC pools more than 40 tonnes of nutmeg and two tonnes of mace from the member farmers across 50 villages.

Nutmegs are sorted by the farmers and graded in three quality tiers. All the produce is brought to a marriage hall in Pollachi and sold within ten days. Not only is their bargaining power better, the FPC can focus on marketing and attracting more buyers. As a result, farmer incomes have gone up almost 50% and the FPC has a turnover of Rs 2.5 crore.

A nutmeg tree starts yielding in about five years. A fully grown tree in Pollachi produces 400-450 nutmegs a year on average compared to a 1000 in Kerala. But in a wetter Kerala, the nutmegs are more susceptible to fungus.

Mace fetches a better price when it dries out turning yellow from scarlet while retaining its flower-like shape. “Due to the weather in Kerala, this process takes longer. Also, the nutmegs here have better flavour because the plantations are not as dense as in Kerala,” says Ranjit. A better understanding of the market and the value of their own produce is helping farmers convince the traders to offer a premium.   

Farmers make up to Rs 180,000 a year in profits with 50 trees as an intercrop with coconut. Last season, one of the farmers in the FPC sold nutmegs worth more than Rs 20 lakh from his four acres. A kilo of nutmeg during peak season sells for more than Rs 450. When farmers sell small lots to traders, the average price can be as low as Rs 275.

Ranjit wants to replicate the success of nutmeg in coconut as well. That’s the big but elusive prize. It was easy to unite farmers through nutmeg because it is a high value commodity. The biggest crop in Pollachi is tender coconut—so big that most farmers have now lost the skill to grow anything else. In summers, the price of a nut goes up to Rs 35 and in winters farmers barely get Rs 10. “Our next target is to find a way to create a supply chain for tender coconut that keeps farmers profitable year-round. If you are not working collectively as farmers, you are moving in the wrong direction,” he says.

The young entrepreneur from Jharkhand who wants to simplify spiky jackfruit for India

Posted on February 17th, 2024

Like most young people born and raised in Jharkhand, Aman Chhabra, 31, was determined to find the escape velocity required to pull out of the state’s dark gravitational forces that could ground even modest ambition.

Being a bright student, he managed to attend Delhi’s prestigious Shriram College of Commerce. Post graduation, when he was expected to become a part of the family business running a hotel in Ramgarh, a town in central Jharkhand, Chhabra chose a career in event management instead. 

His small but profitable startup organized flashy weddings for the super-rich in Mumbai and Delhi where A-list artistes performed and fine wine flowed from faucets. But the business couldn’t survive the crippling effect of Covid-19 in 2020. The search for a business idea that could survive such unforeseen shocks, and in sync with his own newfound life-motto of minimalism drove him to seek shelter under the copious, cool canopy of the jackfruit tree.

Under the jackfruit tree

Chhabra has joined the burgeoning corps of food entrepreneurs that wants to rekindle India’s love for the spiky, smelly, latex-laden sticky jackfruit.

His latest startup Kathalfy, seeks to simplify the consumption of jackfruit, called kathal in Hindi, in the form of ready-to-eat vegan packaged foods such as patties, keema masala, jackfruit makhni and assorted Indian curries.

Even if Chhabra had successfully plotted his way out of a state whose brazenly corrupt polity is a graveyard of entrepreneurial activity, memories of childhood were harder to shed.

“I grew up amidst jackfruit trees. Jackfruit was staple food. When I was researching sustainable business ideas, I realised India wastes almost Rs 2000 crore worth of jackfruit simply because we don’t know what to do with this abundance,” says Chhabra clad in a tight white Chinese-collar shirt, buttoned down to the wrist, a pair of denims and white sneakers, and hair cropped so short and sharp as to make his square jaw lend a rectangular shape to his face.

In recent years, jackfruit’s stock as a ‘superfood’ has skyrocketed globally.

There is increasing scientific evidence of jackfruit’s health benefits. A 100g serving of steamed, raw jackfruit has 40% less carbohydrates and up to four times more fibre than chapatis made from the same amount of wheat flour. The seeds in the jack pods contain a great deal of protein.  

But even in India, the home of the jackfruit, the biggest tree-growing fruit in the world, Indians find it a nasty fruit. North Indians hate the ripe fruit for the smell they find unpleasant and, erm, reminiscent of excrement. In the south, jackfruit has an exalted status. According to ancient Tamil literature, it is part of the divine troika of fruits alongside mango and banana; its wood is used to make the mridangam. Yet, India wastes more than half of its two million tonnes of annual jackfruit output that leaves farmers with no option to treat it as a weed and chop the trees down.

Chhabra travelled around every major jackfruit mandi in India from Panruti in Tamil Nadu to Tumakuru in Karnataka to understand the fruit’s supply chain. He met up with scientists at the India Council for Agriculture Research (ICAR) and Central Food Technology Research Institute (CFTRI) working not only on developing new varieties of jackfruit but also processing to make it more industry and consumer friendly.  While their work such as making chocolates out of jackfruit seeds that was called ‘Jackolate’ (we’ll leave you to judge branding) was interesting, no entrepreneur or business was keen on licensing the products and taking them to market.

Even if jackfruit grows prodigiously across peninsular India, especially along the coast, it is only Kerala that understands its many uses from the raw to ripe form, and has the capacity to process it at scale.

In Kerala, thinly sliced and steamed raw jackfruit is sometimes used as a healthier, fibrous carbohydrate alternative to rice.

Not surprisingly, James Joseph, another Kerala entrepreneur, has built a venture selling raw jackfruit flour under the brand Jackfruit 365 based on its ability to help diabetics.  

Raw jackfruit chunks in the hands of a clever cook can be made to mimic pulled pork, or meat in a biryani. Chhabra’s quest for a contract manufacturer who could make ready-to-eat jackfruit products to his recipe brought him to a giant 20-acre food processing hub in Kerala’s picturesque Kolanchery town 30km to the east of Kochi.  

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Synthite, a large and local private firm with a long history of trading in spices grown in the Malabar coast, has set up what in marketing-speak it calls a ‘Taste Park’ in Kolanchery amidst ageing rubber plantations, a church at every bend of the hill-tract, and giant granite bungalows whose owners prefer to stay in Dubai or Denver, Colorado, US, than here. The dry January air can transmit the smell of instant noodles masala to anyone within a 3km-radius of the ‘Taste Park’. And for good reason. Synthite and its subsidiary Symega operating out of the ‘Park’, that makes Chhabra’s ready-to-eat jackfruit gravies, also produces spice blends, sauces, mayonnaise, and savoury processed foods for any major multinational brand you can think of.  

According to Santosh Stephen, the managing director of Symega foods, a Rs 500-crore food processor, jackfruit-based, vegan ready-to-eat kebabs and curries is a huge market for his company globally. While a startup like Chhabra’s Kathalfy is merely seeding the market in India, large supermarket chains in US, Europe and Canada already sell seekh kebabs, samosas and cutlets made and packaged by Symega.

During the peak processing season for raw jackfruits between December and June, farmers can make up to Rs 30 a kg. While a ripe jackfruit can weigh as much as 15kg, the the raw form its only about a 3kg at best and its easy to transport, handle and process.

“The market for jackfruit products is huge globally. We have set up a dedicated division for plant-based foods made of jackfruit for our global customers,” says Stephen, a loyal Montblanc customer who uses the German luxury brand’s flagship Meisturstruck 149 fountain pens, belts and wallets.

For Chhabra, though, this seems the right time to make the abundantly available jackfruit more relatable to Indians without forcing them to change their palate.

“This can be a win-win for consumers and farmers. Why should we follow the West, when we have the raw material and knowledge to make jackfruit into the next big thing,” says Chhabra.

The humble jack might need government-led marketing campaigns like for millets for lift-off.

Tamil Nadu acid limes that basically offer a good deal without getting neighbours salty

Posted on February 2nd, 2024

Puliyangudi in Tamil literally means ‘tart territory’. Fittingly, the big boss in this Tamil Nadu town 140 km to the southwest of Madurai, on the foothills of Western Ghats bordering Kerala, is a sour fruit called acid lime that bears the scientific name Citrus aurantifolia.

While Puliyangudi acid lime’s application for the geographical indicator (GI) status is pending, it clearly commands a premium in the market.

With a paper thin two millimetre peel, the Puliyangudi acid lime has 50-55% juice content and is packed with flavour. A tiny nail-scratch on its surface is enough to make the juices and fragrance burst through. More importantly, it has a citric acid content of 8% compared to 5% in other lime varieties. Prices therefore can go up to Rs 500 a kg when demand peaks.

This small region’s tropical climate and red soil allows around 2500 farmers to produce nearly 10,000 tonnes of acid lime on 7500 hectares. Puliyangudi itself has become a large single commodity trading hub whose inhabitants take incredible pride in it being billed the ‘lemon town’. The proximity to a large consumption market in Kerala next door and the year-round demand for lemons in a hot country helps.

Even accounting for such factors, Puliyangudi’s acid lime-fame is arguably built on the base of a pioneering farmer and innovator called V Antonysamy. Now 83, Antonysamy is credited with developing several high-yielding varieties of acid lime that the region’s farmers have benefitted from.

His work not just on limes, but increasing sugarcane and rice yields through sustainable methods, has won him national acclaim too. With a 300-acre landholding, Antonysamy would rank among the wealthiest farmers in a country where farmers own less than two acres on average.

Antonysamy is a burly man with a round, chubby face, bald head and loads of, what locals consider, “attitude”.

Besides the white pick-up truck he drives, and the air of authority that occasionally creeps into his voice, there are few visible signs of prosperity that would make him an outlier in his surroundings.

After a breakfast of kambu koozh (a gruel made with bajra and buttermilk), Anthonysamy spends most of the day examining every tree and soil bed.  His small eyes seem to be getting smaller with age, but the ability to spot something odd, here or there, remains intact.

“The farm wasn’t offered to me on a platter,” he says, clad in a white shirt, veshti and a typical farmers union green towel around his neck, trying to follow deer footmarks on soil made butter-soft by recent rains, to ascertain the damage done by nocturnal visitors.

Antonysamy joined his father’s farm in 1962 learning about Nature’s ways, the native science of soil management and weeds that helped and hampered the crop.

In the late 1980s, he developed a new lime breed from locally available varieties, by grafting and trial and error, that could almost triple the output.

That led to Puliyangudi’s acid lime boom and its demand in the food processing industry in Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

On average, acid lime cultivation can fetch farmers a net profit of Rs 200,000 per acre a year, accounting for seasonal price fluctuations.

“In the last decade, acid lime productivity has increased 25-30%. Farmers now get more than 1000 fruits a tree on average compared to 700-750,” says Palani Kumar, Head (Horticulture), Citrus Research Station and Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (TNAU), Sankarankovil.  

However, climate change is proving a party-pooper.

Every morning, with his lunch packed in a steel tiffin box, 62-year-old Abdul Wahab rides a 100cc TVS moped to his acid lime orchard in Konandoppu Aaru village in the Puliyangudi region. It’s a big improvement on the bicycle he used until a decade ago.

By December, his lime trees should have bunches of pearl-white flowers. But the northeast monsoon rains, delayed by almost two months, that battered southern Tamil Nadu, have knocked the flowers off. The unseasonal deluge has also resulted in citrus canker, a bacterial disease that devours citrus leaves. Wahab needs to prune several thousand afflicted branches carefully to ensure he has any marketable output during the April-May harvest season. The interest on the money he has borrowed from a local loan shark would grow as fast as the weeds around his acid lime.

“Better farm management with increased use of organic manure, mulching and pruning can overcome such issues,” says Antonysamy.

A GI tag for Puliyangudi acid lime can only make farmers’ prospects better.  

Vijayalakshmi Sridhar is a business, technology, food and environment writer based in Chennai.