In one of the first acts of the new government, an income support scheme has been extended to farmers which will include some 140 million such households. Congress had promised in its 2019 Lok Sabha poll manifesto an even better deal with cash transfer of Rs 6,000 a month per farmer household.

Based on case studies built on inputs from field visits, a new development paradigm for Indian farm sector is emerging, which rests on the robust individualism of the farmer. Indian farmers do not need freebies. They are looking for freedom.

The grape farmers of Pimplegaon near Nashik area of Maharashtra have engaged an International grape expert, paying him an annual consultancy fee of Rs 1 crore a year, with stay, a logistics are thrown in. These farmers are seeking to improve the quality of their produce, including wiping out chemical residues in grapes to make Indian grapes acceptable to global buyers and wine producers.

Every farm in the area has been evaluated, indicating their positional details, including the longitude and latitude of every evaluated firm. Farming families, engaged in gape faming for the last forty years, are not just looking for some little income support or subsidies. They want to be left alone to pursue their business of grape growing and achieving global standards.

The Pimlegaon grape growers are now part of the “Grape Net” and their phytosanitary and other reports have been standardised. Harish More, the local grape expert, now is taking over consultancy work apart from looking after his family’s grape growing farms. He is active on international conference circuits as well and picking up useful knowledge on grape cultivation and standardisation of produce.

Not that the farmers of the region have only the financial heft. They are equally innovative. They are innovative in a way that will fox you. The smaller farmers in Dhanu block were growing only rice in their small fields. Farmer Patil said that rice growing provided enough for the family to have their daily “bhat” and be left with a little surplus. Now they have diversified into the production of vegetables.

The problem was the vegetable traders would buy their product alright. But would deduct Rs 10 per kg from the price if the farm was located a little away from the road. They put up with the deduction for a season or two. But now, farmer Patil, who owns a plot of land along the metalled road, has put up a small improvised shelter, made with four pillars and some thin textiles, used for making hot-houses, where the producer farmers bring their harvest to sell.

Users of Patil’s improvised collection centre have now formed a “WhatsApp” group and they communicate among themselves price information for products grown in the area, mainly bitter gourd and bottle gourd, in the morning so they know the prices by the time they reach the collection centre. The produce being offered alongside the metalled road, the traders can no longer deduct the Rs 10 per kg for being out of the way. Their income has doubled following multiple cropping and compared to those days when they were unorganised and did not have the price information.

The “Information Asymmetry”, something coined by the leading edge economists and used in Nobel-prize winning papers, has been tackled and overcome in rural India using the mobile phone and free Apps available now. The farmers, in their enthusiasm, have sent me some of their morning WhatsApp messages on price points at which sales were done when I was visiting their village.

It is not men alone who are making it big, women are not far behind. In many ways, they are even more advanced. When I met Kavita in her village in nearby Vikramgarh, I felt like encountering a high voltage package of intelligence. There she was, managing a conglomerate of businesses and operations, aided and abetted by a digital network of inter-connected gadgets.

She is what is being called an “Agri Entrepreneur”, as a Swiss NGO Syngenta Foundation of India, which has given her training in becoming a business-woman. These Agri Entrepreneurs are the fulcrum of a new individual-led model for farm sector growth being tried across the globe in select experiments.

The Foundation has trained 1700 such AEs who are actively working with at least 250 farmers each, providing them consultancy on cropping to price info structures and disease control.

Kavita has a tab in which she has ready data on 250-plus farmers who are her clientele. She has their names, land holding size, type of crop, Kishan Credit Card (KCC) specifics, location of farms and every other details you can think could be relevant.

She has stocks of seeds, environmentally friendly agro-chemicals, implements and tools as stock in trade. Apart from having gone though a training course for handling farm plant diseases and minimal intervention procedures, Kavita is a counsel for her 250 farmers on a gamut of daily problems. She organises credit and loans for the famers in her command area as a banking correspondent (BC). She has their credit records and purchase trends. She can tell from all these data how creditworthy a farmer is and how prudent it should be to supply him inputs on credit.

To cap it up all, she has a close circuit CCTV network in her smallish shop and a screen in the corner from which she can watch whatever little movements in every part of her sprawling business, including an adjoining cement godown so that can monitor the movement of cement bags to customers. As if nothing should be left untapped, she has procured a digital camera and a colour printing machine to supply the ubiquitously required passport size photographs, which until now had to be got only from the nearby town.

Believe it or not, Kavita’s annual turnover is close to Rs 1 crore and she does not have any problems keeping the accounts in order to keep track of what the profit is! But she is modest and is rather shy of revealing her profit margin.

Indian agriculture and farming is changing its profile on the ground at the hands of these Agri Entrepreneurs. On the basis of regular baseline surveys, it has been found that with some of the marginal interventions and shifting over to multiple cropping, farmers’ incomes have doubled in two years if along with paddy another vegetable crop is also grown.

A young man, Ashok, had given up his job with Mahindra Motors in Bombay to set up a seed farm in his family land holding. In a large enclosed canopy hot-house he has prepared the soil for growing tomato and cauliflower and cabbage seeds. Until recently, the farmers themselves used to grow their seeds. But now, they see the advantage of using seeds from seed farms.

Akash grows his seeds on order. The seeds are tweaked to suit the requirements of farmers and the quality of the final produce. Only problem Akash encounters is that seeds grown in hothouses and protected environments like his gets a shock when planted in open fields. Nonetheless he is making a nice living. He hopes to hit a target turnover of Rs 4 lakh to Rs 5 lakh currently and touch Rs 10 lakh shortly after further taking up different other seeds.

With his success, Akash is planning to start another seed farm for the prized product —grapes. For that he will build a proper poly hot-house. That alone will call for investment of another Rs5 lakh. 

Agricultural transformation is not limited to only some areas. It is happening across the country. What Dr M.S. Swaminathan, renowned agri-scientist had written about the scope and potential of developing diversified farm sector, including the growing of fruits, vegetables and other horticultural produces, is happening on its own because of the compulsions of the free market. “Surgical” local interventions, not massive nation-wide universal policies for agriculture dictated from above, can achieve these wonders. These “surgical strikes” for the farm sector growth will have to be formulated keeping in mind the local conditions and potentials. Forget big talks, send specialised groups for these efforts.