Agriculture Series 1: My Tea Trails with Indian Farmers
Agriculture has been one of the oldest professions known to mankind. It has a history of its own. A history of which we know so little. Civilizations have thrived because of agriculture and its failures have also led to its collapse.
As we see more unseasonal rains, temperature rise, depleting and deteriorating soils and water, the plight of Indian farmers seems alien to us. Well, I too was a part of this alienation, till I chose to work on my Masters and PhD research on the subject. This involved a lot of field work and conversations with farmers on their fields. I have been out in the hot October sun at noon, sitting under a tree talking to a farmers how the rains have impacted her/his cotton crop. To walking the fields in March, moving from one water source to the other of a farmer who was struggling to irrigate his crop. There have been far too many stories of loss and despair.
I recall one event specifically when I was visiting Solapur in Maharashtra. It was the month of December and I had just found a grape orchard farmer. I went to his field hoping that I would hear one of those hopeful stories this time, but it was one that shocked me. The farmer had to keep his plantation alive since he had invested a good amount of money in building it, but water had depleted over the years. He had drilled six bore-wells, some even going up to 500ft which did not yield any water. He had sunk his money and had been little to no profits that would break-even his expenditure. He had to irrigate his fields via tanker water for which he had to pay dearly. This story was not one of a kind, but over the course of my travels I heard many such narratives. There was one farmer who had drilled a 900ft bore-well which had to be blocked since it released alkaline water.
I have met all kinds of farmers, marginal to large land owning farmers of about 96 acres. However, most stories have been their plight of debts and cycles of despair. The major part of the money that they earned after a harvest is used to pay the crop loan that they had taken. Some of what remains is used for children’s education, weddings and family responsibilities. Farmers do not wish this life for their children, and why should they? This hopeless cycle of despair where money just changes hands but rarely stays with them, nature playing games and institutions politicizing their plights to their advantage is nothing short of hell.
At the end of a hard day of roaming around fields with my team, walking miles in the heat, the sun starts to set. Those are the times when I have sat down with them, and asked them would they do anything else? The answer has been a mixed bag but the love for their land and the honor for their profession is the common thread in these conversations. The sweetest of tea I have had in the homes of these kind farmers who could not let a guest go away empty handed. I have never been a fan of tea and most of these ‘one cups of tea’ would easily equate my weekly sugar quota. However, I have enjoyed them as their token of love and probably seem to have the fondest recollection of all those homes that I have been to. Some of my best memories have been out in these fields. Of all the cafes and restaurants in India and abroad, my most cherished one remains the lunch that a family invited me to on their fields on the first day of the year 2017.
I have never found a more hopeful, kind, hospitable and generous lot. Maybe it is the connection to earth that keeps them grounded, or the pure nature of their hard work. I am still not able to conclude. If they stopped doing what they do, we would collapse due to the shortage of food. It is not fiction. Tomorrow if the farmers living about 50–100 kms from the city stopped sending us food supplies. We would not last more than a few weeks. Yet they continue to shoulder the responsibility of feeding the nation. Whenever I think of farmers, I am always reminded of this conversation from the book, Atlas Shrugged:
“If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders — What would you tell him?
I…don’t know. What…could he do? What would you tell him?
To shrug.”
