Traditional agriculture is the most water-guzzling activity and the reason for bitter disputes between countries and states in India. But it is possible to do high yielding agriculture will frugal use of water. CNN-IBN travelled to water-challenged Maharashtra and the rather inappropriately named Jalgaon to see how a company with foresight has popularised a water saving technology by converting it into a productivity enhancing tool.
Sights of water tankers in slums, and SUVs being hosed down are common in parts of national capital, and they tell us how little we need to get by. One does not need to douse a car with water when a wet wipe can do the same, nor train a hose on the stairs when a bucket of water, a scrub and a squeegee can be as effective. In jargon it would be called frugal engineering.
Mahatma Gandhi epitomises frugality and life in harmony with nature. Bhavarlal Jain, founder of Jain Irrigation in Jalgaon, regards him as his guide. He even has a museum called Gandhi Teerth in Jalgaon, near Aurangabad, in north Maharashtra. Jawaharlal Nehru and J R D Tata are his other lodestars. It is an unlikely combination but their place in Jain’s pantheon is thought-out not whimsical.
"Gandhiji teaches us how to live, Nehruji teaches us how to dream and JRD Tata how to do business with a social conscience," says Jain.
Bhavarlal Jain can be regarded as one of the entrepreneurs who made India. They are people who chase and shape transformative ideas well ahead of their time. The idea of drop by drop or drip irrigation clicked with Jain at a trade exhibition in the United States. He saw a future for it in Maharashtra where less than a fifth of the land is irrigated. That was in the late eighties, when import substitution and conservation of scarce foreign exchange were the pivots of economic policy.
"I remember a dialogue with a government official who was concerned with my file to sanction $30,000 as a technology fee. And he said, Mr Jain what are you talking about giving $30,000. Big money in those days and you are saying you will save water. But we are not importing water so why should you be talking of saving of water. That does not help the country. The country needs foreign exchange not water," says Jain.
Tenu Borole is one of those who has re-imagined life because of Jain pioneering enterprise. He is another Indian who started life after matriculation as a chai seller in the village square. Today, he counts his annual earnings in tens of millions of rupees. His rise up the social ladder from a patronising Tenya to a respectful Tenu Seth has been as easy as climbing a banana trunk. Borole was an early convert to drip irrigation. From 2,000 plants in 1990, he has 72,000 plants on 60 acres of own and leased land. His annual income is not less than Rs 1.5 crore.
"I do not need to save water because there is enough but if I give more it is not good for the crop. In cold weather, we need to give one hour of water instead of six. In flood irrigation we cannot give water daily. We do it once every few days because we do not manually. But with drip we can do the whole field in one go and also calibrate it every day," said Tenu Seth.
Laxman Onkar Chaudhari is a crorepati farmer who turned to agriculture because a diploma in education did not fetch him a school teacher’s job. A banana grower for forty years he shifted out of flood or furrow irrigation in 1989 and was among the first crop of farmers to adopt drip irrigation. From four barren acres to begin with he now grows the fruit on about two hundred acres of own and leased land.
"With one motor I irrigate twice the number of plants and get harvest two times. Previously I used to take one harvest in two years. Only 65 percent of bananas would be marketable. Now I have 100 percent of the harvest and get two harvests in two years," says Chaudhari.
There is more to drip irrigation than installing the apparatus of pumps, pipes and nipples. It means unlearning wisdom handed down from father to son, questioning tradition. They say the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Once people start interrogating received certitudes, there is no stopping them from asking why not? Why not use the drip system to apply dissolved fertilizer drop by drop, a process known as fertigation? Why not keep fewer hands on a banana bunch and get bigger fruit that customers prefer? Why not use cloned, test-tube tissue culture plants instead of disease prone conventional rhizomes or suckers of uncertain yield?
"It is the mindset and people are very conservative. Willingness to change is not there. And they are more looking at this as a source of livelihood. They are not looking at it as a business. Nor are they treating it as science. Result is, they are not moving from traditional methods to modern methods and so on. That is where they are lagging behind," says Ajit Jain, joint managing director of Jain Irrigation.
For one farmer, Avinash Nathu Patil, making the switch meant negotiating a personal dilemma. A graduate in computer science, he fell back on farming, when a three-year search did not get him a job. Pretty hard up himself, he wanted to take a bet on tissue culture and get the best out of the drip system his father had already installed. He would be the first in the village to do so and a wrong move could push the large joint family of twelve persons deeper into debt. But the gamble paid off, when his 1700 tissue culture plants yielded the same as double the number of conventional plants. His annual savings from ten acres of bananas are in the range of Rs 25 lakh; and other youth in the village have taken after him.
"Others are saying this guy has done BSc and is faming. So even those who are studying are now thinking of doing agriculture. My friends are all doing good agriculture," says Patil.
Corporate talk of business with a social conscience should not be confused with altruism. It is shared prosperity that emerges from enlightened self interest. Jain irrigation must create wealth for farmers to drive demand for its products. It is integrated with them through the crop cycle from saplings to a limited buyback of fruit for processing. At this facility, it produces 60 million tissue culture plants of high-yielding Grand Naine, a Honduran variety imported from Israel in the early 1990s. The ten-month tissue culture plantings sell for Rs 13 each, four times more than conventional rhizomes, but demand exceeds supply. It aggressively promoted drip irrigation by installing the systems on farms at half the cost, and claiming the other half as subsidy on behalf of farmers from the government, a model it has discontinued after delays affected cash flows severely. Agronomic practices, continually improved through research, helps farmers get the most out of their banana crops.
Kalyansing Baburao Patil, vice-president (Tissue Culture and Agri-services) Jain Irrigation Systems, says, "Because I believe when we as company work with growers, one issue is the need to improve productivity and income level of growers. When income level of growers has increased, he will definitely adopt the technology. When we give technology, our other objective is to get the profit."
Companies are the engines of change, but they are driven by individuals with passion, knowledge and desire for social good like KB Patil, who is affectionately teased as ‘kela bechho Patil’. A doctorate in banana cultivation, he has been at it for 21 years, his ardour undimmed. Under his watch, Jalgaon grows bananas that yield fruit in one year instead of 18 months, and have a three-year life cycle. Dense planting, drip irrigation and wind barriers create the required high humidity within plantations, absent in hot and dry Jalgaon. Planting in April instead of June enables best use of monsoon rains. Application of nutrients, in varying combinations and doses depending on weather and growth stage, is another innovation.
According to Kalyansing Baburao Patil, "We have a 16 percent share in banana output of the country. The gardens are so good because the higher the temperature the banana plants needs balanced nutrition. If the temperature today is 47 degrees, then we tell our growers to increase potassium by one kg. In dry hot weather we give nutrients to plants on daily basis."
India is the world’s largest banana producer, though it ranks low as an exporter. Maharashtra is the second largest producer, and if Jalgaon district were a state it would rank fifth in production. It produces three quarters of Maharashra’s output. Within Jalgaon, talukas like Raver are almost entirely banana country.
Maharashtra ranks high in productivity at 23 tonnes per acre, against the national average of 15 tonnes. But those who adopt the combination of drip irrigation, fertigation and tissue culture, that is those who use drip irrigation as a productivity enhancing tool, get 40 tonnes per acre or a net income of about 2.5 lakh per acre. Yet, despite the incentives and the marketing, the adoption rate of drip irrigation is still low in the country.
"So far yes, but frankly the adoption rate is slow as compared to the size of country. Adoption is high in western part of India where water availability is low, followed by south, that is, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. Rajasthan has also started coming up. But North and North east continue to be slow," says Ajit Jain.
The national mission on plastics in agriculture in the eighties gave the impetus for irrigation, particularly drip irrigation, which allows large areas to be watered in the same amount of time. Drip pipes can be put on undulating land; they do not have to be flat. And they can cope with limited power supply and labour shortage.
India has only 8 percent (USA – 57%, Russia – 78%, Brazil – 61%)of irrigated area or less than 2 million ha under drips and sprinklers, while other countries are far ahead. Within India a few states lead.
Does drip irrigation help raise the ground water table? One cannot say with certainty.
The latest official data of 2009 classifies banana growing Raver and Yaval talukas as overexploited ground water areas. To make a difference, clusters of farmers must adopt the technology and this is where the government must step in.
The government has to play a facilitative role in smart agriculture.
Both rice and sugarcane are considered to be water guzzling crops. Rice traditionally has been grown by flooding the paddies. This is not an environment friendly practice as the paddies emit methane which heats up the atmosphere. Scientists say that the crop does not require standing water; it is actually meant to kill weeds. Cane is an efficient converter of solar energy. But here in Sangli farmers have demonstrated that it can be a efficient user of water as well.
For Sanjeev Mane Astha, WhatsApp is an outreach tool. Almost everyday he posts messages about how to improve cane productivity to about 5,100 followers up from 300 when he started in February 2014. The messages in Marathi go out to farmers in Maharashtra and the border areas of Karnataka and Gujarat. Mane says their productivity has risen by about 20 tons per acre in the past one year. It takes Rs 1 lakh to grow cane on an acre so at the price of Rs 2000 a tonne anything above 20 tonnes is profit.
Mane has another group of 550 farmers that meets every month to discuss and listen to experts. Their target is to achieve 150 tonnes of cane an acre or a profit of two lakh for every lakh of investment. All of them are on drip technology.
In Ahirwadi village, farmers have a problem of plenty. The water table is so high because of the topography that the soil had turned saline. So about 100 small farmers owing as much land formed a water cooperative to pool money and bring water from a river five and a half km away at an investment of Rs 165000 an acre. To conserve water they are all on drip. What they did out of choice has become mandatory in the state which grows cane in areas that are not suitable for cane.
Farmers are willing to adopt new technology if they see gains in it; it takes enlightened corporates to initiate change and sustain them. And the government must step in with supportive policies.
(To know more, watch 'Smart Agriculture' presented by Monsanto, every Saturday & Sunday at 4:30 PM and Monday at 5:30 PM on CNN-IBN and every Saturday & Sunday at 4:30 PM on CNBC-Awaaz.)
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