Not too far from Mumbai: Crop losses, worried farmers

Vijendra and Prakash Mhatre are brothers who together farm their plot of land at Tara village in Maharashtra’s Raigad district. It’s a joint family with 11 members, including five children. The two brothers work on a 2.5-acre field, growing rice in the monsoons. They also grow vegetables and fruits during the rest of the year: brinjal, tomato, mangoes.

They reckon they have lost 25 per cent of their usual crop due to the here-today-gone-tomorrow rains of this monsoon.  And the area is far from the hardest hit by the rains this year.

The brothers had planted rice which needs plenty of water to grow. The water generally comes from the rains. But this time, there was a long dry spell, right in the middle of the monsoons.

“The crop was sown. Then it didn’t rain.”

A lot of the first sowing in the coastal areas faces a similar situation, they say. The farmers planted their crop, then the rains stopped and the crops withered.

The Mhatre brothers have a well on their property. So water is more plentiful for them than it is for others. But they still lost a fourth of their crop.

Coming off the worst drought in over four decades, others in Maharashtra have been wary of sowing in the first place.

Government data show that most farmers have not sown as much as they could have this monsoon. The normal area under cultivation for paddy in Maharashtra is 1.57 million hectares. The actual sown area this year is 850,000 hectares. This means that nearly half (45.8 per cent) of the normal kharif crop area lies unsown.  The figure for bajra is 50.9 per cent. For jowar, it’s 66.4 per cent.

Pulses have seen 69.1 per cent sowing; sugar crops are 41 per cent. Oilseeds and cotton have seen a greater proportion of sowing than normal, eight per cent more than the normal area under cultivation. Overall nearly a fifth of the land has not seen sowing activity.

But lack of rain during the monsoons, and the accompanying water shortage for crops isn’t the only problem they face.

Mhatre brothers

  Madan Marathe and Ramdas Gurume are part of the Yusuf Meherally Centre, an organisation involved in rural development in Mhatres’ village. Gurume says that a number of tribals face troubles with drinking water in the summer. Existing pools of water begin to dry up, and the water at the bottom is unclean, he says, leading to illnesses for anyone who’s forced to drink it.  The problems in Tara are despite an abundant source of water. There is a river running through the area called Patalganga. Marathe says that industrial pollution has rendered the water unfit to drink. Tribals who catch fish from the river are sick.

There is some supply from a nearby dam, but people dig borewells aplenty for access to water. One person in the area found that the water from a freshly dug well was blue. Not like the ocean. Like the paint. Industrial waste had made it undrinkable.

Everybody drinks bottled water.

People committed to agriculture in such an environment are also hamstrung by sluggish government action.

The Mhatre brothers lost a lot of their Mango crops last year. The subsidy is only now being released.

But Tara is lucky that way. Most farmers have at least one member who earns his living in the city which is only three hours away, or in the industries that have come up in the area. But even there the Mhatre brothers face a bit of a problem. There’s been a strike at the workplace, with contract labourers agitating for better pay. The situation is uncertain.

One can only imagine how much worse it must be further in the hinterlands, where there are few other sources of employment. Over 1,300 farmers are said to have killed themselves in the first six months of the year in Maharashtra. Tara, where farming families also have at least one source of income from non-farming activities is better off, but not by much.

“We won’t die,” says one of the other residents in the area, “But it’s difficult to sustain ourselves.”