Hope rides a tractor near suicide zone

Life changed for Mulak in mid-February. “I was fast asleep in the afternoon and was a bit startled when I opened the door to find an elderly, well-to-do man at my doorstep seeking to know if I wanted to plough my field,” he recalls.

The man, Ramesh Arnalkar, a trader from Pune, offered Mulak his brand new tractor free of cost—the farmer had to bear only the fuel cost and the driver’s wages which came to Rs 150 a day. Mulak could not believe his luck: “It was as if Dnyaneshwar Mauli, our deity, had answered my prayers.”

Arnalkar, the son of a farmer from Alandi, now settled in Pune as a trader, is a man with a mission. He was bothered about farmer suicides and did not want the wave to spread. So he launched his own “prevent-farmer-suicide” mission.

Six months ago, Arnalkar and his wife Shalini, while returning from a pilgrimage, made up their minds. “My wife said we should do something concrete for the farmers and when I said we could buy a tractor and till their lands, she immediately handed over her personal savings of Rs 50,000. That started it all,” he says.

So far, 50-odd small farmers from Alandi have benefited, resulting in nearly 100 acres of fallow land getting transformed into cultivable land. Add to that another 50 acres elsewhere in Pune district and the results of the Arnalkar initiative becomes apparent.

Says Janardan Jadhav, principal of Regional Agriculture Extension Management Training Institute in Pune, “Loss of cultivation cost when crop fails is one of the major reasons of farmer suicides in Maharashtra. Arnalkar’s effort to cut down the cultivation cost of small farmers will certainly address the issue at least in Pune district. The Arnalkar pattern can be replicated across Maharashtra with the aid of government and private industry.”

Alandi has a population of 20,000, the weather is generally warm and dry with average rainfall of 70 cm. The main crop is jowar along with bajra, wheat, pulses, sugarcane, and maize. Only the big farmers can afford grapes and sweet lime. “We grow jowar or pulses once a year. Water is plenty but cultivating the land is becoming costlier by the day hence only a few go for a second crop,” says Dnyaneshwar Tapkir, another farmer.

“Maintaining a pair of bullocks was no more a practical proposition. It costs you anything between Rs 50 and Rs 100 a day for the entire year and their utility period lasts hardly a couple of months in a year. The owners of tractors target only big farmers and they charge up to Rs 3,000 an acre,” says Sanjay Mungse, whose marginal land holding does not justify such spending.

Raju Pandurang Tajane’s three acres at Charholi, that was lying fallow for nearly a decade as no tractor owner was ready to risk his machine, got ploughed by Arnalkar’s tractor in October 2006. Currently, that land grows pulses.

Arnalkar has set simple rules for lending his tractor. The smaller the farm, the higher the priority; special concessions are given to poor peasants; those who cannot afford to pay for the drivers are to be trained and Arnalkar pays for the driving school and license fees.