Treasure hunt on the coast

The coastal areas before the Ghats begin have always been known for commercial farming. Apart from the machi mar communities and their fish ...

The coastal areas before the Ghats begin have always been known for commercial farming. Apart from the machi mar communities and their fish catch, the rich soils, plentiful rains and a trading environment always encouraged farmers to make money. In a way, I always thought of the Konkan Railway as an important landmark of infrastructure and was grateful to its great builder for connecting resource-rich areas with each other. Remember earlier, to go from Surat to Cochin by train you almost went to Chennai. All roads literally led to Rome; the train network connecting us always to the ports and imperial designs and not with each other. All that is now history.

The Wadis of the area between Surat and Thane and beyond have been known for what is now called diversification: The mighty alphonso, bananas, chikoos and, of course, cotton and tobacco. Long before Vasco da Gama landed up at the Mangalore coast and left some very unpleasant memories, a benign Chinese admiral had landed there and talked of the wealth of the coastal areas. If you visit the coast more to the north, near Surat, you will see the beginning of another revolution. Praful Dholakia, who facilitates creative lending for rural development from NABARD, talks effortlessly of bixa, safed muesli, khus, stevia, patchouli and palma rosa. You know muesli, but safed or ‘‘dholi’’ musli as it is called in Gujarat is described as a ‘‘divya ausadhi’’ in the Charaka Samhita and ‘‘chlorophytum borivalinum’’, its scientific name, is now a wonder drug. Also, what about the others? You also do not know that the demand for them is almost limitless at the levels at which we produce them and you can make more than a lakh of rupees an acre. In the west, the craze for the ‘‘natural’’ obliterates the ‘‘chemical’’. For example, no well-informed lady would let chemical agents defile her by body contact. Khus oil and patchouli oil are used for cosmetics, and the latter as an aroma for perfumes world-wide.

There is, of course, the home market in a small country called India, growing reasonably fast. Khus is a household name. Vetevier, as it is called, apart from its use in sherbet and pan masala is, as we know, used in mats for cooling. But it is also a great agent for avoiding soil erosion as any forester will tell you. As soon as ridge counters are formed to harvest water in a hill slope or on the banks of a pond or water body, khus is planted to stabilise the work done. Stevia will have a limitless market in the diabetes capital of the world called India. It is a high potency bio-sweetener. A native of Paraguay, the stevia leaf powder is thirty times sweeter than cane sugar and stevioside, the core sweetening agent, is three hundred times more so. Its demand is almost limitless, as long as it substitutes other sugar substitutes which scare with carcinogenic properties. Stevia, in fact, has therapeutic qualities for other diseases.

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All this is pretty much like the wealth the Hyderabad-based Center For Research in Dryland Areas had shown us, as reported in these columns earlier. There, it was in spices and exotic foods. Here, it is more exotic now in medicinal and aromatic plants (MAPS) but almost a step away from becoming the household names of tomorrow. But we do need to get our act together. Not everyone is as excited and as resourceful as Praful Dholakia.

In a recent meeting with senior bankers in Gujarat, a kisan from Kaira openly said that the lead bank did not fund his need for credit for ‘‘dholi musli’’. Of course, in Gujarat the local NABARD men will chase the front end banks, but we need to crank the system. First, it is credit. Some of these are tree crops and so will have a crop cycle of three years plus. We are now talking of investments of upto half a million rupees an acre. Again, there is need for more effective water delivery systems. The water requirements are not always high, but for results, the timing of water is important and since these are line crops drips are very effective. That, too, costs money. Also, our certification systems are slow. I know how moribund our health authorities are. I once recommended a bio additive to milk and its products which creates anti bodies for diaorrhea. It is widely used in Europe and elsewhere and since diaorrhea is a killer I was enthusiastic. A senior doctor whom I knew was then in authority and I shied away at his suggestion that he would take care of “my friend” since I was a former minister. If we do this to all bio-friendly products we will miss the bus forever.

Finally, there will have to be synergies between farmers and industry. It is here that the idea that farmer or producer groups can form companies under the Companies Second Amendment Bill 2002, drafted by a committee I chaired, can be the natural vehicle for strategic partnerships for companies in agroindustry.

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