For them, it is a fate worse than death: why Warud’s orange farmers are selling farmland

Rajeshwar Thackeray of Benoda village, near Warud town in Amravati district, has a 20-acre of farmland with 4,000 orange trees. But the 58-year-old is planning to do the unthinkable. He is the process of selling his land and giving up farming completely.

He is not only one with such a plan in Warud, which is an important town on the horticulture map of India. The town is a part of the larger and perennially farmer suicide-prone Vidarbha region of Maharashtra. In this region, farmers are known to kill themselves, but never sell their farmland.

Thackeray laments: “The government, farm labour force and Nature are against farmers, which is why farmers are taking such extreme steps. What can a farmer do, if groundwater is available only at 800- 1,000 feet and supply by water tankers is only available at night, where uniform water distribution to the whole field is not possible. Plus, power supply from the grid is erratic.”

Trees are bearing oranges but due to lack of water the fruit size has shrunk drastically. In national markets, the size of the fruits matters. Consumers pick the fruits based on the size and smaller fruits have no takers. In trade parlance, such fruits are called Chura (leftovers) and Chura has no value in the table fruits market.

Thackeray has about 200 tonnes of oranges in the orchard. The fruit pulp company will pick and choose the best fruits. Due to such selective buying, the price of this year’s harvest has dipped from ₹54 lakhs to ₹5 lakhs.

“Fortunately my son is working in the IT field, therefore, I have chosen to sell my agriculture land and move on in life,” he said. Thackeray’s family has been cultivating orange trees for the last 60 years near Warud, which is regarded as California of Maharashtra due to extensive cultivation of the citrus trees. In the last 25 years, such a water shortage was unprecedented in Warud.

In Maharashtra, oranges are cultivated over three lakh hectares with a production of about 1.20 lakh tonnes. A major orange trader from Warud, Sonu Khan of MKC Agro Fresh, said in the region it rains about 30 inches, but last year it was 16-17 inches. Compared to last year, this season only 15-20 per cent of total tonnage has arrived in market.

MKC Agro Fresh procures about 30,000 tonnes of oranges in a year. Khan said that in a standard 13x18 inches crate, 96 to 225 oranges, depending on size gets filled. This year due to poor monsoon, crates with 225, 191 and 205 oranges are more in number.

Orange farmer Nilesh Rode from Salbardi village in Morshi taluka of Amravati district said in the last two years the rainfall has reduced, due to which farmers were resorting to using groundwater that also has hit rock bottom. The region has Upper Wardha dam, which has adequate water, but it is being supplied to Amravati city and power plants.

The local farmers of Morshi, Salbardi and Warud get no advantage. The Government is spending lakhs of rupees on paying salaries of the local Agriculture Department staff, but their skill sets are no use to the local farmers. The orange trees in the region are wilting and dying due to lack of water and it takes six years for farmers to get a fruit-bearing tree in his orchard, “I fear orange farmers are also going the cotton farmers’ way,” Rode said.

Rode said this year about 80 per cent of the medium and large farmers in the surrounding villages have pledged their gold to raise loans for digging open and tube wells. Those framers, whose wells have almost dried up, are further deepening them, in the hope that they get more water. Such processes require additional capital in terms of submersible pumps. All these difficult tasks are being carried out by farmers so that the orange trees, which are like their children survive, he said.

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