In a veggie soup not of their making

Climbing vegetable prices will hound the urban consumer in the coming months, even as a summer of discontent lies in wait for the rural growers hit hard by unseasonal rains in March and April across the northern, central and western belt of the country.

Ask Sonu Singh, 42 and Pankaj Chouhan, 24 as they trudge through the many acres of their flooded vegetable farms in Bakhtawarpur, on the outskirts of Delhi. They keep repeating over and over, “It should not have rained like this. The vegetable crop is in ruins.”

Squatting in their waterlogged field, they point to the cucumber creeper where most of the baby fruit has drowned and will soon rot on the plant itself. “ Kheera , tori , petha , ghiya (cucumber, snake gourd, ash gourd, bottle gourd)” — they list the numerous casualties. The crop of tomatoes, cauliflower and coriander has also been impacted.

“Yes, prices will be high, but that is for the city-dweller to worry about. For us, our livelihood has taken a beating; we will earn at least 25 per cent less than we do in these months,” explains Singh. He is among the growers who sell their vegetable produce through a growers’ association to Mother Dairy Fruit & Vegetable Pvt Ltd, which owns the Safal brand.

Singh and Chouhan are among the handful who work on their own farm in this belt. Most landowners here lease out their farms to migrants arriving from the northern belt, mainly Bihar. And instead of selling at the mandi, a majority of them follow the Safal farm-to-fork model. Through the growers’ association they offload their indented produce at the local collection centre and Safal transporters pick it up for distribution to its outlets in the city.

This year, for the villagers of Sungarpur, Jhangola, Tiggipur, Tajpur Kalan it is double trouble. Their ready-to-harvest rabi crop of wheat has been laid flat by the rain, and now their vegetable farms are also waterlogged. “It is the worst when it rains the whole night, then the sun shines down strong and it rains again. We have been furiously trying to retrieve whatever vegetables we possibly can,” says Ram Dulari as she removes clusters of mooli (daikon radish) from the fields and washes them before loading onto the tractor. “On the next farm we have employed labour to pluck the methi (fenugreek) before it is ruined. It’s a tedious task when it has to be done at such a fast pace.”

Singh laments the absence of subsidy for farmers in the Delhi area. “Haryana and Uttar Pradesh farmers are luckier; we have no help when it comes to tractors, fertiliser, seeds, electricity and pesticide,” he says. “They do not even recognise that Delhi has a farming community and a rural area,” he adds. And now the rain...

Bijender Singh, Secretary of the Bakhtawarpur Phal Va Sabji Utpadak Association, nods in agreement. One of the oldest growers’ organisations, it has almost 150 members. “Vegetable growing has a typical 60-day cycle and if the plants rot, cultivators will have to plant all over again, increasing their expenses and reducing their profits. More the rain, more the losses,” he says, praying the weather gods will be kinder in the coming months.

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