The trolley that Thakur built

Jitender Thakur’s life changed after the construction of a dam in his hamlet Badhol in the Kandaghatghat block of Solan District, Himachal Pradesh, 10 years ago. And so did it transform the existence of the entire neighbourhood, the 10 to12 families who were part of the Tundal panchayat.

The RCC Roller Compacted Concrete dam was part of a World Bank-funded, mid-Himalayan, watershed project that brought with it enough water to grow cash crops such as capsicum, tomato and cucumber. It began to give villagers a fairly good income. Some added dairy farming to their livelihood as they could now afford to buy cows of best breeds.

Thakur too bought 7-8 Jersey cows over the years. These yielded 60 to70 litres of milk a day. But unlike other villagers, he faced challenges transporting the milk to the market. It was not possible to carve out a link road from his land to the main road head and carting the milk and produce up the winding steep hilly footpath was tedious. As the vegetables and milk had to be taken to the market before they rotted, he had no choice but to hire labour for the purpose. This meant added expense, making the profit not worth the effort.

Farmer Narender uses a manually-run fan to sift the husk rice from the paddy

One day, standing outside his house and looking up the hill close to his home, he figured that the road head was not more than 100 metres. If only the goods could be carried atop a trolley on a rope-way, his problem would be solved. It would also save a lot of time, money and energy.

Thakur had studied up to Class XII and did not have any technical knowledge, but his mechanical bent of mind started to tick. He kept figuring out the design of a trolley-kind of device that could help him in this endeavour. “Once the idea entered his head, Thakur was obsessed with it and I decided to invest money in it if it could be implemented,” says his retired father, who now runs a small restaurant-cum-kirana shop on the main Shimla road.

Thakur says it took almost two years for the idea of the trolley to come to fruition. “Now it takes just 15 seconds for a load of one quintal to reach the road head,” he says detailing how it works for a number of people from nearby villages who had come to understand how crates of vegetables and containers of milk go up the steep hill in a matter of seconds. “It does not consume much electricity, saves time and my production of vegetable and milk reaches the road head in no time.”

Their own pick-up van

Thakur and his brother now have time to diversify into other businesses. They have bought a pick-up van and transport their own produce and that of other villagers to the market.

That is not all. Having installed a motor to run the trolley, Thakur has also set up a small flour mill and a grass-cutter at his place. People from nearby households use the mill and mostly pay one-tenth of the produce to turn it into flour. In fact, innovation is catching up with other villagers as well. Narender, a young farmer, is using a big, manually-run fan in his small courtyard to sift the husk rice from the paddy. “Earlier we used to keep heaps of paddy in the direction of the wind for the sifting of rice husk. Now we are using this fan and the job is done pretty fast without electricity. My uncle thought up the idea of using a fan for the purpose, he says, with pride.

The writer is a senior journalist based in Delhi

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