Chai Anyone???

 

Greetings from Bangalore, India! The Pond-Zee Scheme Team completed an interesting week surveying farmers in the Kanakapur Taluk. This involved lots of driving, lots of hospitality by gracious farmers, and last but not least, lots of Chai breaks! 

In this Photo (from left to right) Cameron, Ayan, Megan, and Wenesso enjoy Chai before surveying a farmer.

The focus of our project has been to investigate the effectiveness of the Krishi Bhagya scheme, a government subsidised initiative to encourage farmers to utilize farm ponds. We spoke with beneficiary farmers of the scheme as well as non beneficiaries. We’ve found that across board, all the farmers whether they had the Krishi Bhagya scheme or not, were very receptive to this new initiative. An interesting trend we noticed early on was that many of our beneficiary farmers were higher-income. Key indicators of this wealth were the farmers comfortable residences and presence of polyhouses, which are expensive to implement.

Above, a large polyhouse that has 1 acre of pepper production in our visit to Farm 7

In almost all of our farm visits, it was obvious that the farm industry was heavily male-dominated. Thus, it was very exciting when in our farm 6 visit, we had a female farmer by the name of Rathnmma. She was our first and only female farmer who we surveyed. After completing the survey, she was so kind to give the Pond-Zee scheme team papayas straight from her farm!

Above, Cameron and Ayan ask questions about Rathnmma’s crops.




Above, a brief photo-op with Rathnmma’s papayas in front of her polyhouse.

Many of our farmers have other sources of income other than farming. The source of this income run the gamut from raising livestock, silkworm harvesting, or even working at the World Bank. A unique experience that the Pond-Zee Scheme team had a chance to experience was witnessing the silkworm harvesting in various farms. In Farm 11, we got to witness the silkworms larva, while in Farm 15 we had the chance to see the silkworm pupa in its final stages. Throughout India, Ramanagara, specifically Kanakapura region is known for it's silkworm production.

One known fact about the Pond-Zee Scheme team is that we are usually the last team to arrive back to Institute for Social and Economic Change, our headquaters. Although we begin our field visits at the same time as the other teams, there have been cases were we arrive to campus almost two hours later! Could it be that we work at a slower pace? Or is it that we work hard? The picture below speaks for itself. Let's chat over chai!

Wenesso with a group of farmers working until dusk