The custard apples that reach your fruit bowl go through endless rounds of bargaining all the while tribal farmer families in Kotra, Rajasthan, hope to get a fair price for their labour.
However, from being offered a measly sum of Rs 50 per crate, some tribals now earn Rs 150 per crate.
One of the organisations helping in this regard is Gramshree Development Services Pvt Ltd, which educates and supports tribals through the entire value chain process.
Founded by Rakesh Gupta, Gramshree educates tribals in rural areas about fruit processing by setting up processing units and training tribals to present fruit in a better condition. Gramshree’s interventions are resulting in better prices and standards of living for the tribal farmers.
They started with a pilot project in 2016 with 500 tribals across multiple villages to check the importance of establishing a value chain. Today, Gramshree has replicated the model, setting up fruit processing units in 50 different villages of the state like Kotra, Gogunda, and Sayra, working with almost 2,000 farmer families, claims Rakesh.
Now the organisation has produced about 30 metric tonnes of custard apple pulp, which are sold to Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and NCR.
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They also work with Indian blackberry (jamun) and tamarind, in Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, empowering around 200 families.
Rakesh hails from Ranchi, Jharkhand. He graduated in maths and did his postgrad in rural development from the Xavier Institute of Social Service, before joining the development sector. He then started working with the NGO Srijan, in Rajasthan’s Tonk district, for four and a half years. “I worked directly with the community to establish a whole value chain there. It was a great experience,” he tells The Better India.
Around 2011 he left Srijan, after acquiring enough experience to understand the challenges specific to India’s rural areas. He then joined a charitable wing of an Indian conglomerate to understand the other side of social development like funding.
He worked closely with the 18 NGOs that the trust was supporting at the time. “But I was not satisfied,” he says, “I wanted to make a more direct impact on the lives of tribal farming families.”
He then started the research process and found that there were several NGOs in the sector doing great work, including bringing in new technology, increasing agricultural production and output, adding new livelihood activities to the farmers’ lives, and more. “Ultimately, the farmers are left to deal with the market. That was the biggest existing challenge,” he says.
Quitting his job, he decided to build an organisation that would assist farmers at the front end.
It was started as a consultancy, providing support to NGOs in different aspects of the value chain. But soon he began travelling to the tribal areas of Udaipur and started working with the tribals. “I found that tribals have very small land holdings and were living in a condition devoid of basic facilities. Their main option was to migrate,” he says.
In the surrounding forest areas, Rakesh learnt that custard apples were in abundance. But since the areas they live in are deep in the interiors, the tribals were unable to bring the fruit directly to any market.
Sunkibai, a tribal farmer from Rajasthan’s Surana village who has been associated with Gramshree for 18 months, has experienced this challenge firsthand. Earlier, she used to sell only to the locals in the neighbouring areas. She says, “Middlemen would come to buy custard apple, giving us between Rs 50 to Rs 150 per crate (20 kg of fruit). This amounted to between Rs 2.5 to Rs 7.5 per kg.”
“We put in as much hard work, but the returns were low. Today, we earn more for the same work,” says Sunkibai, adding that they get around Rs 12 per kg.
“Before we only grew corn, wheat, and mustard. But after Gramshree’s residential training I grow more plants like pea, spinach, coriander, fenugreek, and more. My annual income for the past year has been around Rs 50,000,” she adds.
