Voices from the field

Groundnut is what this soil gives, so groundnut is what I grow. But the price is not mine to decide. I load the trailer before dawn, reach the mandi, take a gate slip, and wait for my lot to be called. Then comes the line of deductions — the agent’s commission, the market fee, the weighment, the hamali who unloads. By the time the slip is written, the number on it is smaller than the number on the board.

And payment does not come that day; sometimes it comes the next week. The year prices fell below what I had spent on seed, fertiliser and diesel, none of that mattered — the cuts were taken all the same. What I want is simple: to know the price in three mandis before I load, and to be paid the day I sell.

Alone, a two-acre farmer has no weight. Together, three hundred of us can clean, grade, store and sell as one — that is why the FPO exists. Getting onto e-NAM opened doors: a wider set of buyers, an electronic auction, payment into the account.

But every door has a form. KYC, bank seeding, the assaying that buyers trust — each step loses a few members along the way, usually the oldest and least lettered, the ones the collective was meant to carry. We spend as much time on documentation as on trade. Give me one onboarding that works on a basic phone, in Kannada, and I will bring you the members the portals keep leaving behind.

I work where there is work — weeding and harvest in the season, the guarantee-work worksite when there is none. The guaranteed-work wage is a little more than a farm-labour day, and it comes to a bank account, which matters. But my attendance is now marked on an app, by a photo taken twice a day on a smartphone — and the smartphone in our house belongs to my husband.

So even the wage I earn with my own hands is recorded through a device I do not hold. Count me as a farmer and I might get a say. Count me only as the hands, and I stay invisible — even in the systems built to help me.

When the rain stopped being dependable, I did what everyone here did — I drilled. The first bore gave water for a few years, then less, then nothing. The second was dry from the day it was sunk. The third, deeper still, runs for an hour and then rests.

With drip and the pond subsidy I have learned to spend each drop carefully, and where the water allows I have moved from rainfed groundnut to onion, even a little arecanut — crops that pay more, if they get their water. But the ledger underground does not lie: I am taking out more than the sky puts back, and I know it cannot last.

I spent three years in a Bengaluru office and came home because my parents could not work the land alone. My friends think I am mad. Maybe — I earn a fraction of my city salary now. But I can see what would change the maths.

I already check mandi prices on my phone before I decide where to sell; I want that, but trustworthy, for every market within a day’s drive. I want an advisory that knows my field, not a generic message. I want to plan the season as a business — what to grow, for whom, at what likely price — instead of guessing and hoping. Build that, and you keep people like me on the farm. Without it, the young keep leaving, and the land keeps ageing.