Refusing a job offer from the Tata tea gardens in Munnar, Sudhanshu Kumar has worked on his mango orchard, making it a huge success.

It was around 21 years ago. Straight out of college, Mr. Sudhanshu Kumar had to make a choice. There were two roads before him: Either accept the job offer as a manager in a tea estate, or return to his village and look after his ancestral mango orchard. And he took the latter, the difficult, the less travelled one. And he had not made a mistake!

For Sudhanshu Kumar, from Samastipur district of Bihar, a post graduate in History from Delhi University, agriculture was an opportunity staring him in the face.“Though I got a job offer from the Tata Tea gardens in Munnar, Kerala, I decided to go back to my village and take care of our own farm,” says Sudhanshu, of Nayanagar Farms in Samastipur.

Sudhanshu’s success did not happen overnight. It is the result of his dedication, determination and readiness to accept new ideas and challenges. When he left college, he had around 250 acres of land, ancestral property where various crops like mango, litchi, maize, wheat, lentil (masoor), mustard etc. were being cultivated. “Many of the mango orchards in my village were in a dilapidated condition, virtually dying. The annual income from ten acres of mango orchard used to be around Rs 25,000– even in a good crop season,” he recalls.

The first step he took was to leave behind the traditional methods of orchard management. He adopted scientific crop management practices to rejuvenate the entire farm, and it worked. He was able to increase the revenue of a 9 acre plot from Rs. 10,000 to Rs six lakh, within a span of eight years.

It was not a cake walk. But he never got dejected by hurdles and troubles. Seeing a bright future for litchi in Bihar, he planted around a thousand litchi trees in his farm. Despite a good yield, the response from the local merchants was not very favourable. “Litchi is a highly perishable fruit, we were forced to sell at very low prices,” he adds.

“In 2004, an exporter offered me a better prize for my fruits. But he threw me the challenge that he will buy the fruit only if it reaches Muzaffarpur before 9 am, each day” recalls Sudhanshu. Muzaffarpur was 100 kms from his village, and it used to take 4-5 hours for a Tata 407 to reach Muzaffarpur, due to the poor condition of the roads.

“I took up the challenge and installed two generators to light up my orchard.

We plucked the litchi with the help of 100 labourers from 8 pm to 3 am, packed and dispatched the truck by 4 am to reach Muzaffarpur by 9 am,” he says.

Sending litchi to Muzaffarpur from Rosera was like sending coal to Newcastle, yet it gave him a return four times greater than what the local merchants were offering. This whole episode opened his eyes to the market realties, and emboldened him to take up similar challenges in other spheres of farm work.

Being the headman (Mukhya) of his village for the last 10 years, Sudhanshu is an advisor to fellow farmers. He has developed an effective weather forecasting system for planning farming activities. “The method we use is physical verification. When we get the basic forecast from various websites, we verify the same with the satellite photo of the cloud cover moving East or West. Then we phone and warn our lookouts in Delhi/Kolkata (people from our village) to report to us immediately of any rain there. They never fail. The rain takes approximately 4 days to travel from Delhi to our village and a storm takes 4 hours from Patna to our village. We get that grace period to tie up loose ends or control the harvesting/threshing in our village,” he explains.

Sudhanshu is happy with the returns he is getting from agriculture. “Returns are nearly 250 % of investment, and I get an annual turnover of approximately 40 lakhs from my farm,” he adds.

His success has brought him many awards and recognitions. He is amply supported by his wife Sunita Sinha, an Associate Professor in English at the Women’s College, in Samastipur.

By Riyas Aboobacker