A pilot programme in UP’s sugar belt shows how even marginal farmers can be taught to grow better and more
Bahar Singh started out as a sugarcane farmer, joining his two older brothers in cultivating his 50-bigha farmland. After almost a decade of growing and supplying his produce to Loni sugar mill in Hardoi district, heart of the sugar belt in Uttar Pradesh, the young farmer has found the sweet spot in sugarcane. The yield from his land today has doubled from 40 quintals, rising steadily over the last four years—50 quintals per bigha in 2010, 70 quintals in 2011 before finally hitting pay dirt for what is being called mitha sona (sweet gold).
Dressed in his impeccable white kurta and showing off his lush green fields being finally harvested—a process inordinately delayed beyond Diwali due to the pricing stalemate between farmers and millers—one can tell that his spirits are buoyed by the sharp rise in productivity and income. The hint of pride is unmistakable when he talks about his 17-year-old nephew preparing for engineering college at the end of the year. His large joint family hasn’t felt this good about growing sugarcane in a long time.
Bahar Singh is one of the 2,000-odd select farmers in the core area (radius of 15 km) of Loni and Ajbapur sugar mills of DCM Shriram Consolidated Ltd (DSCL) in central Uttar Pradesh, who are finally shedding the state’s legacy of abysmal farm productivity and producing record output.
For this change in fortune, farmers aren’t thanking any gods; instead, they are grateful to DSCL and International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector arm of the World Bank. Three years ago, the two joined hands to build the expertise of farmers in an intensive outreach and training pilot programme, evolving a customised package of agro-climatic practices to not just make sugarcane farming remunerative but also to help DSCL optimise its crushing capacity across its four plants in the Hardoi and Lakhimpur Kheri districts of the state.
The aim was pretty straightforward for Mitha Sona Pariyojana (moniker ‘sona’ connotes money to capture the imagination of the farmers): Increase productivity of target farmers by 25 percent at the end of three years. And, in doing so, create a model that could be expanded to the rest of the 150,000 farmers in the supply chain. Through extensive collaborative planning, innovation, smart monitoring and evaluation, the programme was able to do this, and more.
Gets bigger, better and broader
The programme is now reaching 12,000 farmers as DSCL ramps it up to its sugar mills in Hariyawan and Rupapar. That is just a start. A bigger, better and broader version of the prototype is being rolled out into what is arguably one of the world’s biggest sugar programmes in the private sector; it is on course to reach out to 200,000 farmers in India across 14 mills of four sugar companies by the sugar season of 2015.
Here is the ‘better’ and ‘broader’: Expanding the pilot’s original mandate of enhancing productivity to also include water efficiency and making farmers certifiable for sustainable farming. The idea is to get them ready for the likes of Coca-Cola and Unilever—institutional buyers who have announced that economic, environmental and social sustainability would have to be a part of everything they do. Their proclaimed vision is to go about sourcing only ‘sustainable’ sugar by 2020.
Sugarcane is a leading cash crop for farmers across the country—an estimated 50 million farmers depend on it for their livelihood. In central UP alone, there are over 4 million sugarcane farmers, but low stagnant productivity remains the biggest bind. As compared to an average yield of 100 tonnes per hectare in states like Tamil Nadu, an all-India average of 80 tonnes a hectare, and 70 tonnes in neighbouring Haryana, UP has averaged close to 55 tonnes per hectare.
Even the sugar content of cane is low, because of which sugar recovery is a mere 9.2 percent in UP as compared to well over 11.5 percent in Maharashtra. That’s not all. “The challenge for UP is particularly stiff as the average land holding is less than a hectare; therefore farmers have to be reached in multitudes to make any significant impact,” says DSCL deputy managing director Ajit S Shriram. So, even though sugarcane is the main cultivated crop in the mill area, small and marginal farmers tend to switch to competing crops such as wheat, paddy and vegetables because of the low yield and returns from sugarcane. Most sugar companies in UP have been reporting a declining trend in acreage in the command (25 km radius around the mill) area.
Strong business imperative
The million-tonne question: Is it possible to make India’s marginal sugarcane farmers understand the need for sustainable standards? “Certification is in a way proxy for sustainability,” says IFC’s Vivek. “The writing is on the wall that we have to do agriculture smartly, and for this it is best to engage with the farmers early,” points out Chattopadhyay. The message has gone home to sugar businesses. Companies are already putting their skin in the game –DSCL with four mills, Olam Agro India with two mills, EID Parry with five and Rajshree Sugar and Chemicals with three mills have come on board for the project that aims to touch a million lives over the next three years.
(This story appears in the 24 January, 2014 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)