DIRECTORATE OF HORTICULTURE
GOVERNMENT OF MEGHALAYA
GOVERNMENT OF MEGHALAYA
Bernadette Khongsngi, former housewife, present day farmer entrepreneur, resident of Umran village located about 35 Kms along NH-40 connecting Shillong to Guwahati. With seven children and a village teacher husband, she is the epitome of a normal Khasi housewife but with one exception; she is also a business woman. Originally hailing from Sohra, famous for its rains, Bernadette moved from her ancestral village and came to settle in Umran in 1992. Having initially tried her hand at growing paddy, ginger as well as poultry, piggery and brick making, with not much success, Bernadette was selected as a floriculture beneficiary under the Technology Mission in 2002-03 and was provided with one low cost shadehouse, 6000 bulbs of Gladioli, 5000 Liliums, Amaryllis, Carnations and Hyacinth to test the suitability of these flowers in the area. Lilum and Amaryllis turned out to be successes but not Gladiolus while Carnations was successful but not profitable. Taking note of her sincerity and love for flowers, Bernadette was encouraged by the office of the District Horticulture Officer, Nongpoh, to expand her activities under floriculture and was given a vermicomposting unit to generate compost for her plants. Incidentally she is the first woman farmer to produce vermicompost in the District. This helped her a lot as she not only had compost of her own but she could sell it too. In 2004 Bernadette along with five of her friends formed a women SHG called Kyntiewlang Women’s Group which has now expanded to seven members and is engaged in activities like strawberry cultivation. With the start given by the Technology Mission, Bernadette has now given up all the other activities like brick making and poultry to concentrate exclusively on flowers and has set up her Sloan Flower Nursery cum Vermicompost as well as expanded her portfolio to include potted plants and seedlings. She has also taken up the cultivation of Anthurium, Leather leaf, Heliconia, Roses and Strawberries. Some of the activities like strawberries are being carried out on her land for the benefit of her group. Being located on the National Highway, she is in a unique position to showcase her flowers and potted plants and tourists passing by as well as people from the city regularly stop to buy her plants. With the proceeds from her sales, she has constructed a small showroom to house her more exotic pots and foliage plants as well as a small shop that doubled as a PCO until the advent of mobile phones. In conversation with us, Bernadette or Kong Ber as she is fondly called, informed that she is sending only liliums to the Dewlieh Horticulture Farm for grading, packing and marketing by ZOPAR Exports Pvt. Ltd, while her gerberas, Anthurium, potted plants, etc are being sold in the markets of Shillong as well as meeting home orders. Discovering that there exists a very good demand for potted plants, she has now taken the initiative to travel to nurseries in Assam to source good quality and exotic planting material, which she brings back, multiplies and then sells for a tidy profit. Recently she has also started the business of making bouquets for people which she says is slowly picking up. She has also participated in many seasonal flower shows being organized by the Regional Rural Training Center (RRTC) Umran as well as study tours conducted by the Department and has a sheaf of certificates to prove it. With such dedication and zeal combined with a friendly manner, it is no wonder that people regularly drop by to buy her flowers and potted plants and she averages about Rs. 500/- to Rs. 1000/- sales per day which she says has been sufficient for her to put her seven children through school and college as well as provide a personal computer for them to learn. Seeing her example, women of the village have got together and formed another five groups under her leadership of which she is proud of and takes a very active part in all their activities and in guiding them. Her one wish is to be able to open a way side tourist stop so that people passing by get a chance to stop, relax with a cup of tea while admiring and maybe buying her flowers. In an earlier conversation with us she had expressed a wish for a small showroom for her flowers, which has been realized. Going by past experience we would not be surprised if sooner rather than later, this determined lady would fulfill her own wish.
Shri. Drepshon Kharpuri is 65 years of age and a resident of Laitjem village, which is about 22 Kms from Shillong. He has emerged as one of the progressive farmer under Mylliem Block in East Khasi Hills through sheer hard work and ingenuity.. He and his family owned a plot of land not less than 3 hectare and were growing assortment of vegetables like cauliflower, radish, turnip, pea etc. He is also a registered Potato grower under the Department for seed multiplication. Five years back Shri. Drepshon Kharpuri seeing the shortage of vegetable seeds faced by the farmers in his village and surrounding areas took it upon himself to start “Vegetable Seed Production for Cole crops” in his own land. With the launching of Technology Mission on Horticulture he could expand his work as the Department has given assistance to him for area expansion of vegetables, installation of polyhouse and drip irrigation. With the implementation of Private Nursery under TMH/2007-08/2R, his family has been selected as one of the beneficiary for “Vegetable Seed Production Nursery”. Since then, Shri. Drepshon Kharpuri has progress tremendously in this field and he was subsequently provided with one hi-tech polyhouse of 100 sqm, one water harvesting tank and a vermi-compst unit. This has enhanced his activities and through his Nursery he is able to produce upto 8 Kg of cauliflower seeds, 5 Kg of radish seeds, 5 Kg of turnip seeds and 100 Kg of pea seeds annually respectively. Shri. Drepshon Kharpuri market the seeds locally to the farmers of near and far villages without any difficulty and he earns approximately 1.5 lakh annually from this activity. Thus Setting up of “Vegetable Seed Production” Nursery in this place is an important milestone and Drepshon Kharpuri has shown the way for other farmers to emulate.
Eight sisters, a remote village, 24 kilometers from the town of Nongpoh and rupees five thousand - unlikely ingredients for a success story – this is the story of a lady’s vision, of hard work, of perseverance and a commitment to the upliftment of her community. This is the story of Angela Maiong, of Umkon Nongtluh village, group leader, teacher and a farmer entrepreneur of rare vision. 38 years old and the fourth of her eight sisters, Angela first came into contact with the office of the District Horticulture Officer, Ri Bhoi District, Nongpoh, in 2002-03, when she approached the office for assistance in taking up horticulture activities. As she and her sisters had already formed a group called the Umkon Nongtluh SHG – I Women Farmers, she was extended assistance of Rs. 5000/- only under the Technology Mission scheme for women farmers. Her reason for approaching the office; she had land but not the resources to utilize it and she and her sisters managed by working as housemaids in people’s houses. Having got the funds and after opening a bank account Angela and her group started by cultivating ginger and since then there has been no looking back. Their first acquisition was a power tiller which they purchased through the bank and for which the loan amount has long since been liquidated. Having the power tiller helped them take up other crops like vegetables though their main crop is ginger and over the years their activity has diversified into banana (300 nos), pineapple (30 farmers), carambola (300 nos), broomstick, arecanut (2550 nos), dhania, pudina vermicomposting etc. The group has also taken up Eri silkworm rearing and weaving under the Central Silk Board. The groups’ modest success has catalyzed the formation of another 63 groups of which Angela is the guiding force. Angela was a shy housewife when she first came into contact with the office, but today her self confidence is amazing and she is very much capable of putting her point across in no uncertain terms. What drives her is the vision of her village lifting itself from poverty and of her sisters never having to work for other people again. A typical example of her leadership and the group’s cohesiveness is the pooling of their individual resources in 2007, to set up a school, the Tbeh Jingshai L.P. School, Lumajong, Umkon, and in construction of the school playground on her own land which she gave to the group. With 63 students and three teachers, the school is proving to be a boon for the poor students of the area. She herself is one of the three teachers and the group pays the teachers Rs. 1000/- per month. Appreciating the good work of the group, the RBYF, a social organization, gifted the school with benches and blackboards whereas water was supplied by the PHE Department.
Located barely 35 kilometers from the State capital of Shillong, in Ri Bhoi District of Meghalaya, at the end of a dusty rural track, the sleepy idyllic hamlet of Sohliya seems an unlikely birthplace of a revolution – a horticulture revolution. The villagers are simple folks, agricultural laborers most of them, toiling away in their own little patches of land or as laborers in rich peoples’ tea gardens. Till they came across a deep red, heart shaped, luscious fruit – the strawberry. Introduced into the village some eleven years back, albeit on a very small scale, by the earthy, energetic, hard working, effervescent headman of Sohliya, Shri. O. Lyngkhoi, strawberry cultivation in Meghalaya can be said to have its origins here but it was only with the intervention of the Technology Mission in Horticulture in the form of a Center of Excellence for Strawberries at the Departmental Farm of Dewlieh, Umsning, and the evolution of a C2C Agri- Business model by the center, that really saw the cultivation of this fruit rise from that of hobby farming to the level of commercialization that is visible today, catapulting Meghalaya into the ranks of one the largest producer of strawberries in the country and the largest in entire North East. The effects of this commercialization of the fruit is visible in the daily lives of the strawberry growers of the state and nowhere else is this effect more pronounced than in the village of Mr. Lyngkhoi, or Bah Os as he is affectionately known. Starting with him, Bah Os has expanded his cultivation of the fruit from a small patch of a few square meters five years back to his present area of little more than an acre and the income generated from his strawberries has enabled him to construct houses for his four children as well as his own and recently enabled him to buy a Maruti 800. His success, combined with the efforts of the Center of Excellence, has been the key factor for farmers of the District adopting new technologies like drip irrigation, mulching, post harvest grading and management and in reposing their faith in him as the General Secretary of the Ri Bhoi Strawberry Growers Association (RBSGA), a registered organization of growers formed through the initiative of and supported by the Dewlieh Center of Excellence In retrospect it was the formation of the RBSGA and the untiring efforts of its General Secretary that witnessed the rise of the Association from a conglomeration of farmers to a marketing force that now negotiates markets for its growers nationally as well as internationally. Having captured almost the entire North Eastern market, the Association had in April 2009, signed an MOU with Seuji Agro Processing and Services Pvt. Ltd, Guwahati, in an agreement brokered by the Indian Institute of Entrepreneurship (IIE) and supported by the Dewlieh Center of Excellence to market strawberries to Chennai which has resulted in the halting of Sri Lankan import of strawberries into Chennai during the last season. The Association has also secured an export order to Bangladesh for the coming season. The hard work put in by the General Secretary and the members of the Association is paying dividends in more ways than one and Sohliya village is a model demonstration of the benefits that can accrue to a community through working together in the cultivation of low volume high value crops. With 66 households out of 68 cultivating the fruit, Sohliya plays a major part in the total production of strawberries in the state and as a result many of the families have now been able to afford TV sets to extending or building houses, better schooling and healthcare, opened bank accounts and finally have a chance of improving their quality of life. It is indeed heartwarming to see mothers like Wistina Lyngkhoi, whose son secured first class in his Matriculation Exams with distinction. Ordinarily his career would have ended there and as so many village boys, he would have had to work as an agricultural laborer like his father in others’ fields. However his mother had a sum of Rs. 14,000/- which were the proceeds from the sale of her strawberries in the Association’s account. With this money her son has now obtained admission in a reputable institution and so also another seven of his brothers and sisters in different classes and schools. Yushilda Nongbsap, an ordinary housewife, her weathered face reflecting her years of toil and worry proudly showed us the new bamboo house with a tin roof that she gifted her daughter with. Tiewdaris Lyngdoh, another housewife, has started construction of her new house and even though only the roof is up, she hopes to complete it by the next season of strawberries. Elberus Wanniang now has his own brick house and has moved out of his in-laws house. Desphiniel Wahlang, an old grower, has now extended his house to accommodate his growing family. Policity Marngar spent a portion of the Rs. 25,000/- which she received out of strawberries and moved out of her in-laws house to her own little thatched house. More significantly, Shrinly Lyngkhoi has been able to clear her long outstanding bank loan of Rs. 8000/- and is now debt free. Barihun Lyngkhoi has completed her small house and has now opened a small tea and grocery shop to augment her income. Many more small but significant successes and examples of improvements in the lives of the people of Sohliya abound which are too numerous to cite here. Even the village church has benefitted with Sunday collections now touching Rs. 5000/- per week as compared to Rs. 2000/- per week during the pre strawberry years. However as in any real life story there has to be a victim and in this case it is the village school which has seen attendance drop by almost half as parents could now afford to send their children to better schools in Umsning town and Shillong. Bah Os is not a man to rest on his laurels. With boundless energy he involves himself in many other activities besides strawberries. His village is the catalyst of the Horticulture revolution sweeping the state. His aim is to put his village firmly on the development and tourist map of Meghalaya for which he is working with another entrepreneur to turn his village and nearby farms into a rural horticulture tourism center. His only grouse is that till today the village still does not have a proper access road which is a necessary pre-requisite for visitors to come to his village. The Indian Institute of Entrepreneurship, Guwahati, under the Ministry of Panchayati Raj has put forth a proposal to establish a Rural Business Hub (RBH) in Sohliya and the State Bank of India has in a recent District Level meeting agreed to adopt the village under the “SBI ka Apna Gaon Scheme”. His services and advice is being sought after even by NGOs and farmer groups of the other North Eastern states. No wonder then that in May 2009 he was re-elected headman of the village for the 4th time, polling 83% of the votes of the local Durbar. There is no greater endorsement of the hard work, vision and perseverance of one farmer and by extension, of the role, impact and horticultural revolution that the Technology Mission in Horticulture can bring about in the North East.