Ramchandrapuram village

Ramchandrapuram village

Crop: cotton/paddy in kharif ; maize/groundnut in rabi
If you want to know what it means to work as casual labour on your own land, meet P Venkateswarlu in this village of 70 households of the Koya tribe. He has four acres; his two brothers have two acres each. "We ran up debts of Rs 30,000 with dealers of seeds and pesticides five years ago. After repeated crop failure, the creditors asked us to give them five acres of our land, and the credit would get adjusted in the land lease. They would pay me Rs 50 a day to work my land, and they'd walk away with the produce," he says. With his two sons, he would go out to find work most days. "Half the families here have their lands leased out to pesticide/seed dealers, who also double as monopoly buyers of our produce and cheat us on price," says Easam Narasimha, 50. "We'd heard of Punukula's success with NPM, and thought a similar turnaround was possible here," says Nageshwar Rao of the Chapel Rural Development Society, the NGO assisting NPM here. In 2005, M Lakshmi, the representative of the village women's group, travelled to Kosgi in Mehbubnagar to see and learn NPM methods. After her training, she and her husband Rajulu became the village coordinators of NPM, her house the NPM secretariat. Venkateswarlu was the first to enrol for NPM: "I was making a loss anyway. I decided to try it out on the remaining land. Lakshmi taught us what she had learnt, with great patience and commitment." In 2005-06, he spent Rs 2,000 on one acre of cotton, earning Rs 13,000 for the produce. "This year, we'll get our five acres back. This entire village will stick with NPM," says his brother Sitaramulu. Others are also getting their land back. This village is already an example, and it is used for extension work across the state. 12jav.net12jav.net