Mainstreaming Non-Pesticidal
NPM is being promoted at a scale in Mahabubnagar
district following the initial experience in Kosgi.
WASSAN is facilitating this exercise in partnership with the MMS under IKP. The
promotional exercise is in mainly in the nature of facilitation and capacity
building across a crop season to farmers who have registered with the Village
Organizations. Those farmers who can prepare the botanical preparations could
reduce cost of pest management significantly. Large farmers were not targeted
in the course of promotion of NPM as many of them are not part of the MMS
structure. Many of them also expressed that NPM is too labour intensive for
them to practice.
NPM in large farmers’ lands offers a great scope
for labour to benefit. The ways in which labour can benefit and the attempts
during this season are presented in the following table.
1. By supplying material -
i.e. neem powder
2. By supplying formulations
–/ neem kernel extract/ dung-urine solution etc.
3. Like transplantation /
harvesting, labour can take contract of pest management. The following are the
ways in which this contract can take place:
Share
cropping: farmers and labour can agree that they share the crop on harvest,
while the labour take the NPM responsibility
Farmers
pay an agreed pest management cost upfront to a labour group or to an
intermediary
Farmers
pay 25% cost upfront and the rest can be arranged as a loan
In all these cases, with
proper technical backstopping the cost of pest management with NPM methods
comes to about Rs.700/- to at the most Rs.1000/- per acre. The existing farmer
expenditure on pesticides alone is of the order of Rs.2000 per acre. Even at a
contract rate of Rs.1500 per acre labour can profit by about Rs.500/- per acre.
If 50 acres are taken under contract the benefit could be Rs.25,000/- per season of 3 to 4 months. This benefit could be
for a group of 10 to 15 labourers. This profit is
over and above the wages and cost of material, which are covered under the
Rs.700 to Rs.1000/- cost of pest management.
In all these, the issue of
credit for NPM comes up largely as the farmers would otherwise get pesticides
on loan from the Sahukar and the Pesticide dealer.
The options 1 and 2 are
being tried in the form of ‘NPM Shops’ opened up at several places.
Full-pledged experimentation could not take place this season and the
experience is rather limited.
For the Pest Management
Contracts, a small experiment is taken up by WASSAN along with Guards (NGO in Kodangal). About 10 farmers came forward to give 40 acres
for NPM contract in the village Udumeshwaram in Kodangal mandal. The agreed amount is Rs.1500/- per acre.
Farmers have paid Rs.500 per acre upfront – deposited in a bank account. They
are taking loan for the rest of the amount of Rs.1000 per acre from the local
area bank of Basix. The results are awaited.
The great advantage of the
scheme is the shift from manual to knowledge based labour. The profits are
essentially the knowledge outcomes, which over few seasons can be adequately
transferred to the labour groups.