In the tribal belt stretching from Banswara to Dahod, the day often begins with a glance at the sky. The fields are small, the land uneven and sloping, and irrigation mostly means whatever the rain chooses to give. Yet in the villages of this region, a different story has been unfolding over the past few years. Sitting in meetings of Vaagdhara’s Gram Swaraj groups, farmers have begun to treat water, forest, land, livestock and seed as their real capital.
Terasingh Bania of Patisara village in Dahod planted his future in a nursery and organic farming. Pratheg Vala Garasia of Gamana Mala in Banswara stopped his family’s migration with the yellow glow of turmeric. And Ramanlal Damor of Sera Nagla travelled from a few kitchen-garden seeds to a flour mill, a shop and even a pickup truck.
A Nursery in Patisara
Patisara lies in Fatehpura tehsil, about 59 kilometres from the Dahod district headquarters. Here 51-year-old Terasingh Bania lives with his family of five. Educated up to the second year of a B.A., he owns three bighas of rain-fed land and has three sons. For years Terasingh worked in a government nursery, earning 11,000 rupees a month. Then one day he fell into conversation with a man who had come to buy saplings. The man asked about his income, his land and his farming, and left him with a simple question: when you have nursery experience, land and the necessary knowledge, why not a nursery of your own?
Terasingh took the question seriously. He began to build a future in saplings and organic farming. For daily expenses he planted vegetables on one bigha, and the rabi season brought him 50,000 rupees from tomatoes and other vegetables. Vegetables such as cluster beans, okra, cucumber, colocasia leaves, valor beans, cabbage and tomato now bring in sales of more than 700 rupees a day. His wife sells vegetables every Saturday at the Fatehpura haat. For manure and pest control he does not depend on the market; he prepares dashparni, jeevamrit, dry jeevamrit and neemastra himself. The nursery earns a separate profit of around 4,000 rupees every month, and it is with this income that he is able to send his children to a private school.
The lesson of Swaraj does not confine him to the farm. He travelled with the Swaraj Sandesh Yatra from Banswara to Jaipur, seeing and hearing the realities of village after village along the way. “What I learned from Vaagdhara, I put into practice,” he says. “Today I feel considerably more content.” He adds that the yatra, inspired by the idea of Swaraj, taught him a great deal.
Turmeric in Gamana Mala
Gamana Mala is a village in the Gagdatalai block of Rajasthan’s Banswara district. It is home to the six-member family of Pratheg Vala Garasia: husband and wife, two sons and two daughters. They have 11 bighas of farmland and keep four buffaloes, two bullocks, three cows and four goats. Even so, the income was never enough to run the household, and until 2023 the entire family had to travel to Gujarat for wage labour.
The first hint of change came when Vaagdhara began holding Gram Swaraj group meetings in the village. Facilitator Rajesh Garasia would explain to the community how to conserve and properly use water, forest, land, livestock and seed. When Pratheg attended a meeting for the first time, he found both new information and the inspiration to move forward. In 2024 he became a member of the group and has not missed a single meeting since.
That same year, in the kharif season, the organisation distributed seeds. Pratheg took five kilograms of turmeric seed and sowed turmeric in half a bigha. In the other half he made a nutrition garden, planting onions, tomatoes, chillies and ginger. The fruit of his hard work and new understanding turned out better than he had hoped. The turmeric yielded 75 kilograms in all; he ground 50 kilograms into powder and sold it within his own community at 220 rupees a kilogram, earning 11,000 rupees. The nutrition garden and vegetables began to bring a regular income of 450 to 500 rupees a day, and the household’s monthly budget rose to nearly 6,000 rupees.
From A Kitchen Garden To A Pickup Truck
Thirty-year-old Ramanlal Damor of Sera Nagla has studied up to the B.A. level. He and his wife Manisha have three daughters, one of whom goes to school while the other two are still small. There was a time when he had no source of income and had to go to Gujarat to feed his family. He could not think what to do. Returning to the village on an errand, he learned that a Gram Swaraj group meeting was in progress. He went and sat in, listened, and after the meeting told the organisation’s worker who was present that he wished to join the group.
For a year he attended the meeting every month. It was there that he came to understand kitchen gardens, seeds and fruit-bearing plants. The road was not easy, because many people in the village taunted him, asking what good would come of it. Ramanlal paid no one any heed and stayed with the group. “Many people in the village said, what will you gain from this, but I did not listen to anyone and stayed connected with the organisation,” he says.
The first big change was about water. His home had no water supply, so he raised the matter in the monthly meeting and then proposed a handpump in his name at the Gram Sabha of Gram Panchayat Sera Nagla. Within four months the handpump was sanctioned and installed in the courtyard of his house. The handpump proposal is a lesson in itself: discussion within the group meeting, then a proposal in the Gram Sabha, and approval within four months. This is the democratic path by which a village can claim its rights. Ramanlal showed that reaching government schemes calls not for a middleman but for an organised voice.
It was at the monthly meeting too that he received kitchen-garden seeds. He grew all manner of vegetables — tomatoes, brinjal, turmeric, ginger, okra and bottle gourd. Different nutritious green vegetables now appeared on the family’s plates every day, and spending on the market dwindled. People from the village began coming to his house to buy vegetables, and his monthly income rose above 3,500 rupees.
Encouraged by this trust, Ramanlal opened a grocery shop, which began to sell 500 to 1,000 rupees a day. Working hard and saving more, he bought a flour mill, after which his monthly income reached 15,000 rupees. A year later he bought a pickup truck, and his income has now grown to about 39,000 rupees. He has also begun a tent-rental business. “With Vaagdhara’s support my livelihood grew and a great deal changed,” he says. “Today, through it, I have been able to do so much.”
What stands out in Ramanlal’s journey is its sequence: first water, then the kitchen garden, then the shop, then the mill, then the vehicle, and now the tent business. Every step rested on the earnings and savings of the one before, and throughout the journey he placed his trust in hard work and thrift.
Fruit of Labour
The three stories begin differently. One man had a nursery job, another had wage labour in Gujarat, and the third had hands and questions. Yet all three received the same thing: the chance to sit in a meeting in their own village and recognise their own resources. To one it brought seeds, to another the right information, and to a third a proposal in the Gram Sabha.
Their priorities, too, are alike. Terasingh is educating his children in a private school; Ramanlal’s eldest daughter goes to school and the younger ones will follow the same path; and Pratheg’s family now stays rooted in its own village. Saplings from Terasingh’s beds are becoming trees in other villages. Following Pratheg’s turmeric, nutrition gardens are flourishing in twenty homes, and the hum of Ramanlal’s mill says that work in the village can now be found in the village itself. This is Swaraj where the seed is your own, the water is your own, the decision is your own, and the fruit of your labour is your own.
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*Contact: Vikasmeshram04@gmail.com
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