ISAP entrepreneur series:Story 4 Breaking the gender bias For a woman in rural India, breaking social taboos is a bigger challenge than overcoming hurdles in business. Navreet Kaur, a 27 years old, graduate in Food Technology from Khalsa College, Amritsar is an innovative lady and a progressive farmer herself, having 11 acres of land. “Belonging to an agriculture background I was motivated since childhood to do something different in Agriculture”, says Navreet. After completing her education in 2010, she joined the ACABC training programme, at ISAP-Amritsar. The exposure which she got from the training helped her to start net house cultivation on her fields in 2011 with an initial investment of ` 1.50 Lakhs on which she received a subsidy of ` 50,000 under National Horticulture Mission. Navreet started with two crops,cucumber and coriander, and going ahead she included capsicum in her portfolio. During the initial years the production of cucumber was35 quintals from 1 Kanal area (1/8th of Acre). In July and August she took coriander as an off-season crop and sold it at a remunerative market price of Rs. 130-150 per kg. In the next year the production from capsicum crop was 31 quintals. An astute marketer, she focuses on off-season crop cultivation to avail higher prices for her produce in the market.She also motivates other farmers in her village for taking off-season crops to take benefit of price differences. A resident of village Thoba in Amritsar, Punjab Navreet grew up seeing that the main agricultural activities are led by male farmers only. Women, either do not go to the fields at all or even if they go, it is for doing menial jobs like transplanting, weeding, manual harvesting, winnowing, etc. With her exampleshe motivated the girls of her age and other ladies of her village to establish their own net houses and poly houses. To make them start, Navreet convinced themto do it at least for their own consumption, if not for commercial purposes.She educated them on the benefits of protected cultivation whichis safe for consumption due to minimal sprays of pesticides. Due to her efforts, now there are around 12 net houses in her village. After her marriage she started the same concept at her in-laws house & now they are having 3 acres area under organic farming. Wherever she comes across agriculture professionals, she explains them the benefits of getting associated with different kinds of agricultural activities and the government subsidies given to agri graduates for setting up of agribusinesses.
Posted on: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 02:40:25 +0000
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