In Tulyachapada, a tribal hamlet in Mokhada block of Maharashtra's Palghar district, farmer Pandurang Lahare no longer walks two kilometres a day to the water source: 'Now the water comes to me.' On his two acres he grows groundnut, mango and cashew with water from a solar pump shared by ten farmers — one of ten such pumps in the village. 'Now we are not so dependent on the rain,' he says. 'We can farm with or without it.'

The hamlet sits close to the Morchondi dam, which stores 1.93 million cubic metres, yet for years most families grew only rain-fed paddy and millet in the June–October kharif season and then left for daily-wage work. Farmer Ramdas Jadhav, 40, would pack for Nashik or Mumbai each November to carry bricks for ₹300–500 a day: 'We are farmers. We aren't used to that kind of work. It was very tough.' About 60% of farmers migrated after the monsoon, says Jayram Bhasme, project manager of the non-profit Pragati Pratishthan, which has worked on tribal water scarcity since 1972.

Supported by Bank of America Merrill Lynch and implemented by Pragati Pratishthan with technical partner Gram Oorja, the 2019 project gave ten farmer groups — 108 households today — solar pumps and a 10 km pipeline that carry stored water to fields long after the monsoon, with drip irrigation for efficiency. Cultivated land grew from four or five acres before 2019 to 95.77 acres; groundnut, the first second crop, rose to 57.3 acres by 2025, vegetables — onion, bitter gourd, cucumber, chilli — from nothing to 38.47 acres, and 58 fruit trees were planted per farmer along field edges.

Total farm income rose from ₹18.3 lakh in 2021 to ₹31.1 lakh in 2024, with vegetables and fruit adding ₹8.1 lakh over the period and about 19.7 tonnes of produce in 2024 alone. Pandurang Chaudhary, who saw groundnut as a risk when it was first suggested in 2018 because paddy was his safety net, now earns about ₹60,000 a season, sometimes ₹1 lakh, against ₹25,000 before; Mr Lahare says the extra income paid for his daughter's BSc admission.

Farmers learned to make jeevamrit and other bio-fertilisers, to compost dung and to farm organically, and say one-to-one conversations settled their early doubts about cloudy days and breakdowns. The gain is double, the reporting finds: crop diversification and a reason to stay — an answer to Mr Jadhav's question, 'I am a farmer. Why should I leave my fields and go away?'

Source: Down To Earth