Pune: In Parli in Maharashtra’s Beed district, an NGO Global Vikas Trust (GVT) organised a 5-km run Wednesday, led by actor and model Milind Soman.
Soman led the run from Arjuneshwar Vidyalaya in Parli’s Sirsala village to GVT Krishikul, a training centre for farmers. He was joined by Sub-Divisional Officer Arvind Latkar, tehsildar Vyankatesh Munde, and Mayank Gandhi—a former politician turned social worker who founded GVT in 2016.
The event also included a 3-km run for boys and girls under 18 years of age and a 10-km cycle ride open to all.
“We are doing this to change the mood on the ground,” Gandhi told ThePrint.
Beed has gained much notoriety over the past few months following the murder of a sarpanch, allegations of extortion from an energy firm operating in the district, and suspected political links to the case. State minister Dhananjay Munde even had to step down after his close associate was arrested in connection with the matter.
Amid these controversies, Gandhi, a former Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) member who quit the party a decade ago, has been working at the grassroots level to uplift Beed.
For the past 9 years, he has made Parli his permanent home, studying the rural economy, helping the drought-prone region conserve water, and working to increase farm incomes by promoting crop diversification and horticulture.
Fitness icon Soman had earlier visited the district when GVT was in its infancy.
GVT Krishikul opened in October 2024 and has conducted 175 training sessions so far. The centre focuses on practical training on crop selection for profitability, precision farming techniques, soil and organic farming, water conservation and management, post harvesting and value addition and basic financial literacy.
Parli also happens to be the home turf of Munde, a leader from the Ajit Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party (NCP).
From Mumbai politician to Parli resident
Gandhi worked with social activist Anna Hazare in 2003, protesting for the implementation of the Right to Information Act.
He came back from Dubai where he was working as an urban planner with a vision to change India. “Slowly, I saw AAP becoming like any other political party. I saw that I was not suited for power politics of the day,” he told ThePrint.
By 2015, Gandhi decided to start working at the grassroots, with an idea of helping individual villages develop. He was living in Mumbai at the time, and he chose Beed district for this project as “it was one of the poorest with a high rate of farmer suicides”.
Within the Beed district, Parli was a taluka badly impacted by poverty and drought. “People were said to be living only because they were not dead,” he said.
In 2016, Gandhi sold his Mumbai apartment and moved to Beed permanently, knowing little about farming and village economy, being an urban planner by qualification.
“Without transforming rural incomes, not much will change. Change will come through activism and a movement,” said Gandhi.
When Mayank Gandhi chose to settle in Parli, the taluka, he said, was grappling with severe malnutrition among children and farmers struggling to survive on monthly incomes of no more than Rs 3,500. To make matters worse, the region had endured drought in 6 of the past 8 years.
GVT’s work in Parli
Gandhi officially set up the GVT based in Parli in 2018 and took up 15 villages to work on in the first phase. He had spent the first 3 years from 2016 onwards learning Marathi and understanding how the rural economy functions.
In 2017, Gandhi launched social movements against liquor consumption and dowry to gain acceptance from people. In 2018, by when the GVT had officially been set up, it started working on water availability and storage.
For 45 days, thousands of farmers would start their day with shovels helping dig a 70-km canal, 162 ponds, 62 check dams and five larger dams. The work helped create 222 crore litres of water storage. This, Gandhi said, was the first milestone. Today, over 400 crore litres of water has been harvested this way.
The GVT’s next step was to change the cropping pattern. Cotton and Soyabean which the farmers had planted traditionally had limited potential for increasing incomes. By 2019, the GVT team was ready. They would go from village to village with projectors asking farmers to plant fruit trees like papaya, mulberry and banana. In 2019, farmers in the district planted 11.87 lakh fruit trees.
“I am not married to fruits, however, change in cropping pattern is the key to raise incomes,” said Gandhi. GVT has helped farmers change from soyabean and cotton to jasmine, drumsticks and lemons.
In 2020 and 2021, despite Covid, farmers planted 19 lakh and 78 lakh such trees, respectively. This was extended to 2.2 crore and 1.44 crore trees being planted in 2022 and 2023, he said.
There are three aspects to changing cropping patterns: quality of the fruit, proper training, and development in large clusters to ensure volumes, Gandhi explained.
“In 2019, 1.45 lakh papaya trees were planted in Beed district. This was 1 percent of all papaya trees in Maharashtra. The sheer volume of produce brought traders from across the country to Beed and helped farmers sell their papaya,” he told ThePrint.
GVT’s work that started in 15 villages has now touched 4,600 villages in 27 clusters across the country with over 5.5 crore fruit trees being planted, said Gandhi. The organisation was also registered on the NSE Social Stock Exchange last month.
According to the department of agriculture and farmer welfare, the area under fruit cultivation across India grew by 1.5 percent from 2022-23 to 2023-24. Advance estimates for the current financial year show a marginal decline, however, these numbers are usually revised upwards as second and third estimates come in.
In Beed district alone, 28,000 farmer families have participated in the GVT initiatives. Much remains to be done, as even in Beed district, the percentage of farmers that have benefited from the work has not yet crossed single digits.
According to a report by researchers from Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) in January 2024, average annual income per acre of farmers participating in GVT’s initiatives has increased 10 times over the years.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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