‘With no rain, we have lost an entire crop’

Stepping smartly around puddles of muddy water, 55-year-old Nira Mhatre points to her wilted bitter gourd vines. Instead of bright yellow flowers, the creepers hold a mesh of dried twigs and a handful of stunted, shrivelled vegetables.

Stepping smartly around puddles of muddy water, 55-year-old Nira Mhatre points to her wilted bitter gourd vines. Instead of bright yellow flowers, the creepers hold a mesh of dried twigs and a handful of stunted, shrivelled vegetables.

In large patches of her two-acre farm, there will be no gourd this season.

“There just hasn’t been enough rain,” says Mhatre. “We’ve lost the entire crop.”

Mhatre and her husband are third-generation farmers and have toiled on this family plot in Panvel since they married 40 years ago.

Here, they grow rice, spinach, fenugreek, beans and gourd, which they sell in local markets for a living.

Mhatre starts her day at 5 am, sweeping and dusting the single-storey, two-bedroom home where she lives with her husband, mother-in-law, son, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren.

Next, she cooks a breakfast of bhakris and sabzi for the family, then has a quick bath. At 8.30 am, she has a breakfast of one bhakri and some tea and, at 9 am, heads into the fields behind her home.

She and her husband, 65-year-old Pandurang, will work without a break for the next four hours. With rotational vegetable crops cultivated in batches, there is always work to be done — ploughing and sowing in some parts, harvesting in others, overall weeding, pumping of water into irrigation canals.

“It’s tiring trying to do everything ourselves at this age,” says Mhatre. “But we never considered involving our son. There is virtually no profit in farming, so we made sure he finished college. He is now an independent electrician earning at least Rs 600 a day — three times what we earn.”

At 1 pm, an exhausted Mhatre walks back to the house to cook dal and rice for lunch; her husband continues to work the fields. After lunch, the couple takes a short break, sometimes napping, sometimes playing with their grandchildren. At 3 pm, it’s back to the fields.

“At least with the vines there is some shade from the trees nearby,” says Mhatre. “But working on the rice and spinach plots, especially in summer, is exhausting and back-breaking.”

By 4 pm, Mhatre begins washing the vegetables harvested through the day and loading them onto a handcart for her husband to sell at a wholesale market nearby.The couple makes Rs 5 per kg of sweet gourd and Rs 10 per kg of bitter gourd at the wholesale market. These prices drop to Rs 2.5 and Rs 5 respectively if they fail to reach the market before 7 pm on the day the vegetables are harvested.

“On the retail market, these vegetables cost between Rs 40 and Rs 60 per kg,” says Mhatre. “But even in these times of crisis, the wholesale shop owners refuse to pay us a better price.”

Back from the fields at 6 pm, Mhatre makes a quick dinner of khichdi and dal. “Dinner is my favourite time of the day because I get to spend time with my entire family,” says Mhatre.

After dinner, 9 pm to 10 pm is TV time, with the family enjoying some comedy serials before they turn in.

The Mhatres work seven days a week, taking only a few days off a year for family trips to a nearby hill station.

“Our village is now part of New Panvel and our house is worth a lot of money,” says Mhatre. “But we will not sell. This is our ancestral land, our only asset. We will farm until our bodies fail us. It is the only thing we know how to do.”

(This weekly feature explores the lives of those unseen Mumbaiites essential to your day)