A tale of two AIs: Maharashtra’s MahaVISTAAR meets Amul’s Sarlaben

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Anand/Nashik/Ahilyanagar: Vitthaldas Balkisan Asawa, 57, grows sugarcane in Chanegaon village, in Sangamner subdivision of Maharashtra’s Ahilyanagar district. When I ask what has changed in farming, he doesn’t start with the weather or the price of cane.

He starts with the vanishing joint families. “What is happening," he says, “is that the joint family did not live." He isn’t romanticising it. He’s describing a practical advantage the old arrangement had: when his grandfather’s house held 30 people, farm decisions didn’t require an appointment with an officer or a visit to a university.

Somebody in the house had seen the crop up close. Somebody had tried a method last season. Advice travelled through courtyards and meals, through evenings long enough for one farmer to notice what another farmer had done.

His own day is split the way small farming days often are—across crops and animals, across work that can’t be postponed. Sugarcane is the main crop. He intercrops—chickpea, soybean, wheat.

He keeps cattle. Dairy runs through the day: fodder, milk, the fixed chores that don’t wait for a convenient time to go and meet an officer or catch a scientist at a training. The universities and research stations still exist.

So do the agriculture staff. Asawa’s complaint is simpler: “When we work in our fields, we can’t coordinate with them that much." So farmers fall back on whoever is closest and fastest: the Krushi Seva Kendra, the local input shop that sells seed, fertiliser and pesticide, and, just as often, sells the advice that comes with it. “Whatever they give us, we have to use it," Asawa says.