He had always farmed someone else’s land. The village asked him to demonstrate on his own

The constraint was never effort. It was insecure access to land, low returns, migration and not knowing what was available.

Kallu lives with a nine-member household in Bhedhan Purwa, near the Katarniaghat forest. Farming and wage labour are the options there. For his family, cultivation usually meant working another person’s land under a share arrangement - after costs, only part of the harvest stayed with the household, and some seasons ended in loss. Family members travelled to Delhi and Rajasthan for work.

During a household survey under FASAL, facilitators discussed economic conditions and gaps in scheme access with families in the village. Residents then took part in an Aajeevika Adhikar Sangathan. In its meetings Kallu learned, for the first time, that he was a member of the Gram Sabha, and began talking about entitlements and cultivation in the same room.

Village members selected him as a Kisan Mitra. The role puts responsibility for learning and sharing inside the community instead of making an outside worker the permanent source of it. At a training at Girijapuri, farmer-enablers went through locally available resources, biological inputs, water management, seed selection and pest management.

He took ten grams of cauliflower seed, raised a line-planted nursery and cultivated ten biswa. Stated cash cost ₹300. Receipts ₹13,400 over about three months. The record carries no full labour valuation or sale ledger, so treat those as his account of the trial rather than an audited return.

What the trial did was change his own assessment of vegetable cultivation. He continued with trellis-based and mixed cropping afterwards.

And it gave the village a demonstration run by its own Kisan Mitra. Other farmers could see a crop in local soil, ask questions of someone they already knew, and judge whether it suited their own conditions. That is a different transaction from being shown a technique by a visitor.

One season does not establish income security. What it establishes is narrower and still worth something: he moved from receiving information to testing it, and he is still testing.

A demonstration run by its own Kisan Mitra.