She Had Never Grown Vegetables. Two Years Later She Was Mixing Her Own Pest Control

The plot behind the house is usually counted as nothing. It is land.

Shanti Devi lives in a six-member farming household and belongs to the Durga Aajeevika Adhikar Sangathan. She had not cultivated vegetables before. Over the two years leading up to her fact sheet she began adding vegetables and spices - changing both what the household could harvest near home and how often it had to buy those foods.

That matters in a way a sales figure will not show. Livelihood resilience includes expenditure avoided, food available at home, knowledge held locally, and the ability to absorb a price rise without changing what the family eats.

She learned to prepare jeevamrit and a botanical mixture recorded as char-chatni, and used them as nutrient and pest-management inputs. Preparing them locally cut the need to buy some chemical products. It also moved the technical work - mixing, watching how the crop responds, judging when to apply - inside her own practice.

Her 2024–25 onion trial used three biswa. Nursery 25 October 2024, transplanting 5 December, lifting from 10 March: 136 days. Two and a half quintals. Receipts ₹9,500, total cost ₹3,500, net return ₹6,000. Seed and land rent are recorded at zero; labour at ₹1,800 is the largest line.

The story is not the yield. Her own account connects the cultivation to confidence, to what the household eats and to buying less. Membership of a livelihood-rights collective put that farming inside a wider space where women compare results and raise entitlements and local concerns in the same meeting.

One onion season cannot show whether the soil improved or whether the returns hold. What it does support is narrower: she diversified into vegetables and spices, completed a documented trial, and built skills that outlast a single distribution of seed.

Resilience includes the purchase a household no longer has to make.