All about innovative farmer Sundaram and his wife Devi from a book ‘Grass Roots Innovation: minds on the margin are not marginal minds’ by Anil Gupta (2016)
Sundaram has developed several new varieties of dry-land crops. In 1998, Sundaram visited the village of Khandela, where he noticed a few uncommon plants of guar in a farmer’s field. These plants were taller, bore more number of pods from top to bottom and were free from insect, pest and disease infestations. He selected those plants and harvested the seed separately. The next year he grew the seeds of the selected plant in his farm and observed that some plants had fast-growing habits, including early flowering and fruiting. He adopted such mass-selection methods, that is, pooled the seeds of selected plants and plots every year for six years and harvested better seeds separately. The result were a new variety of crop with uniform height, synchronous maturity and higher yield. He developed Guar SR-23, mothbean SR1 and Kubuli Chana SR1 which was finally released into the market for commercial purposes in 2005.
Sundaram’s wife, Bhagwatic Devi, is no less innovative. She found that termites, a serious problem in the dry lands, used to affect the growth and yield of the crop. She also observed that pieces of soft wood in the soil attracted the termites. To attempt to solve her problem, she planted small pieces of eucalyptus in the wheat field at different interval. She found that all the termites became concentrated under these pieces of eucalyptus. Finally she could remove these pieces and dispose of the termites.
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