Friday, April 24, 2020

Mahuwa

The Mahuwa tree and
flowers on the ground
Photo: Ravi Kumar
          It is the Hindu month of Vaishakh and the rural India has again got that special sweet smell of Mahua/Mahuwa flowers. In the morning, the ground under a Mahua tree is spread with white (with a greenish tint) flowers. The flowers continue dropping at a few seconds interval. If you see above in the branches to guess from where the next flower is going to drop, most likely you will fail. There you can hardly see a flower like on the ground. Before dawn, standing beneath a Mahua tree is an awesome experience with the sweet smell around and the dropping sound of the flowers. 
Mahua flowers on the ground
Photo: Ravi Kumar
        Villagers come near the trees with baskets and collect the flowers. The flowers are dried and sold to grocery stores. The dried flowers are used for making some recipes but generally it is used to make alcoholic drink. This home-made drink is also known as Mahua which is a country liquor. This drink is more popular in the forest dwelling tribal people as this tree is more in numbers in their areas. Mahua drinking is accepted as a part of their cultural heritage.
 
Mahua oil, (कोढ़ी का तेल)
In Winters
        The seeds of Mahua are used to extract oil which is known as Kodhi-oil (कोढ़ी का तेल). This oil is very good for skin. It is also used to make soap and detergents. It is edible and may be used as vegetable butter. The seed cakes after the extraction of oil is used as manure. 
           The bark of the Mahua tree is used for medicinal purposes. The leaves and flowers are fed to goats and sheeps. The leaves are also fed to a type of silk insect (moth) and Tassar silk is obtained from them. Tassar silk is a type of wild silk.


Picking Mahua flowers
Photo: Ravi Kumar
         The Mahua wood is very hard and used as timber. But seasoned Mahua wood is brittle and very difficult to work upon. So in villages, it is mostly used as Chowkhats (door frames) and carpenters work on it before it is seasoned or dry, immediately it is fixed in the walls so that no warping takes place on drying.
           We see that the Mahuwa tree plays an important role in rural economy. Due to its usefulness, the tribal people consider it as a boon and revere this tree.
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Mahua dried flowers and it's oil is also available online at - Amazon

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Thursday, April 23, 2020

Never bargain with a farmer

Farmers in the field, plucking vegetables
Photo: Ravi Kumar
      When we buy vegetables from the local market, we try to buy them cheap. So the bargaining is inevitable. We bargain for small amounts of money which matters for them not for us. But we do not bargain in the malls and hotels though the bill may be in thousands. We even give tips to the waiter just for serving us. But it is the farmer who needs our support. Just imagine how the vegetables are produced and taken to the market or local haat. The farmer tills the field mixes Gobar compost (decomposed cow dung) in the soil, sows the seeds, waters the field form time to time, then weeding, pesticides, fertilizers and caring-guarding till the vegetables are ready to be plucked. It all needs money and a lot of hard work in the field. You can realise their hard work if you see them working in the field. 
They are plucking 'Bhindi or Okra'
with hand wrapped in polythene
sheets. Photo: Ravi Kumar
          Now it comes to the plucking of the vegetables and sending them to the local market. It is also not an easy task. Since we reach vegetable market at about 6:30 in the morning, farmers have to reach there before this time. Generally they go to the field before dawn about 4:30 AM. Both men and women work there. Plucking of vegetables is not easy. There is always a danger of snake and insect bite due to low visibility. Some vegetables have thorns for example eggplant. Some have itching effect on the bare skin, for example ladyfinger (Bhindi, Okra or Ramtorai). Farmers have to cover their hand to pluck them. Since the can not afford buying hand gloves, the cover their hands with polythene sheets. They collect the vegetables in baskets and carry them to the local market on their heads. They sell these vegetables there for three to four hours and if some vegetable remains they sell them all to local vegetable sellers at a cheap rate and then return. Some farmers can not carry the baskets to the market or can not spare so much time there, so they call a middleman (Bicholiya) and sell all the vegetables to them at cheap rates at the field itself. In this case the farmer's profit reduces considerably.
             So this is how the vegetables are produced and brought to the market. We see how much labour a farmer and his family do in this process. Can we do only a part of this labour? No. So next, if you hard bargain a farmer (Kisan) think again how he has brought the vegetables in the market.
           Most of the times a middleman or a permanent vegetable seller in the market earns more than the farmer without going through the hard work of the farmer. It is the point where cooperative institutions have a role to play for making available a good matket to the farmers and picking the vegetables directly from the field.
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