Almost every farmer require financing for their inputs like seed procurement, water management, cover the loss due to floods, late or early monsoon, low price for farming produce, high wages, unavailability of labour, transportation of food grains, etc..

Smallholder farmers who are mostly on subsistence farming require loans to carry forward their seasonal farming.

It is hard for the smallholder farmers to sustain themselves only through their farm income and produce. They had to depend on multiple sources of income like livestock rearing, poultry, fishery etc. for their survival. Even after having these resources, the farmers are unaware of their management and utilisation to upkeep and more often these allied support fails to give the required results.

Prinith Marak, a full-time farmer of Waksogre village of East Garo Hills district of Meghalaya was distressed to get desired results even after long hours of hard work. Prinith used to be mostly busy working in his field to grow paddy to manage his family of seven members.

BAKDIL the social service society in Tura, Garo Hill, Meghalaya reached out to Prinith with the Boro paddy seed support. He was cultivating paddy only once a year but this seed support helped him to cultivate paddy in the second season too. Prinith with his small savings could manage planting betel nuts in about 2 acres of the land but all that he was doing was not enough for him to sustain his family.

“BAKDIL team asked Prinith to join the Caritas India’s FARM program aimed for the small and marginal farmers food and nutritional security in the region. He joined the farmers club and learnt different things that proved beneficial to him. He has been an avid listener and used to take an active part in the training programme conducted with all his interests”, informed Chingchak D Arengh, Coordinator, BAKDIL.

Pirinth also had a fishery pond that was hardly giving him any returns. He approached the BAKDIL team to help in restoring this pond to reap the benefit. The team engaged him with the farmers contingent who were given training on fisheries management.

Seeing his urge to work hard and earn, BAKDIL facilitated a loan of Rs 4,46,600 on a 50% subsidy from the State Fisheries Department. Prinith without wasting time applied his learning from the training and spent this amount to repair his pond and introduce fish fingerlings to the pond in May 2020. The pond is expected to give at least Rs. 20,000 per season as a return.

Being a member of the Piggery cooperative society, he also received a loan of Rs 2,50,000 on 0% interest from the piggery cooperative mission in February, the year 2021. He further availed a loan of Rs 12,000 on 0% interest from PM Kisan Yojana which he utilised in his farms. With all this Pirinth now expects an annual income of 3-4 lakhs which is way beyond what he used to earn before.

“This is the beginning for me, and I can see a future with full potential and opportunities,” says Prinith. He also expressed that he would be happy to support and help other farmers in his village to take activities that help them to grow.

BAKDIL as an organisation has been spearheading the cause of farmer in the Garo Hills of Meghalaya and this is one out of several success stories that they have created.