Another farmer quits

THIS DUSSEHRA, Pitabasha did not go for the customary sighting of the Indian Roller, or tiha, as it is called in Odia. The bird is believed to grant wishes, and every year thousands of people flock to farms, fields and forests hoping to glimpse it and make a wish. But the 30-year-old farmer from Matupali village in Odisha stayed back. From that day, he also stopped calling himself a farmer.

- RICHARD MAHAPATRA

“I do not wish anymore.”

His one-hectare paddy field lay ruined, flattened by incessant September rains. Fiddling with his government-issued farmer card, he recalls his college days and the school textbooks that described farmers as the happiest people in society. He remembers the meditative rhythm of a life spent nurturing seeds and waiting at the government paddy procurement centre, which farmers half-jokingly call their “legislative assembly”.

He was never a reluctant farmer. “I liked farming, and I earned from it,” he says. After graduating in history, he returned to his village to take it up as a livelihood, ignoring his father’s firm advice against it. “Human history is about land and the people who grow food,” he had reasoned back then, convinced of his choice.