Naazneen Karmali, Forbes.com
Dreaming of a better future for India's downtrodden farmers, Bhavarlal Jain created the world's second-largest micro-irrigation company.
Until recently Ram Krishna Khodpe and his four brothers were eking out a meager living cultivating cotton on their 5-acre farm in the semiarid region of Jalgaon in India's western state of Maharashtra. To supplement his family's income, Khodpe ran a small shop selling sugarcane juice.
Then two years ago he saw a drip irrigation system being demonstrated in his village. This uses a motorized pump to push water through long black plastic tubes that are laid out in rows along the base of the plants. Instead of flooding the field, just the required amount of water "drips" slowly through intermittent holes in the tubes directly onto the plant's roots.
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This irrigation-efficient system, Khodpe was told, could double crop yields and save up to 60% of the water that flood irrigation methods consume. The system wasn't cheap: $600 an acre, of which half would come from a government subsidy. Scraping together the family's savings, Khodpe took the plunge.
He reaped a bonanza. The yield on his cotton crop increased two and a half times, earning Khodpe $1,200 an acre, enough to recover the cost of the device in the first season. The family landholding has since expanded to 40 acres, says a beaming Khodpe as he walks visitors through his flourishing fields.
Image: A farmer irrigates a field with a water-saving irrigation system. (Inset) Bhavarlal Jain, Chairman, Jain Irrigation Systems. | Photograph: Getty Images
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