Changing the fortunes of poor Indian farmers like Khodpe has been a lifelong mission for Bhavarlal Hiralal Jain, founder-chairman of Jain Irrigation Systems, the leading supplier of this technique in India.
Pursuing this altruistic goal doggedly over a 45-year business career, he's achieved global scale for his Jalgaon head-quartered company. Jain Irrigation has become the world's second-biggest manufacturer of agricultural micro-irrigation systems, behind an Israeli outfit, Netafim.
In India Jain's tubes cover more than half of the 4 million acres using the microtechnology. But that's still barely a trickle in a country with total farmland under cultivation of 300 million acres, of which less than half is irrigated at all.
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The much heralded Green Revolution of the 1960s, with its miracle seeds, made India self-sufficient in staple foods, but in the last decade agriculture's growth rate has notably stagnated. Today Indian farms, highly fragmented and with relatively little in the way of state water projects to channel the seasonal monsoons, produce some of the lowest yields in the world. For example, rice yield per acre on average is 1.3 tons versus 2.5 tons per acre in China.
Poor productivity keeps Indian farmers trapped in a cycle of poverty, despite all the subsidies the government doles out. This year's budget provided for a massive $14 billion waiver on farm debt with state-owned banks.
Image: An Indian farmer ploughs a paddy field in the village of Naxalbari near Siliguri. | Photograph: Diptendu Dutta/AFP/Getty Images
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