Millet Mela at Mysore

I still remember those days in the nineties when two of our friends Ravi and Dinesh, fresh graduates out of Engineering college who pedaled vegetables grown without the use chemical fertilizers and pesticides on their bicycles. Except for a very few people who had known their cause nobody else respected their initiative. They had not taken it as their job but something more; their young minds were struck by the philosophy of Masunabo Fukuoka. They had read E F Schumacher's economics in ‘Small is Beautiful’ and soil science and ill effects of synthetic chemicals in ‘Tending the earth’ by Winin Pereira.

Mr. Dinesh Kumar

Entrepreneurs like A P Chandrashaker and Ramakrishna Bhat at Kallahalli had already begun to try out the natural ways of cultivation. They had given up carriers in the main stream and moved on to the country side to take on farming. In those days many people did it. Probably Dinesh and Ravi felt the need of a proper market for such products and they started to take to house holds and form buyers network in Mysore.

Mr. U.N. Ravi Kumar, Guruprasad and others tried giving a proper shape to the movement and started the first Organic shop in Mysore in 1997. It aimed at Nesara, stocking everything organic - from salt to sugar to vegetable and fruits. Through memberships they gathered from like-minded people to join hands to promote organic products besides encouraging farmers to grow organic products. Presently, it has around 230 members, including farmers and consumers.

In about fifteen years, Mysore has seen a dozen more initiatives. Not all of them are cooperatives like Nesara. Some tried adding value to the products like Ahara butti. Some stock organic products along with other items in their shops and some have a village-fair approach. They put up the shop once a week and remove it by evening. The markets grew and consciousness of the people awakened. Every shop had its own pricing and competition grew stiffer. An annual gathering to promote their common interest started occurring frequently. The networks grew wider and the melas got bigger. Today you find any thing and everything branded with an organic tag- from cooking oil to phenol, all classically packed and exorbitantly priced.

Every shop started profiting. Many regular customers started losing faith in the products. But talking organic became a fad and like religious cults there are always newer customers who become even more hard core. Our urban population is mesmerized to keep buying to help economic growth. Families found new destinations to go shopping.  

Nanjaraja Bahudar Choultry is seeing a fair on a monthly basis. It is happy to see so many products on display and to feel that the world is going greener. Millets are coming back to the market- not as an alternate food but as a remedial measure for the health of an individual. Whatever, it is definitely doing good to the environment and economy.

It is a hard fact that profit seekers surface from every possible nook in a gathering of people. It is the crowd who can afford at pay Rs 90 or 120 for a kilo of rice. They must also be people who may be interested in buying a site or exchanging a car. As a result, our Organic marketers are making a hey day always ready to showcase their unquestionably good intentions and put up a stall to recover the losses of a farmer, do good to the environment and promote health of the public. Of course all these things incur expenses and they are another unorganized sector that is fast becoming organized. They along with their customers or the organic people constitute more than 95% of the people. Alas, the remaining five are the farmers? One should not doubt how many of them are really organic and how much they are producing ?