September 2025
Pushpanjali’s journey reflects a broader shift in vegetable farming, from chemical dependency to sustainability, from risk to resilience, and from subsistence to surplus. Her story stands as a living example of how smallholder farmers can overcome systemic challenges through knowledge, innovation, and collective support.
In the quiet village of Pehelaju Takera, nestled in the Nayagarh district of Odisha, a remarkable transformation has taken root led by Pushpanjali Mallik, a smallholder farmer.
Pushpanjali owns one acre of land, where she previously grew paddy and brinjal, primarily using chemical fertilizers. Like many other farmers in her community, she practiced monocropping, which offered minimal returns while slowly degrading soil health. Her family’s nutritional needs remained unfulfilled and their annual household income hovered around ₹48,000, barely enough to sustain.
Transition to mixed vegetable farming
The turning point came when NIRMAN, with sustained support and interventions, introduced capacity-building sessions for farmers. Pushpanjali actively participated in natural farming training, financial literacy workshops and group management training. She learned how mixed vegetable farming and natural methods could improve soil fertility, reduce pests and secure food year-round.
Motivated, she shifted from monocropping to cultivating a diverse range of crops. For example field crops like black gram, green gram, horse gram, indigenous paddy, maize etc; vegetables like brinjal, bitter gourd, cowpea, cucumber, ridge gourd, pumpkin, tomato, chilli etc; and fruit crops and perennials like papaya and drumstick. Also other enterprises included were goat rearing, desi chicken rearing and azolla cultivation.
Motivated by the newfound knowledge, Pushpanjali adopted natural farming methods and the trelly technique to grow climber vegetables like bitter gourd and beans. These simple innovations significantly boosted her yield per unit area. Shifting from single-crop dependency to cultivating 4-5 types of vegetables in a year, she now enjoys multiple harvests, meets her household’s dietary needs, and contributes to the local market’s supply of fresh produce. The results have been transformative.
Today, Pushpanjali produces 12–13 quintals annually across kharif and rabi seasons. Her household income has risen from ₹48,000 to about ₹64,000 per annum, marking a 20% increase. Her household now enjoys year-round nutritional diversity. Surplus vegetables are sold in local hats, through the FPO and to local aggregators. With these earnings, she is building a new house, a symbol of resilience and progress.
She candidly shares the challenges too:
- Lack of access to premium organic markets, which often forces her to sell produce at lower prices.
- Limited storage facilities, which compels immediate selling even when market prices are unfavourable.
Moving beyond
Pushpanjali’s transformation has not gone unnoticed. She has inspired 10 other women members from her SHG – Anantakhola Mahila SHG – to adopt mixed vegetable farming. Beyond inspiration, she provides training and handholding support to these women, enabling them to follow her footsteps. Her SHG received ₹10,000 in seed capital from the block agriculture department, which was instrumental in accessing improved seeds, farm tools, and transport facilities. This financial backing, combined with knowledge from NIRMAN’s training, helped her shift from subsistence to surplus farming.
“The support from our SHG and the seed fund from the agriculture department gave us the confidence to try new techniques like the trelly method. I feel proud that I can now contribute more to my family and community” says Pushpanjali.
Siddharth Kumar Rout State Program Coordinator NIRMAN Plot: S-2/15, 1st Floor, Niladri Vihar Bhubaneswar, Odisha - 751021 E-mail: kksdfnirman@gmail.com
