In the Walvan village of Maharashtra’s drought-prone Dharashiv district, Vrindavani Yadav (Patil) stands out as an unusual woman, with little financial might but a dream to transform the lives of women farmers like herself — widows or divorcees. She heads a company which has more than 650 shareholders, most of them single women farming on their own. Six of the ten directors on its board are widows.
When her husband died in 2013, Vrindavani was in her early thirties with a young son to raise and little experience beyond managing her household. Her journey began with a self-help group in 2014. With the first loan she took from the thrift fund, she set up a stationery shop in the village, repaid her loan, borrowed again and raised goats as a side enterprise. Then, she helped other women — whose husbands had died by suicide or of ailments or had deserted them — to set up small enterprises. In 2019, she steered nearly 30 groups to form a federation that would eventually become a farmer-producer company.
Today Vrindavani heads Valmikeshwar Agro Farmer Producer Company, a collective of over 650 members, spread across 15 villages in Bhoom taluka. The company aggregates soybean, pulses and other farm produce from its members, negotiates with buyers and attempts to secure better returns for small cultivators in a region marked by drought, migration and agrarian distress. Four years ago, she roped in male farmers who were eager to join the venture.
Valmikeshwar is part of one of the largest rural development experiments undertaken in contemporary India. In 2004, the idea of FPC emerged from efforts to give smallholders the benefits of collective action without the bureaucratic baggage that burdened many cooperatives. Over the past two decades, governments, development agencies and financial institutions have promoted more than 45,000 FPCs. The idea is simple: individually, small farmers have little bargaining power; collectively, they can buy inputs at a lower cost, access credit, process produce and negotiate better prices.
The results, however, have been disappointing. Evaluations by the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad and other agencies, including a recent report by the Tata-Cornell Institute for Agriculture and Nutrition, suggest that while a few FPCs have improved farmers’ access to markets, the vast majority of them are financially fragile. The bottom line: there is potential; it remains untapped.
The major challenge for these FPCs is access to capital. The second: professional management. Third: difficulties in compliance filing. Many FPCs haven’t moved beyond aggregation to profitable processing, branding and marketing.
The agri-business is tightly controlled by private corporations. The small farmer economy is plagued by a poly-crisis — from ecological degradation to climate change to market volatility. While organising farmers under an institutional umbrella remains an important policy tool, India needs to make a course correction: infuse capital and hand-hold these fledgling firms.
Vrindavani understands these constraints. “We decided to stay small and learn first,” she told me when I first visited the company three years ago. She was buoyant then.
But on a recent visit to her village, she seemed to be losing hope. The problem stems from the state government’s programme, the World Bank-aided Balasaheb Thackeray Agribusiness and Rural Transformation (SMART) Project. Her firm was assured capital and infrastructure support, but those commitments never materialised, leaving the FPC drowning in debt. Yet the significance of Valmikeshwar lies in what it has already achieved. In a part of rural India where women have traditionally remained invisible in markets, a group of widows and single women have built a company of their own.