VIJAYAWADA: For the love of horticulture and to help farmers in the State earn better, he left his central government job and joined the State government to implement various innovative programmes to promote horticulture.
Vepuri Shadrak Dharmaja, a deputy director at the State horticulture department, has been working towards crop diversification, and encourages farmers to take a leap from low-income to high-income crops through innovative agricultural practices.
One of his notable achievements is cultivation of banana through tissue culture in tribal areas of Kadapa district. The move led to a threefold increase in the tribal farmers’ income, resulting in a drastic change in their socio-economic status.
Born in Ammanabrolu of Prakasam district on January 1, 1967, Dharmaja graduated from Andhra Pradesh Agriculture University (now Professor Jayashankar Telangana State Agricultural University) in Rajendranagar, Hyderabad. Soon after his graduation, he joined a private company as an area manager for micro-irrigation in Medak.
It was then that he promoted micro-irrigation for horticulture among tribals. “It was 1989. The area hardly had any water resources. I encouraged tribesmen in the area to raise pomegranate orchards using drip irrigation, which helped them get better income in due course,” he recalled while speaking to TNIE.
Later, Dharmaja got a job at NGRI, where his job was maintenance of landscape gardens. Had he continued in the job, he would have ascended to higher ranks in the institution. However, his interest in making use of his expertise to benefit the farmers made him resign and join the Andhra Pradesh horticulture department in 1990.
“My first posting was at Palamaner in Chittoor district. The region has unique climatic condition, where one spell of rain can help in growing vegetables and the morning dew suffices to cultivate tomatoes. However, scarcity of water made me encourage farmers to shift towards commercial crops like capsicum, grapes, french beans, potatoes using micro- irrigation. Further, I encouraged them to take up dry-land horticulture crop like mango and today the area emerged as hub of mangoes, which are sought by food processing industries,” he said.
Later, during his stint as Project Director, Chittoor, he promoted micro-irrigation in 30,000 hectares. The district stood first in implementation of drip-irrigation in India. The move improved quality of produce, helped achieving 40 per cent saving in utilisation of water. 42,000 farmers were benefited by way of increase in incomes.
While he was working as horticulture assistant director in Pulivendula, Dharmaja said, through drip irrigation he was able to take up cultivation of banana through tissue culture in one hectare, which now expanded to 25,000 hectares. Farmers who were cultivating groundnut, earning a mere Rs 18,000 per hectare are now earning between Rs 3 lakh and Rs 4 lakh per hectare, he added.
According to him, a novel initiative was started on fruit care activity on banana, through “Public Private Partnership Banana Value-Chain Project” in collaboration with exporters like INI-Farms, Desai Fruits.
The partnership helped in promoting, marketing and exporting of banana. The project has been well accepted in the Middle East.