Victor Hugo once wrote, “No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come.” In contemporary India, in the midst of drought in 2015-16, Prime Minister Narendra Modi floated an idea to double farmers’ real incomes by 2022-23. He called it his dream as he knew that if farmers prosper, India will prosper. Even Mahatma Gandhi said that India lives in its villages. But today, the economic condition in villages is not very good. They are lagging in basic infrastructure. To the best of our knowledge, no independent study has been done about the outcomes of doubling farmers’ incomes. However, at ICRIER, we have researched this issue, and our conclusion is that the achievement was less than 50 per cent.

Around the same time as the PM envisaged doubling farmer incomes, in the drought-stricken district of Beed in Maharashtra, Mayank Gandhi floated the idea of Krishikul under the Global Vikas Trust (GVT) to augment farmers’ incomes. They convinced farmers to shift from traditional crops — soyabean and cotton — to fruit crops such as papaya, custard apple, sweet lime, guava, pomegranate, mulberry, bananas, etc. The results have been astounding. As per an independent evaluation study by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) in 2024, the per-acre income of farmers increased by more than 10 times, from Rs 38,700 to Rs 3.93 lakh, within a short transition period. So far, GVT has planted more than 6.7 crore........

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