Ganga Barela

Ganga Barela, of village Sankota, practices farming on her family land. Earlier, due to high agricultural input cost of chemical fertilisers, her family was finding farming an inefficient vocation, thereby retracting from it. She brought the issues to the Jeevika programme team in her village, who with timely handholding, counselling and capacity building enabled her to take up vegetable-cultivation with cost effective agriculture practices. With a series of motivational discussions and required facilitation, Ganga decided to start mixed cropping cultivation and also adopt bio-fertiliser process. She sowed seed of ladies-finger and tomato in her land with support of her spouse and took good care of the field. Her hard work resulted in a handsome produce, which brings an additional income of rupees five hundred to her family. The amount varies from time to time and this has inspired other women members of the Self Help Group to resort to mixed cropping through Bio- fertilisation.

As an expansion of the initiative, Jeevika Haat, weekly market is organised on Fridays whereby the people from twenty five villages gather to sell and purchase goods. Jeevika Haat is a response to the difficulties faced by people in transportation to reach the nearest market place in Tiwni village in Umariya district. The process took almost a year, and now people have come up with around twenty shops connected with twenty five villages at a common nearby location, earning an average income of rupees two thousand a month.

Ganga Barela