Terrace vegetable nursery raising becomes a source of livelihood security

Smt. Sunita Kumari is a resident of village Bharjwanu of Sundernagar block of district Mandi of Himachal Pradesh. She was leading a simple life of house wife devoting herself to her children and family before adopting farming for livelihood. Her husband was working in rented cycle repair shop about 5 Km from her village to earn livelihood for his family but was earning a meager amount which was not sufficient enough to meet out family expenses. In 2007, her husband got serious health problems which forced him to continue his work of cycle repairing and was almost bed ridden. This compelled Sunita Kumari to work as unskilled labour in her village to sustain her family but the earnings were meager enough to meet out family and children education expenses. Consequently she decided to take farming as a profession for sustenance. In the course of her agriculture journey, Smt. Sunita came in contact with KVK Mandi during 2009-10 when she faced initial hurdles and discussed about options in agriculture. KVK experts motivated her to adopt vegetable farming for income generation in her small land holding. She was advised by the KVK experts to scientifically grow and raise the nursery of vegetable crops, for getting the remunerative returns.  She took vocational training on scientific nursery raising of vegetable crops, their production and protection technology at KVK, Mandi and UHF Nauni, Solan. She started growing vegetables on the leased land. She has been cultivating cauliflower, broccoli, radish, spinach, peas, turnip and potato in Rabi season and cucurbits (cucumber, bottle gourd, bitter gourd and summer squash), French bean, capsicum & tomatoes in Kharif season. She does not have sufficient land for farming and thus KVK also motivated her to grow vegetable seedlings on the terrace for supply to fellow farmers and in nearby areas for additional income. At present she has become a successful nursery grower and producing the quality seedlings of different crops like onion, cole crops and solanaceous vegetables apart from poly tube nurseries of cucumber, bottle gourd, bitter gourd and summer squash etc. early in the season. She earns a net profit of Rs. 50,000/- by selling vegetable seedlings grown on terrace of her house.  Apart, she also earns annual income of about Rs. 2.30 lakh by the sale of fresh seasonal vegetable from her leased farm land. Earlier Sunita used to sell vegetables at her village itself. Now vegetable vendors from neighbouring areas usually come to take her produce directly from her fields. She is earning additional income by selling vegetable nursery to other farmers in her village as well as neighbouring villages. At the same time she runs and monitors two Vegetables Self Help Groups in her village and has become a role model for other women farmers. Sh. Purshotam Rupala, Hon’ble State Agriculture Minister also interacted with her during Mahila Ksan Divas on 15^th October, 2020 and appreciated her success.