: New Toilet to Daughter’s Education: How 2 Women Used Potato Farming to Become Independent #IndiaNEWS #Agriculture After spending her entire life as someone’s daughter and then a wife, Shamima

New Toilet to Daughter’s Education: How 2 Women Used Potato Farming to Become Independent #IndiaNEWS #Agriculture
After spending her entire life as someone’s daughter and then a wife, Shamima Begum from West Bengal’s Molaypur village is now carving her own identity as a farmer.
She recently sold 12 tonnes of potatoes to PepsiCo India, and with the revenue generated, she paid off her husband’s debt. She also purchased household essentials like the fridge and cooking gas and kept aside some money for her daughter’s medical career.
Some 200 kilometres away from Shamima is another woman farmer, Malati, who has a similar story. A resident of Harishchandrapur, Malati has been helping her husband in farming but it was only last year when she independently grew potatoes.
She, too, directed her profits towards fulfilling her needs — a toilet inside the house and a tubewell on the farm to ease the irrigation process.
Both of them decided to start their second innings as individual entities despite being fully aware of the deplorable conditions of growing potatoes in their region.
West Bengal is one of the largest producers of potatoes in India with sizable cultivation in Hooghly. However, the region is plagued with price fluctuations, untimely rains and high agricultural input costs. Due to this, farmers are often subjected to extensive losses.
However, the mutual desire to become financially independent pushed them to grab a common opportunity that came their way in 2019.
PepsiCo India partnered with the US Agency for International Development (USAID) last year under the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity (W-GDP) initiative to empower women in agriculture and help build a more sustainable food system. The programme imparts various lessons like crop rotation, pest control management, financial literacy and so on. So far, they have provided potato production training to 500 women.
“I was nervous about the yield-related failures and debts that I may have to incur, but this was a risk I was willing to take for the well-being of my family,??? Shamima tells The Better India.
Shamima Sheds Her Farming Fears
A high school graduate, Shamima was married off as soon as she turned 18. She effortlessly emulated the role of a homemaker and occasionally started helping her husband with basic farming activities like removing weeds and warding off pests.
While she liked helping her husband, Shamima never actively took an interest in farming. She says that she didn’t have the calibre to deal heavy crop losses or the physical stamina to sow seeds and till the land. She was happy taking care of her two children and the house.
Every year Shamima’s family takes a loan of Rs 3 lakhs to grow potatoes and after the harvest, they repay it.

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