June 1, 1998

In certain select pockets of rural Punjab a minor revolution is brewing. From lavish lifestyles to crop  selection, farming has a new, exciting language.

By Ramesh Vinayak

Throw out the makki di roti and sarson da saag, burn the hut, abandon the bullock-pulled plough, cancel the evening's bhangra, ignore the paddy crop -- take that image of the rural Punjab farmer and dump it into the incinerator. It's history. Well, not quite, but in certain pockets of rural Punjab at least, a minor revolution is brewing. From lifestyles to crop selection, farming has a new language. As Scotch is glugged under the shadow of palatial houses and the noonday sun glints off the golf clubs strewn across a miniature course, the talk is of high yields and Hitachi laptops, plant genes and Levi's jeans, strawberry plantations and satellite phones. Once upon a time saying "I'm an agriculturist" was enough to silence a conversation; now it's a lifestyle statement.

Outside Chandigarh, down a sweaty highway, the concept of the man in the fields has undergone a designer alteration. Farmers once spoke of chai and charpoys; if so, then Gurpreet Khehra, 33, has been riding on some agricultural time machine. His world is a planet away from that clich . Ray-Bans on face, Nike on feet, Stroh's beer on the table, his accoutrements have altered, so has his work. Sandwiches packed in his air-conditioned Gypsy, his cellular beeps when he's just finished supervising the laying of a Rs 4 lakh Israeli drip-irrigation system and ensuring that his thousands of tender saplings ranged under a sky of nets have nothing to complain about. It's his wife Mandeep calling, a postgraduate in plant genetics who runs the tissue-culture laboratory that he set up at Mohali. This is a romance for the ages: their idea of love-talk is discussing plant mortality.

The word kisan doesn't quite sit comfortably across Khehra's cupboard-sized shoulders. A PhD in tissue culture from Britain, he spurned job offers from the US, aware that if he could plug his hi-tech dreams into his ancestral land, a fortune awaited him. "I am going to be halfway between research and farming," says Gurpreet. "Doing tissue-culture based agriculture is a fascinating way to do things on our own and make megabucks." With Pepsi and Indo-Mint as clients, a US firm engaging him for research on hybrid seedless watermelons, his first year's turnover was over Rs 20 lakh. Small change. Now, he's booked to produce strawberries across 50 acres, grow exotic exportable vegetables, use some of them at a fast-food franchise he's buying, and set up a Rs 75 lakh lab.

City-bred, modern in manner, yet unable to shake off the soul of the farmer that stirs restlessly within him, Khehra represents the new crop of brats with the green thumb. The land beckons them, the dust is their calling. Yet young, savvy and educated, they are giving tradition a twist. Wheat and paddy that sustained their ancestors is out; cash crops like strawberries, grapes, flowers, potato seeds and exotic vegetables are in. Their fields of dreams once fertilised by their fathers' sweat now bloom with the added nurturing of technology: modern farm equipment, foreign consultants, imported high-yielding varieties of crops. Even the vocabulary of farming has altered: once their grandfathers went to the market, these men read the markets. Says Khehra: "You live in style, yet are close to your roots." Adds renowned farm economist S.S. Johal: "They are the seedlings of a new green revolution that Punjab so desperately needs."

Throw a dart at the countryside and it could hit a success story. Like the true king of flower power, Avtar Singh Dhindsa, 42, a first generation farmer, who earned half a million US dollars by exporting 70 tonnes of flower seeds this year. His success story blossomed in less than a decade. Once a landscaping officer with a Rs 4,000 a month wage, this son of a Sangrur farmer put in his resignation, picked up his passport and fled to the US to pursue floriculture opportunities in 1987. Of 109 US firms, only one agreed to contract him for seed production, the payment assured only if he met their quality standards. No worries, Dhindsa is a man who sweats optimism. He started with three acres, swelled to 70, then finally to 700, combining low cost of production with high quality. He flits around the globe, attending conferences, studying universal flower trends, returning to tell Customs, "The only luggage I have to declare is literature on floriculture and seeds of the latest variety." Homework is bolstered by ingenuity, in Dhindsa's case, an indigenous thresher to clean seeds. International standards permit only 0.03 per cent dust in flower seeds; Dhindsa stunned them by bringing it down to 0.01 per cent. Now, says the man who produces 600 varieties of seed like verbenas, violas, limoniums and coreopsis, "I don't go to the companies for orders. Now, they come to me for business." Who's to argue: his fax machine whirring amidst the farmlands spews out orders by the dozen.

There is often no mystical allure of the land for these men; it is more a practical consideration. Amarinder Preet Singh Kahai, 28 -- "Call me Uvie" -- found it "more lucrative than white-collar jobs", and spurned careers in flying and golf to plant strawberries. When 23, he was seduced by a two-member Californian team which was promoting strawberries in Punjab, and imported plants from the US at Rs 5 apiece. Local farm experts sneered that it wouldn't work in Punjab; Uvie's reply was a Rs 1 lakh per acre profit, 10 times more than from his other crops. Ambition has been fuelled: next year, he plans a 10 acre plantation, with a little assistance from his Israeli consultant. No travelling required; in rural Punjab too, e-mail works just fine.

Burgers in the back seat of his blood-red Contessa, Uvie works punishing hours, aware that remote-control farming is invalid here: his profits will be directly proportional to dawn-to-dusk attention to his plants. But it's not all a lure of the lucre. It's about freedom as well. Executive jobs with inflexible timings are like voluntarily being strapped into a straitjacket. Farming allows for independence and a self-structured lifestyle, and to see the Polo-clad Uvie fine-tuning his golf swing when he feels like it is seductive. G.S. Saraon, 36, would concur. Last month, he sought premature retirement as a major in the army to grow high-value vegetables in his 60-acre farm. "In the seven years that would have made me eligible for pension, I can establish myself well in the agro-processing business," he says. Then, he adds, grinning, "The idea is to be your own boss."

Ravibir Singh, 33, has a similar tale. Abandoning his executive job with DCM, he retired to his 100 acre ancestral farm with two buddies -- Gurinderjit Singh, 37, and Sukbir Singh Oberoi, 32 -- and a dream in tow. So what if, as Oberoi says, "People only knew strawberries from the alphabet book -- S for strawberry." So what if demand in Chandigarh itself was barely 20 kg a season three years ago. With a 100 per cent profit from their 40 tonne strawberry produce, the youngsters have helped spawn a strawberry culture. Now, between drinking Scotch in front of cricket on television or downloading technical know-how from the Internet, it's the future that consumes them. A Rs 25 lakh turnover is just a start; next year, they want Rs 50 lakh and by increasing the strawberry yield and cutting prices, they might raise the profits high enough to replenish their Hush Puppy shoe collections.

This is a bold new generation, untiring and unafraid of improvising. Father may have sent them abroad, but their foreign degrees are not mere excess baggage. They use them. Jang Bahadur Singh Sangha, 27, has a US master's degree in potato seed pathology. Not the most flamboyant of calling cards, but at his farm which now houses a state-of-the-art tissue-culture lab, his credentials are ensuring he has a richer future. Degrees aside, both youth and a western education have allowed for a wider, more encompassing vision to farming. "Their recipe for success lies in their flair for marketing," admits N.S. Brar, additional managing director of Punjab Agro Industries Corporation.

This is not the sit-and-wait farmer; this is the go-and-get-it brigade. Khehra books strawberry orders on the cellular and is investing in walk-in freezers to store his produce and export it to Europe during their off season. Uvie, who says that "strawberries make sound economic sense only if you can market them", spent 60 hours on his computer, designing his packaging carton to make his quality strawberries look different in the big stores. Even hard decisions are not backed away from. When mushroom prices crashed on the international market, of the dozen or so units recently set up, only M.S. Bhinder's is still standing, with a Rs 28 crore turnover. Firing all his managers to cut cost of production certainly helped. "Turning wheat straw and chicken shit into dollars is a damn tough job," says Bhinder, 42, who now stays at the plant in Dera Bassi for direct supervision.

Luxuries come with inventiveness. Satbir Singh Nijjer, 40, managing director of the Rs 28 crore Amritsar-based Nijjer Agro Foods Limited, didn't get his Spalding golf set and a fleet of cars for free. Innovative farming made it affordable. In the mid-'80s, his father revolutionised tomato cultivation by introducing high-yielding hybrid varieties. Today, Satbir's genius is high-value exotic vegetables such as pickling gherkins, broccoli, seedless watermelon and red cabbage. His eyes fixed on the globe and untapped foreign markets, he has plans -- not dreams -- of sending two chartered plane loads of exotic vegetables daily to the Middle East and South-east Asian markets. After all, trebling the turnover by 2000 is his goal.

There is no finish line for such men. They are anchored like their ancestors to the land but they are driven differently. They are the futuristic farmers, comfortable with technology, accustomed to luxury, pleasured only by profit. And as more and more young men exchange city desks for culture labs, a trend begins to perpetuate itself. "The glamour of hi-tech agriculture makes my peers look up to me," says Uvie. They're ready to shake his hand in respect and who cares if it's dirty?

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