OFFTRACK: MUMBAI, MAHARASHTRA

Growth Track

The Railways leases its land to employees for growing vegetables

By Sandeep Unnithan

Imam Ali Shaikh, 45, comes in to supervise his vegetable farm at 9 a.m. every Saturday. He lives in Mumbai but his ancestral home is in Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh, and his family has been farming for as long as he can remember. So for Shaikh, the lush green field of lady's fingers has an almost therapeutic effect. The perfect rural getaway? Not quite. Shaikh's five acre farm is in the heart of Mumbai-boxed in between the railway tracks connecting the busy Parel and Dadar stations. Unmindful of the crammed suburban trains hurtling past, his hired hands diligently work the rectangular patch. This weekend farmer is otherwise an unskilled labourer at Central Railways headquarters in Mumbai and his work is to maintain the railway tracks not far from where his vegetables grow.

Welcome to the "Grow More Food" campaign of Central Railways, Mumbai. Of course, it is not a millennium project. "The scheme itself is very old,'' says Central Railway spokesperson Mukul Marwah. In the mid-1960s government departments like the Railways were urged to grow food on surplus land to usher in the Green Revolution. The revolution did indeed happen and the schemes were then forgotten. Another problem crept in. In Mumbai the unmanageable immigrant influx and high pressure on scarce land threatened the Railways' real estate.

Until last year, trains on the world's largest suburban rail network crawled at a snail's pace and within scraping distance of nearly 14,500 hutments crowded into the vital 10-m safety zone sandwiched between the tracks. The encroachers were evicted from the safety zone after a series of high court judgements.

The Railways had to think of a way of keeping their property free of encroachers. "That's when we became aware of the scheme's potential to protect land,'' explains Marwah. It's a win-win situation: the city offers a ready market for fresh vegetables and the land is put to good use. Everyone seems pleased with the arrangement, and the Grow More Food scheme is now being implemented on vacated stretches with a passion that would have pleased the conceptualisers of the scheme in the 1960s.

Vegetables now grow on 260 acres of vacant land leased out to 187 railway staffers. Rubble is being bulldozed to retrieve more land for farming. The railways has set itself a target of bringing more than 150 acres of land under cultivation in the next few months. The land is leased out only to railway employees at a nominal annual rent of Rs 1,000. The agreement does not give the staffer tenancy or ownership rights over the plot-he has to surrender the land within 20 days if the Railways asks him to do so. Once the agreement is decided on, every other expense-fertilisers, water supply and labour-is borne by the lessee.

Nearly 95 per cent of the employees to whom the plots are hired out to are Class IV employees, gangmen and khalasis, people like Shaikh who take home a salary of around Rs 5,000 a month. The fields are a godsend for Shaikh, who says his salary is not sufficient to support his family of wife and four school-going children. He earns around Rs 2,000 a month from the sale of the lady's fingers, string beans, spinach and radish, most of which is auctioned to contractors while they're still growing. "This is a welcome additional income for me because I never manage to save more than a thousand rupees from my salary,'' he says.

The railroad farms also provides others with employment. Shaikh, for instance, hires six labourers for Rs 1,000 a month to tend the fields in his absence. They stay in makeshift cottages near the fields guarding the produce from urchins and commuters alike. They pump in water from nearby Dadar station to irrigate the fields. Shaikh's only grouse is that the middlemen make a bigger profit selling his vegetables in the market. But he's too busy juggling his twin responsibilities as farmer and railway employee to sell the produce in the market. The beat of city life doesn't pause long enough to allow him the time. Yet, amid the concrete piles, he and the city are glad for the little added oxygen, the slight strips of green.