The monsoon was good this year, the climate perfect and the yield bumper. Sandeep Thavkar, 28, thought his tomatoes would fetch a tidy sum.
Used to growing the traditional soybean or cotton, he had gambled on tomatoes on an acre-and-a-half of his four acre farmland after seeing the crop fetch better returns for his neighbours in Virkhandi, 65 kilometres from Nagpur, last year.
But the prices crashed even before he had begun harvesting his tomatoes, a local variety, in mid-December. In the first week of January, 25 crates of his tomatoes, each with 25 kilos of the vegetable, fetched just Re 1.20 a kilo.
At that price, he said, he could not recover even the labour charges, let alone the cost of transport and carting, and the market agent’s commission. Not to mention his input costs and family labour.
After returning home on December 27, Sandeep borrowed his cousin Sachin’s tractor. He drove it over his standing tomato crop on which he had toiled around the clock with his wife, an elder sister and an aunt for four months – planting, weeding, watering, standing guard against pests.




