The odd migrants

Forty-two-year-old Janakee Desai was born and brought up in Pune, Maharashtra's second largest city. She drives her own car, runs a successful graphic designing business, likes to go for dinner parties and feels at home in a pair of jeans and a shirt.
Her ultimate desire is to go live in a village and grow vegetables on a farm. Janakee has her eyes set on Kendur, a village situated 45 kms from Pune, and one of the worst affected during the drought between 2001 and 2004.
Since March 2004, when Janakee and a few friends had converged at Kendur to help the villagers counter the problems due to drought, Janakee has forged a relationship with the village and its inhabitants. "Now if I tell them that I am thinking of turning farmer, they will gladly offer me some of their land to till," she says.
Earlier, she was treated as an outsider. But after she and her friends helped the villagers think of solutions to minimise the accidents that would take place in the melee every time a government tanker would deliver water, the equation changed.
"The tanker-owners would insist on emptying the water into the wells instead of in individual pots. Some women slipped and hurt themselves. One even fell inside the well because the pulley was not strong."
Janakee sees her dream realising in three years, by which time her son would have graduated and she would have dispensed with the responsibilities associated with her designing firm. "There are some farming tips I want to give the traditional farmers of Kendur.
But they will listen to me only up to a point. It will be best if I show them the benefits of growing different varieties of crop and of using modern tools by doing the same on my farm," she says. The student of Marathi literature says that the return of some city-dwellers to the lap of nature is a revolution whose time has come.
The irresistible urge in a growing number of people to leave the cities is, she says, nature's way of balancing things. "When so many people are migrating from the villages to the cities, there has to be a shake up somewhere. Some people will have to go back to nature."
In Gujarat, a similar desire to live among nature drove former Canara Bank manager Harish Desai and his teacher wife Smita to pack their bags and move to a village 50 kms from Baroda. Though they had always harboured a strong wish to farm their own land, it took them five years to put their plan into action.
In 2003, the couple left Surat, where they had studied and worked, and came to live in Kothiya village along with their two young daughters. Neither Harish nor Smita's immediate ancestors were farmers.
Before they left Surat, Smita's parents and brother tried to dissuade them by pointing out the difficulties they may face. Even after three years in the village, their neighbours are curious about the Desais and keep their distance.
It was the Desais' upbringing in a Gandhian environment in the Vedchchi ashram near Surat that taught them to value simplicity. "We have inherited an ideology and a value system that is paradoxical to the city life. We were misfits in the city.
It is alright to live there to earn money," they say. The Desais were not the only ones to think so. They were following the footsteps of Dhirendra and Smita Soneji, both engineers from Ahmedabad, who chucked the good life and went to live in an adivasi village 90 kms from Surat in 1986.
Like the Sonejis, who did not send their sons to school, the Desais' daughters, aged 14 and 12, are also taught at home. The girls help their father on the farm, which is about 10 minutes from their rented home. Twice a week they go to the city to learn classical music and dance.
The Desais grow enough food on their two-acre land to sustain themselves and also have surplus to sell. "Crop grown on two to five acres of land is enough to feed you. It is only when you start hankering for more that the land can't help.
Now everyone wants their small piece of land to also pay for their material desires, which is not possible," says Harish. The banker-turned-farmer has been experimenting on his land, trying to grow different greens at different times like castor seed, mustard and wheat.
For other necessities like fruits, soap and certain vegetables the family is still dependent on the city. Though they have taken the step to move to the village, the Desais are still in an experimental stage in their life. "A move like this is a huge financial risk. Fortunately, we have enough savings to fall back on," says Harish.
Several thousand miles away, Dr Abhay and Dr Rani Bang too, dismissed well-meaning advice when they decided to return from America to live and serve in Gadchiroli, the least developed and the most remote district of Maharashtra with a 40% tribal population.
For the first seven years they lived and worked out of a godown lent by a trader. "After our first night in our new home, we woke up to find a scorpion and a snake waiting for us," recalls Abhay Bang.
Even before they went to study public health at the Johns Hopkins University in the US, the Bangs had decided they wanted to work towards improving healthcare in rural India. "It was the era of idealism, post-Emergency." For Dr Rani, whose father was a doctor and grandfather an MP, it was not an easy decision.
Dr Abhay, on the other hand, had made up his mind when he was 13 and growing up in Mahatma Gandhi's ashram in Wardha, that if there was one way he could help villagers and tribals improve their life it was through agriculture or medicine. His elder brother opted for agriculture.
It is not only people who have lived most of their lives in the city who are expressing a desire to get closer to the earth. Villagers who left their hamlets in search of education and jobs are also returning with new ideas and innovations. Thirty-five-year-old Bharat Pachange left Kendur in 1985 to go to Pune and study.
After graduating in Commerce, he learnt classical music for two years and worked as a purchase assistant with a construction company for Rs 900 a month. By 1997 he was back in his village. "At that time if I had got a job that paid me Rs 4,000 a month, I would have definitely stayed in the city.
But now even if I get a job that pays me Rs 25,000 a month, I will not go," he says. Kendur is on the verge of change, says the father of two, who runs the village's only digital photo studio and photocopying centre and makes about Rs 10,000 per month.
By the time his sons grow up, Pachange reckons the roads will improve so much that they will be able to go to Pune, about 45 km away, and return the same day without any difficulty.