Santuri Adibasi Farmers Producer Company Limited

Barkaram Tudu’s house in Kheratpo village is where we all gather for the Santuri Adibasi Farmers Producer Company. Purulia is a tough place for farming because the soil is so red and dry most of the year, so we have to stick together to get anything done. Being an adibasi group, we mostly focus on what our families have been doing for generations, just trying to get better prices for what we grow. Barkaram is the one who handles the main documents and keeps the records in a tin box in his front room. It’s not a fancy office with computers and air conditioning. We sit on the porch and talk about the maize or whatever else is growing. People from all over the Santuri block come by when they have a problem with their yield. Sometimes we have to walk quite a bit to reach the farther fields because the roads aren't great, especially when the monsoon hits and everything turns to mud. It’s a lot of manual labor and worrying about the clouds. We don’t have a big marketing team or anything like that. It’s just us, a few farmers from the village, trying to manage the collective. We share what we know and help each other out with the tractor or the seeds when someone is running short. It’s just the way life goes here in this part of Purulia, and we are just trying to keep the tradition alive.