National Research Centre

Down on Solapur Road, at the Nanjri Farm Post, you’ll find us out in the open. The National Research Centre isn't some high-tech lab with flashing lights. It’s mostly fields, some old sheds, and a lot of dirt under our fingernails. We spend our mornings walking the rows and looking at how the soil is holding up. The air is different out here, away from the city grime, though the wind can get quite sharp in the winter. We have a small office where we keep our notes and samples, but mostly we’re outside. The road from Solapur is long, and we don’t get many visitors unless they’re lost or coming for a specific reason. We eat our lunch together under the shade of a big tree when it gets too hot to stay in the sun. It’s a slow pace of life, but the plants don’t grow any faster just because you’re in a hurry. We’ve been collecting data here for years, and the notebooks are starting to pile up on the shelves. There’s a lot of waiting involved in what we do. Waiting for rain, waiting for seeds to sprout, waiting for the results to show something useful. It’s not exciting to most people, but it’s what we know. We just keep our heads down and watch how the land changes from one season to the next.