Their short stay in the metropolis was ostensibly meant to expose them to the world of hi-tech scientific `bumper harvest' agriculture.

However, it ended up being a battle for survival in which they had to scrounge for water and paid a fortune to have one square meal a day.

That they managed to find their way from Goregaon station where the state transport bus `dropped' them to the exhibition venue, and from there to Shivaji Park to hear Bal Thackeray, and then back to their bus, was in itself an achievement, the exhausted tourists said on their return. They also have a stern warning to their fellow villagers -- ``Never fall prey to invitations to such exhibitions!''

Musakhan Bhuran Pethan, from Devalna village in Khultabad tehsil has already submitted of a memorandum to thedivisional commissioner, demanding action against the agriculture department officials who ``forcibly put farmers into a bus'' to Mumbai and on reaching there, left them to fend for themselves.

Totaram Sandu Salunke, for one, wonders how the expensive, hi-tech machines on display at the exhibition were relevant to his life. ``What did I get to see there -- tractors, sowing machines, sugarcane-cutting machines! And here I am still wondering where I will get money to buy seeds for the rabi sowing from?''

``If these machines were worth looking at, the government could have put up an exhibition right in my village,'' he fumed. ``Why did they have to make me undergo the torture and agony of travelling all the way to Mumbai?''

It's not as if the farmers didn't anticipate the futility of going all the way to Mumbai to attend an agro exhibition. And no wonder the agriculture department which was entrusted the task of getting an ``adequate number'' of farmers from each village, felt no one was interested in thetour. It therefore reportedly gave the farmers an ultimatum. ``We were told that we either accompany them to Mumbai or forget about the subsidy installments we were being paid through banks for the horticulture schemes on our farms,'' says Pathan.

However, farmers like Janardhan Ganpatrao Adhane did try to look for something novel at the exhibition. ``My eyes once fixed on a beautiful ripe mango in one of the stalls and I began to wonder how on earth it could grow so ripe before November? I even touched it to confirm it was a real one. it was,'' said an awe-struck Adhane.

``And I got the idea that if I could grow it to this stage in November in my farm, I could demand my price,'' he continued. ``But no matter how hard I tried there was not a soul in the stall to answer my queries'', Adhane added.

But Pathan was shocked by something he saw during his round of the stalls. "Someone standing behind the complicated machines was explaining how one could produce ghee following his method and sell it at Rs 178per kg. Back home, people were buying indigenous desi ghee from my village at Rs 200 per kg.

"If deploying the technology will only lower the prices, then I'd better not see the rest of the things here, "Pathan decided.