“It’s a whole new way of conducting business meetings that I am promoting. Normally the farmers earn only once or twice a year but their expenditure is recurring. With this, they get a new income source,” says Taware.

So the farmers plough the fields from Monday to Friday and play tourist guides and hosts during the weekends. From providing food and shelter to showing around the sugar mills, sericulture centres, or putting up rural music and dance performances, they go the whole hog.

And not for nothing as it's proving to be a very profitable venture. While 20 per cent of the revenue goes toward overheads, the rest is going as profits to the farmers. Taware now plans to extend the project across 40 other villages in Maharashtra and as many as 43 farmers have agreed to pool in 10 acres each. The plan is to duplicate the Baramati experiment in eight other locations – Pune, Kolhapur, Aurangabad, Nagpur, Satara, Raigad, Ahmednagar and Jalgaon.