The courtyard houses 15 Jersey cows—together they produce over 350 litres of milk every day—and overlooks three acres of plantations, a double storeyed new house and two tractors. In the centre is a rose tree. The only aesthetic touch in Maruti Gopala Thange’s largely practical world? Not really. “So many VIPs drop by at the village these days, it becomes very difficult to run around for flowers to felicitate them. So we planted a rose tree in the house only to make things easy,” said Thange, who till 15 years ago worked as a daily labourer for Rs 40 a day. Today his daily income from his dairy and agricultural produce is about Rs 3,000.

A few metres away and you are on Amruta Baba Pawar’s land—15 acres of lush green on which Pawar grows jowar, onions, peas and fodder. The yield has been good enough for him to rebuild his house, send his son to the army and buy a vehicle. Much like Satish Ramdas Thange—his five-bedroom mansion has a car, a jeep and a tractor and his son goes to an English school outside the village.

Pawar, Thange and Satish Thange are all part of a script that dared to turn round the fortunes of Hiware Bazaar, a village 17 kilometers from Ahmednagar, Maharashtra. In a little over a decade, it changed from being a drought ridden, crime infested village to one of the most prosperous villages in the country. Over the years, this turnaround has earned Hiware Bazaar awards like the Best Ideal Village in the State, National Productivity Award and Sant Tukadoji Maharaj Cleanliness and Sanitation Award. The village was among the few that witnessed the phenomenon of ‘reverse migration’, when over 40 families who had migrated from the village to cities returned between 1992 and 2002.

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